Grants and Awards
The New Mexico Film Office announced recipients of the newly created Senator John Pinto Memorial Fund for Native Filmmakers.
Legislation in 2019 provided $100,000 for the fund in honor of the late Senator John Pinto and his relentless support for the Native American film industry. Twenty $5000 grants were awarded to Native film students and filmmakers living and working in New Mexico. Funds can be used toward pre-production, production, and post-production. Grantees must be registered members of one of the tribes or pueblos of New Mexico. Funded projects will explore topics including missing women, ancient healing, modern-day culture clashes, and entrepreneurship.
The National Endowment for the Arts recommended funding through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act
855 nonprofit arts organizations located in every state for a total of $44.5 million in nonmatching funds to support staff salaries, fees for artists or contractual personnel, and facilities costs. Eleven New Mexico organizations received awards of $50,000 each:
AMP Concerts, Ensemble Museum New Mexico (AKA Chatter), National Hispanic Cultural Center Foundation, National Institute of Flamenco, Music at Angel Fire, GallupArts, Currents New Media, Pojoaque Pueblo, SITE Santa Fe, Wise Fool, and Western New Mexico University
The National Endowment for the Humanities announced $30 million in grants for 238 humanities projects across the country.
Grant awards support the preservation of historic collections, humanities exhibitions and documentaries, scholarly research, and educational opportunities for teachers. In New Mexico, three organizations received awards:
The University of New Mexico received $9,363 for preservation supplies for the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, which cares for archaeological, ethnographic, and osteological collections, as well as archives documenting cultures of the American Southwest.
UNM received $190,000 for two one-week workshops for seventy-two K-12 educators on the interaction between Native Americans and European settlers in Santa Fe.
Santa Fe Institute received $247,932 for an online course on computational and quantitative methods for cultural analysis of large-scale digital sources to be followed by more advanced in-person workshops for early-career scholars.
New Mexico Arts awarded $1.5 million to arts organizations
The state arts agency, New Mexico Arts (a division of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs), announced that it has awarded $1.5 million in state and federal funds to approximately 200 arts organizations, colleges and universities, K-12 schools, tribal governments, and government entities.
These resources will fund online arts programming and services, assist with the retention of full- and part-time jobs, and support independently-contracted artists, arts administrators, and arts educators across the state. One-third of the funding was awarded to organizations based in New Mexico’s rural communities.
New Mexico Governor’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts suspended until 2021
The 2020 Governor’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts has been suspended until next year, with a new deadline of March 5, 2021, for nomination submissions. The awards event was scheduled to take place this September in Santa Fe.
Complete nominations submitted for the 2020 Awards will be rolled over to the 2021 Awards. To nominate an individual artist or a major arts contributor, visit nmarts.org.
Leadership Changes and Appointments
The Albuquerque Museum named Leslie Kim its new Curator of History.
Kim fills the position left vacant since January 2019 when then Curator of History Deborah Slaney retired after 20 years. A native of Albuquerque, Kim comes to the museum from a faculty position of Albuquerque Academy. Her academic background is concentrated on Colonial Mexico.
“Now more than ever, our country is engaged in the reexamination of history, and Leslie knows how to inspire thoughtful understanding of and conversation about the stories we need to tell. She will steward and expand our permanent collection of more than 35,000 historical artifacts with a fresh perspective,” said Museum Director Andrew Connors.
MCA Denver named Miranda Lash as next Ellen Bruss Senior Curator.
Lash will begin her position at MCA Denver on September 14, 2020. Lash has most recently served as the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky since 2014. Over the course of her career, she has organized more than thirty museum exhibitions, including the touring exhibitions Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art, co-curated with Trevor Schoonmaker (2016), and Mel Chin: Rematch, a retrospective of work by subsequent MacArthur Fellow Mel Chin (2014).
“My goal is to bring a wide range of artists to MCA Denver – both global and local. As a Mexican-American who was raised in a bilingual household, I am excited to come work in a city that has a sizable Latinx population and I will work hard to make sure the artists that we exhibit at MCA Denver respond to the demographics of the city,” Lash continued. “I am committed to keeping BIPOC artists and creative collaborators at the forefront of my practice, as I have done at my previous institutions.”
In Memorium
Marty Horowitz, Santa Fe artist and frame maker, has died.
Horowitz, 70, died peacefully in bed July 2, 2020 at his Santa Fe home, surrounded by family members. He was devoted to his art, and was an integral part of the art community as both an artist and the owner of Goldleaf Framemakers for more than thirty years. His artwork has been featured in many galleries and museums across the country.
Horowitz created a unique style of manufacturing hand-carved period picture frames that brought an ancient art into a modern manufacturing model. This brought him acclaim in the art world as one of the youngest, and one of the only to have this approach to the art of frame making. He was a master gilder and wrote the book An Introduction To Water Gilding. Yares Art Projects in Santa Fe represents his work.
