Education, access, capital: Native artists must excel in more than their art

Debra Utacia Krol, USA TODAY NETWORK
·14 min read

IDYLLWILD, Calif. — Tain Half is a member of the Crow Tribe from Montana. Hayden Rathkamp Robbins lives in metro Phoenix and is a member of the Cherokee Nation.

They’re both 16 and juniors this year alongside six other Indigenous high schoolers at Idyllwild Arts Academy, one of the world’s most acclaimed art schools.

Idyllwild Arts Academy

The campus is nestled high in California’s San Jacinto Mountains, the ancestral home of the Qawishpa Cahuillangnah, or Cahuilla Band of Indians. The mile-high meadows and dappled forests are also a summer sanctuary for the other eight Cahuilla bands.

Native artists and art have been woven into the fabric and sinew of Idyllwild and are integral to the success of the 78-year-old residential high school. Instructors have included potters like San Ildefonso Pueblo members Blue Corn and Maria Martinez, famed for her black-on-black pottery, and Luiseño painter Fritz Scholder. Cahuilla basketweaver Rose Ann Hamilton and master Navajo weavers Barbara Teller Ornelas and Lynda Pete are part of the current summer Native Arts faculty.

Shaliyah Ben, the executive director of Idyllwild’s Native American Arts Center, is helping find and grow new Native artists as well as support their transition into productive, happy adults.

Ben, a Navajo Nation member, literally grew up at the mountaintop school. Her parents, Wendy Weston and Joe Ben are artists in their own right, and Ben and sister Jennifer meandered around the cool pines and soaked up art every summer as their parents taught classes at Idyllwild. Now, Ben helps make space for more Native kids to gain the same quality education she did.

“Idyllwild gives the students a great academic education,” Ben said. “Even if they don’t go on to become artists, they still have a firm foundation for college or for life.”

This year she’s playing “aunty” to eight Indigenous students. They attend the school through a full-ride scholarship program covering tuition, food and board expenses funded by seven tribes, a tribal alliance and two private foundations. More are on a waiting list.

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Some of the students come from extremely impoverished communities, and Ben has had to pay out of pocket for backpacks, socks and underwear and even sanitary supplies. Sometimes they need a few bucks of spending cash for field trips.

“I had to go to one of my funders and ask to divert some scholarship resources for their basic needs,” Ben said.

As she worked on beaded earrings in her bedroom studio, Robbins said art had always been a way to express herself, especially being one of the few Native American teens in Arcadia, an upscale Phoenix neighborhood.

Traveling to another state to attend a residential high school with many ultra-rich kids as part of Idyllwild’s 300-student body had another benefit.

“There’s not a lot of bullying,” said Robbins, who identifies as two-spirit. “When I was in middle school in Arcadia I’d be harassed and one time somebody threw a glass bottle at me.”

But Idyllwild is an inclusive space and even has a gender-sex alliance for students, she said.

Half is concentrating on interdisciplinary arts with an emphasis on metal, fashion and photography. “My aunt and grandpa were photographers,” she said. “And I watched my mom sewing my regalia, including elk teeth.”

Idyllwild provides the teen with a better education than what she would have had in her tribal community high school and immerses her in the arts. “I can show my work, my culture and my eye, my perspective on things,” Half said.

Bella Thorn, the daughter of art gallery owner and Native arts promoter Ruth-Ann Thorn, is also an Idyllwild student who plans on a career other than art, though she has been exposed to the art world and created her own.

“What she wants to pursue is social anthropology with a focus on Native Americans,” Thorn said.

A retreat: In the mountains at Idyllwild, Native artists weave, shape and nurture their passions

Institute of American Indian Arts is the next step in an art career

Two states away, the Institute of American Indian Arts is ready to accept Idyllwild grads.

The university produces artists and art administrators and provides a venue for cutting-edge exhibitions at its Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, said IAIA’s President Robert Martin, a Cherokee Nation member. IAIA holds the world’s largest collection of Indigenous contemporary art.

Once housed at the old Santa Fe Indian School, the university moved into its own campus around 2000, Martin said. And it’s no longer federally operated but is independent, funded by Congress and the private sector.

“That’s allowed us to flourish as an Indigenous college,” he said.

IAIA built its capacity for studio and film arts, 3D printing and digital arts in addition to more traditional arts offerings. It was selected as an educational partner for the 2024 Venice Biennale’s U.S. pavilion featuring the first-ever solo Indigenous artist to display at the prestigious event, Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee painter Jeffrey Gibson.

Many of the great Indigenous artists of the 20th and 21st centuries have either attended IAIA, served as instructors or both.

