Diné College art history department receives $299K in state and federal grants

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TSAILE, Ariz. — The Diné College School of Arts, Humanities and English (SAHE) recently received federal and state grants to support art history initiatives. The federal grant of $99,000 from the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) supports the “Contemporary Navajo Art and Artists: Identity, History and Culture” project. The state grant is in partnership with the Indigenous Design and Planning Institute at the University of Mexico. That $130,000 grant is from ArtPlace America. The purpose of the grant is to empower students at the post-secondary level at Diné College to reimagine their communities through new curricula focused on indigenous design and planning. “The NEH grant emphasizes the importance of reading, research and writing as a way of understanding the role that visual arts play within the human experience, particularly with respect to Navajo litera-ture, language, art and history,” said Dr. Karla Brittona, a Diné College art history professor and princi-pal investigator of the two grants. Britton added that the grants will: • Deepen Diné College art students’ individual Navajo identity and intellectual development through a more rigorous study of art and design from a Native perspective. “The purpose is to inspire and encourage Diné College students’ appreciation for the integral social role of art and design,” Britton said. “We will develop a series of intensive seminars (on campus) for students in the humanities which will be led by prominent Navajo scholars, historians, artists and writers.” • Allow SAHE to develop new art history curriculum on the topics of […]