Description

The American Art Program (AAP) has invited the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA) to apply for a Museum Partners for Social Justice (MPSJ) grant. This AAP sub-program aims to support museums that explore, develop, and disseminate new project models and implementation frameworks to advance justice and equity. Each year, AAP seeks to make these grants to a cohort of four museums in two pairs: two that have distinguished themselves in the execution of prior Luce-funded projects and two that will learn from them and implement new approaches in planned projects at their own museums. The pairs will work closely across the grant period, and all
four will join in a set of dialogues.
MIA will act as a lead and will partner with the Joslyn Art Museum (JAM) for a series of cross-staff, in-person convenings, and virtual meetings. MIA will focus the initial interactions on three case studies: 1) the Luce-funded exhibition “Hearts of Our People: Native American Women,” which relied upon an Advisory Board of twenty Native and non-Native women and a Community Engagement Board of 11 Native women; 2) MIA’s collection-based exhibition “Native/American Art” (August 2022); 3) and a forthcoming major exhibition of Native American photography, co-curated with Native partners and a council of fourteen advisors, tracing the intersecting histories of photography and Indigenous cultures from the Rio Grande to the Arctic Circle over nearly two centuries.
MIA will share its practices: for building authentic and sustained relationships with Indigenous people at multiple touch points across the museum; centering and supporting Indigenous people in programs and practices; providing meaningful access to our resources including collections, programs, tools, and spaces; and listening to and integrating Indigenous voices to become a more inclusive and accessible space.
Key project staff at MIA include: curators Matthew Welch, Jill Ahlberg Yohe, and Robert Cozzolino; content strategist Alex Bortolot,; and exhibition planner Jennifer Komar Olivarez.