I am working with Museum of the The Institute of American Indian Arts
(IAIA) to reach out to Indigenous visual and performing artists who
would want to be considered for participation in A Gathering of Power:
Contemporary Works from the Indigenous World .
IAIA is a tribal college and the only multi-tribal center of higher
education in the United States solely dedicated to the preservation,
study, creative application, contemporary expression of American Indian
and Alaska Native arts and cultures.
Although Santa Fe is home to an international community of artists, the
IAIA Museum, as part of a Native-governed organization, maintains a
unique set of connections to contemporary artists from throughout the
Indigenous world—artists who face many of the same challenges and share
many of the same interests as Native American artists. Therefore, the
IAIA Museum has a special responsibility and opportunity to periodically
highlight the work of contemporary artists outside the Euro-American
mainstream.
The organizers of the biennial, Gathering of Power: Contemporary Works
from the Indigenous World hope to develop collaborative programs with
SITE Santa Fe’s 2006 biennial exhibition, curated by independent
curator Klaus Ottmann. The combination of these offerings presents an
opportunity for dialogue between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous
worlds and will serve as a stimulus for continuing critical and popular
discussion.
The Exhibition: The 2006 IAIA Museum Global Biennial, A Gathering of
Power: Contemporary Works from the Indigenous World, running July
through September 2006, will showcase approximately 30 artworks from 20
to 30 Indigenous artists from North America, Central America, South
America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Oceania, and Europe. The
works will be selected from candidates submitted by an international
group of artists and curators. Selection of particular works will be
based on their technical achievement and inherent capacity to engage
viewers with a sense of power related to alternate worldview or
spiritual systems. The artwork will be selected by Director John Richard
Grimes and Curator Joseph Sanchez in consultation with a panel of
curatorial advisors including noted Chiricahua Apache artist Bob Haozous
and other international specialists. Works will include a variety of
media, including paintings, sculpture, mixed media, installations, video
art, and performances.
An additional component of the exhibition will be a series of lectures,
workshops, and panel discussions by Indigenous artists, Museum directors
and curators who will help to engage Indigenous and non-Indigenous
artists in constructive dialogue and creative exchange. It is hoped that
some of the educational activities and marketing for the project will
take place in partnership with SITE Santa Fe and/or the Santa Fe Art
Institute.
As an Indigenous institution, the IAIA Museum is in a unique position
to develop new, more globally and culturally inclusive interpretive
strategies that provide alternate perspectives on art, culture,
aesthetics, and values. Specific goals for A Gathering of Power are:

1. Within the exhibition, to create an environment that fosters a
respectful, humane, non-voyeuristic engagement with art, and increases
public understanding of the contemporary creativity of Indigenous
artists working outside Euro-American movements.
2. To stimulate dialogue between Euro-American contemporary artists and
Native American and Indigenous artists from around the world.
Recognizing that Euro-American ”Mainstream” art and Indigenous art have
had a profound impact on each other throughout the 18th to 20th
centuries, the exhibition will explicitly inaugurate a creative dialogue
for the 21st Century, a dialogue for today’s diverse world. Art
institutions, artists, and the public need new vocabularies and new
conceptual foundations that are more culturally and socially inclusive,
less biased toward the western experience, and more focused on art as a
fundamental means of connection and dialogue. The IAIA Museum is
dedicated to modeling new ways of exhibiting and discussing art in a
plural, increasingly post-colonial society.
3. Possible creation of an exhibition-to-exhibition “dialogue” involving
the IAIA and SITE biennials. Klaus Ottmann, the curator of SITE’s
exhibition, has suggested that “there is an urgent need today for art
that challenges the dispassion and indecision of the world, an urgent
desire to experience art with immediacy that exists in and of
itself…[art that] generates its own meaning rather than depending on
external or conceptual interpretations. This urgent presence will be
profoundly embodied in the works in the next SITE Santa Fe Biennial.”
IAIA’s biennial exhibition, A Gathering of Power: Contemporary Works
from the Indigenous World explores how, for many contemporary Indigenous
artists, eliciting the “urgent presence” of the creator, or the
spiritual world, is, and has always been, a fundamental obligation,
objective and starting point.
4. To explore the nature of creative expression in non-Western culture,
in which the artist does not typically assume the role of an individual
“genius,” but instead the elicitor of living creative currents inherent
in the human and non-human spheres

I would welcome any suggestions about
1. contemporary Indigenous artists or performing artists who would be
interested in being considered
2. possible sources of funding for their participation and
3. art organizations and institutions, preferably Indigenous, which
would be interested in exploring closer ties with IAIA

I hope to hear from you very soon.
Thank you.

Yours,

Gordon Bronitsky, PhD
Bronitsky and Associates
3715 La Hacienda Dr NE
Albuquerque, NM 87110
USA

505-256-0260
e-mail g.bronitsky@att.net

www.bronitskyand associates.com

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