Museum of Indian Arts & Culture celebrates Native lives and histories with its new permanent exhibition, Here, Now and Always

Museum of Indian Arts and Culture (MIAC), a division of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs, will unveil its brand new permanent exhibition, Here, Now and Always, on July 2, 2022, on Museum Hill in Santa Fe. 

MIAC’s curatorial project team worked in collaboration with Indigenous artists, scholars, and community members throughout the Southwest. The resulting exhibition highlights diverse perspectives from the 19 New Mexico pueblos, as well as Apache, Ysleta del Sur Pueblo in El Paso, Texas, the Hopi Tribe in Arizona, and the Navajo/Diné, Paiute, and O’odham communities. 

Situated within MIAC’s 8,400-square-foot Amy Rose Bloch Wing, the exhibition features more than 600 objects from the museum’s extraordinary collection of ceramics, basketry, jewelry, paintings, textiles, fashion, and more. All these items—and the stories within them—are reflective of the knowledge, narrative, and cultural practices of Native peoples in the Southwest. 

MIAC’s permanent exhibition has modeled a new way to interpret the lives and culture of Native peoples and set a new standard for Native representation in museums that was further developed by the National Museum of the American Indian and many others since opening in 1997. Guided by a deeply collaborative process, the exhibition foregrounds the voices, perspectives, and narratives of Native people from throughout the Southwest, moving the authority away from the museum and non-Native academics. 

In addition to support from the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Museum of New Mexico Foundation, a total of $1.6 million in private donations contributed to the development of Here, Now and Always. 

This press release and all others distributed by the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs can be found here https://media.newmexicoculture.org/releases.