Institute for American Indian Arts Museum

The IAIA Museum is a vital space for contemporary Native American arts and culture. Its interpretive approach is to design programs based on the Museum’s exhibitions and collections. The viewer can be exposed to the multiple environments in which Indian artists live and create. With this view, the Museum hopes to cut through the conventional discourse of “Contemporary vs. Traditional” or the “Two Worlds” concepts which tend to sterilize and oversimplify studies in Native American fine art. The IAIA Museum strives to offer the public, instead, a more complex view of contemporary Native art that reflects its diverse cross-cultural influences and explores its complicated historical development through its educational programming.