Nonprofits provide guidance, training and funds for Native artists

Once young Indigenous artists graduate, they learn about the realities of making a living from their work. Chiricahua Apache sculptor Allan Houser, a master artist, had to resort to a “day job” to support his family while pursuing his career.

Walter Lamar, chair of the Indian Arts and Craft Board, said he understands the plight of artists who labor to make and sell their art. His wife, National Museum of the American Indian Director Cynthia Chavez Lamar, was raised and educated because of the work of her father, San Felipe Pueblo jeweler Richard Chavez.

He’s heard from artists like a Navajo from Ganado who created pieces and drove five hours to Phoenix only to have galleries reject their work, discovering “what it feels like when you’re rejected, spent gas and time, only to have to drive home with your art.”

Justin Huenemann, president and CEO of the First Peoples Fund, understands this scenario well. Most of his 11 siblings in the Navajo Nation create art as their primary income.

“They spend several weeks preparing pieces and then driving to Tucson, Phoenix, Gallup to go to certain buyers,” he said. “You have put in your time making and driving and paying for gas, and if you were to equate it to an hourly wage, you know you’re not getting a dollar an hour, but you just need that income. It’s crazy.”

Jessica Stago wants to rewrite the narrative. She’s the co-founder of Change Labs, an Indigenous-led initiative in Arizona that provides support and training for entrepreneurs and small businesses in the Navajo Nation and Hopi Tribe.

“A major obstacle for entrepreneurs to open businesses on the rez is access to capital,” Stago said. “And we don’t talk enough about the reasons why.”

Lenders are reluctant to extend credit to tribal business owners, said Stago, a member of the Navajo Nation, citing their reliance on what’s called the “5Cs of credit” — character, capacity, capital, collateral and conditions.

Tribal members can have trouble getting financing when a bank asks for collateral like real estate, as most tribal lands are held in trust by the federal government and cannot be sold or foreclosed. Also, banks are few on large tribal reservations, and many do not have the expertise to work with tribes and their unique conditions.

Indigenous artists must carefully manage their cash since many of them make most of their yearly income from two or three markets. But that’s not enough for the ordinary bank, which also requires compliance with debt-to-income ratios and capital investments like down payments.

Just finding enough spare cash to build a robust website can be too high a wall for artists who must make their money stretch between shows. “Significant investment and cash flow are issues,” Stago said.

And, she said, the business model for Native artists has always been based on traders acting as middlemen, which she called the “gatekeeping mode of non-Indian dealers and their protectionist model.”

That’s where organizations like Change Labs come in to support more Indigenous artists. That includes acting as their own dealers and marketing directly to buyers.

The organization offers opportunities for Navajos and Hopis to open or build businesses. Those include kinship lending, which evaluates microloan borrowers on Indigenous kinship or relationships instead of mainstream risk assessment.

Artists who are affected by COVID-19 can apply for an emergency relief grant. Financial education and training, executive coaching, mentorship, professional photography and brand development, as well as a coworking space are also available.

In August, Change Labs launched its biggest program yet: a small business credit initiative program for Navajo business owners, artists and entrepreneurs. The loan program is part of the U.S. Treasury’s State Small Business Credit Initiative. Over the next three years, Change Labs and its partners will hand out $13.3 million in business loans.

Other arts organizations have a broader reach. The First Peoples Fund invests in artists across the nation through monetary support and entrepreneur training. Huenemann said he sees his mission as supporting artists and culture bearers to move past “survive” to “thrive.”

First Peoples Fund offers year-long fellowships to support artists and culture bearers with cash grants to support their work and build sustainable businesses. The organization also holds shorter training sessions, supports artists in need of an extra boost or during emergencies, and recognizes up to six artists and culture bearers annually with its premier Community Spirit Award, which comes with a $50,000 grant to support their efforts to teach art and tradition.

"Artists need access to capital and credit," said Huenmann, a Navajo citizen. But more than that, they need access to the larger economic market, supplies, creative spaces, networking and training to create an ecosystem that is often controlled by non-Natives whose interest is in retaining that control.

“They know that if they control the narrative and the dollars, they control the artists,” Huenemann said. “The longtime question is, ‘Who really controls the market, the buyer or the artist?’”

Young artists are dabbling in 3D and digital, genres that collectors reject. “The collectors say, ‘Wait, that doesn’t look like that pottery I’m looking for.’”

That is one of First Peoples Fund’s primary drivers, Huenemann said: “How can we support artists to thrive and live, to realize a living wage so that they can take care of themselves and their family, and contribute to a bigger community?”

Supporting Native artist businesses to create and sell more of their designs supports a sustainable tribal economy, Stago said.

