IAIA has initiated construction for its Research Center for Contemporary Native Arts. RCCNA streamlines access to the IAIA Museum
of Contemporary Native Arts’ permanent collection as well as IAIA’s archives. Photo by Jason Ordaz

The Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) is opening the Research Center for Contemporary Native Arts (RCCNA), which greatly extends its objective to study, preserve, and disseminate traditional and contemporary Native American arts, cultures, literature, and history. Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, RCCNA has been undergoing development for the past three years and will include a physical location as well as a digital component, with much of the information being searchable in IAIA’s database. Students will be able to access this database anywhere, including off campus. The physical location, currently in the first and second phases of three-phased construction, will include the IAIA archives, an archives classroom, and a collections classroom. The facility will be located in the Barbara and Robert Ells Science and Technology Building on the IAIA campus. The digital component—the research portal—has been launched and is available for use.

RCCNA will consolidate services that IAIA already provides by physically moving the IAIA archives to the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA) collection so that they are in one comprehensive location. RCCNA’s research portal is a monumental tool for researching Native arts and cultures, as it appears to be the first time an archival collection and an art collection have been included in a shared database. Historically, each type of collection has used very different databases and required users to be familiar with each organizational system. The research portal, which uses Re:Discovery’s Proficio for the web system, returns search results from both the MoCNA artworks collection and the IAIA archives. For example, typing “Harjo” in the search field will show artworks donated to MoCNA by the Harjo family as well as provide access to digitized audio recordings of the radio program Seeing Red, coproduced by Suzan Shown Harjo in the mid-1960s. Transcripts of the radio program can also be downloaded. Some archival records include photographs and video files. Other records provide basic information about contents of the physical files so a student researcher knows what to ask for—whether that’s a request to see an artwork or a box of paper records.

“Something that has hampered Native artists is that there is comparatively little published about Native artists,” explains RCCNA director Dr. Lara Evans (Cherokee Nation). “Students who are studying Native art don’t have the same kinds of resources as people studying Western artists. Our goal is to change that by making information about Native art more widely available and much easier to access.” Both the RCCNA physical location and the research portal will accomplish just that. In the meantime, IAIA’s collections and archives can be accessed through the research portal at research.iaia.edu.