Established | 1989 |
---|---|
Location | White River State Park, Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S. |
Coordinates | 39°46′5.9″N86°10′4.1″W / 39.768306°N 86.167806°W |
Type | Art museum |
Visitors | 114,488 (2019) [1] |
Director | Kathryn Haigh [2] |
Curator | Elisa Phelps |
Public transit access | 8 |
Website | www |
The Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art is an art museum in downtown Indianapolis, Indiana, United States. The Eiteljorg houses an extensive collection of visual arts by indigenous peoples of the Americas as well as Western American paintings and sculptures collected by businessman and philanthropist Harrison Eiteljorg (1903–1997). The museum houses one of the finest collections of Native contemporary art in the world. [3] [4] [5]
The museum is located in Indianapolis's White River State Park, which is also home to the neighboring Indiana State Museum and Military Park, among other attractions. The museum offers free parking to its visitors in the park's underground parking garage.
The Gund Gallery has an appreciable collection of paintings and bronzes by Frederic Remington and Charles Russell. It also has paintings by: George Winter, Thomas Hill, Albert Bierstadt, Charles King, and Olaf Seltzer. In another room, there is a large collection of paintings by New Mexico-associated painters, such as: Joseph Henry Sharp, William Victor Higgins, Ernest L. Blumenschein ("Penitentes"), John French Sloan, and Georgia O'Keeffe (“Taos Pueblo”).
In June 2005, the museum opened an extensive expansion that doubled the public space of the museum by adding three new galleries, the Sky City Café, an education center, outdoor gardens, and event space. The new galleries include two galleries dedicated to the museum's extensive contemporary art collection. The collection includes works by T. C. Cannon, Kay WalkingStick, Andy Warhol, and many more. The other gallery added in the expansion is the Gund Gallery of Western Art. This gallery is dedicated to the 57-piece collection of traditional Western art donated to the museum by the George Gund Family.
In 2021, a six-person panel of American Institute of Architects (AIA) Indianapolis members identified the museum among the ten most "architecturally significant" buildings completed in the city since World War II. [6]
The museum offers the prestigious Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship (formerly called the Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art) biennially to recognize some of the most innovative and influential contemporary Native artists active today. Eiteljorg fellows include:
The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University is the art school of Tufts University, a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. It offers undergraduate and graduate degrees dedicated to the visual arts.
The Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) is a public tribal land-grant college in Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States. The college focuses on Native American art. It operates the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA), which is housed in the historic Santa Fe Federal Building, a landmark Pueblo Revival building listed on the National Register of Historic Places as Federal Building. The museum houses the National Collection of Contemporary Indian Art, with more than 7,000 items.
The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation was founded in 1918 by Louis Comfort Tiffany to operate his estate, Laurelton Hall, in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. It was designed to be a summer retreat for artists and craftspeople. In 1946 the estate closed and the foundation changed its purpose from a retreat to the bestowing of grants to artists.
Bonnie Devine is a Serpent River Ojibwa installation artist, performance artist, sculptor, curator, and writer from Serpent River First Nation, who lives and works in Toronto, Ontario. She is currently an associate professor at OCAD University and the founding chair of its Indigenous Visual Cultural Program.
Lorenzo Clayton is a contemporary Navajo sculptor, printmaker, conceptual and installation artist. His artwork is notable for exploring the concepts of spirituality through abstraction.
Joe Feddersen is a Colville sculptor, painter, photographer and mixed-media artist. He is known for creating artworks strong in geometric patterns reflective of what is seen in the environment, landscape and his Native American heritage.
Rick Rivet is a Sahtu–Métis painter living in Canada.
Shan Goshorn was an Eastern Band Cherokee artist, who lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her interdisciplinary artwork expresses human rights issues, especially those that affect Native American people today. Goshorn used different media to convey her message, including woven paper baskets, silversmithing, painting, and photography. She is best known for her baskets with Cherokee designs woven with archival paper reproductions of documents, maps, treaties, photographs and other materials that convey both the challenges and triumphs that Native Americans have experienced in the past and are still experiencing today.
Skawennati is a First Nations (Kahnawakeronon) multimedia artist, best known for her online works as well as Machinima that explore contemporary Indigenous cultures, and what Indigenous life might look like in futures inspired by science fiction. She served as the 2019 Indigenous Knowledge Holder at McGill University. In 2011, she was awarded an Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship which recognized her as one of "the best and most relevant native artists."
Tanis Maria S'eiltin is a Tlingit installation artist, painter, printmaker, and sculptor.
Anna Tsouhlarakis is a Native American artist who creates installation, video, and performance art. She is an enrolled citizen of the Navajo Nation and of Muscogee Creek and Greek descent. Her work has been described as breaking stereotypes surrounding Native Americans and provoking thought, rather than focusing solely on aesthetics. Tsouhlarakis wants to redefine what Native American art means and its many possibilities. She also works at the University of Colorado Boulder as an Assistant professor.
Holly Wilson is a Native American artist from Oklahoma. She is an enrolled member of the Delaware Nation and is of Cherokee descent.
Da-ka-xeen Mehner is a Tlingit/Nisga'a American visual artist whose work includes photography and multimedia installations that incorporate video, sculpture and sound.
Matthew Kirk is an American artist.