“When we support and help small business owners, they’ll spend more of their money to support another Native American business,” she said. “They’ll support coffee shops, bakeries and eateries.”

That will create a market within the community for more businesses like tire shops, beauty salons and other service companies that will hire people.

“The more people working and spending money in the community, the more money stays in that community,” she said.

Can this museum be decolonized?

Museums and galleries continue to loom large as promoters and gatekeepers in Indigenous arts. While some experts see change as opening up new markets and avenues for Native contemporary artists, others aren’t so sure.

John Haworth is bullish on the emergence of Native art as a world-class genre. Haworth, who helped create and nurture the National Museum of the American Indian, recalled the time when Native contemporary artists found it hard to be recognized by galleries or mainstream museums.

But times are changing.

“A lot of (the change) is what I call field building,” said Haworth, a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.

The careers of prominent Native art curators like Kathleen Ash-Milby, Navajo, who co-organized Jeffrey Gibson’s groundbreaking exhibit in Venice in 2024 for the Portland Art Museum in Oregon and fellow Navajo Nation member Andrea Hanley of the Native Arts and Crafts Foundation show the talent Indigenous art professionals possess.

Grassroots-level arts also play an important role in the genre, Haworth said.

He credited artists like Jaune Quick-to-See Smith for busting the perceptions of Native art as stuck in the past to garner acclaim in venues like the National Gallery of Art, where she curated a contemporary exhibit in 2023.

But the reality in mainstream museums is far different than in Native-directed or tribal museums, according to a Native art expert.

Christopher Newell, a member of the Passamaquoddy Tribe, is the former director of the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine. Newell, who like Jeremy Frey, also grew up in Motahkmikuhk or Indian Township, Maine, said Native people are very underrepresented in the art museum world.

“The last survey I saw said something like 0.8% of the entire workforce in art museums are Native people,” he said. (The actual figure is 0.48% according to the Mellon Foundation’s 2022 Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey.)

Most of those are entry-level staff. The survey found just five conservators come from American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander communities.

Newell said the solution is simple: “Hire more Native people in positions of intellectual authority.” That means not just advanced degrees in art history but the equivalent standing in traditional knowledge.

Indigenizing histories also means recasting how Native art histories are told.

Newell comes by his activism through heredity. His father was at Harvard where, as Newell related it, “he raised Cain at the Peabody Museum in the 1970s.” Despite his hard work, the Peabody did not repatriate the remains of the Wabanaki, or the four tribes of Maine, for another 50 years.

Newell also had something to say about how museums support themselves.

“I didn't grow up in a world where art was created to be sold but to preserve a way of life,” Newell said. “The makers were selling their baskets for $30 and $40 back then. It was really pennies, but they didn’t see a reason to raise the prices because what they were making was from the earth and they didn’t want to take more than they needed.”

After the Maine Indian Basketmaker Alliance educated basketmakers on the importance of appropriate pricing, he noticed that buyers from the Abbe would come to basket markets and wait until the end of the day to start scooping up unsold work at bargain prices to mark up in their shop.

“That was hard for the artists to have to discount their work, but they needed the money,” Newell said.

He halted that practice, requiring buyers to purchase Wabanaki art at the marked price. They could then charge higher prices in the shop.

He now runs the Akomawt Educational Initiative where he and his colleagues train educators and museum staff about Indigenous education topics.

Mark Bahti, the gallery owner, thinks the Indian market concept could also benefit from a redo. He said that, like museum shops, the markets don’t benefit the artists as much as in past years.

But no matter how or if the markets improve for Native artists or if they take their businesses into their own hands, both new technologies and traditional ways of making art will ensure that Native arts spark cultural continuation.

“There’s a genuine excitement that the technology, whatever iteration it is in the future, is going to free people from the drudgery,” said Laguna Pueblo artist Pat Pruitt, who works with untraditional metals and uses modern computer-aided technology and cutting-edge machining equipment. “They won’t be restricted in how they design and make things.”

“I believe that the traditional arts are a language in and of themselves,” Lenape artist and curator Joe Baker said. “They tell others who we are.”

He said these traditional arts define each Indigenous culture and spring from the place, home and heart of that community.

“So if we are to continue our culture, which we must, we also must continue the traditional arts.”

Debra Krol reports on Indigenous communities at the confluence of climate, culture and commerce in Arizona and the Intermountain West. Reach Krol at debra.krol@azcentral.com. Follow her on X @debkrol.

Coverage of Indigenous issues at the intersection of climate, culture and commerce is supported by the Catena Foundation.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Schools like Idyllwild Arts Academy are key to future of Native art

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