ART : It’s No Place for Trinkets : The inaugural exhibit at Sante Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts dazzles the eye while jarring some notions

“There’s this tendency to think of Indians sitting by the roadside selling trinkets,” says Kathryn Harris Tijerina. “If people want to see ethnographic material, this is not the place to come.”

This “place” is the newly relocated and renovated museum of the Institute of American Indian Arts. Directed, curated and staffed by Indians, it is the only museum in the world devoted entirely to contemporary Indian art. Tijerina, president of the institute, says she hopes the new museum will make Indian artists more visible and help them in their quest to be taken seriously.

“For the first time, it really is a setting for our own cultural voice,” Tijerina says. “We can take it back and express it our way, rather than have someone impose it upon us.”

That voice echoes loud and clear through the work of about 200 artists displayed in the museum’s premiere exhibition, “Creativity Is Our Tradition: Three Decades of Contemporary Art at the Institute of American Indian Arts.”

The exhibition presents the early work of many well-established Indian artists who got their start as students at the institute over the past 30 years.

A rich, eye-dazzling sampling of the 8,000 works in the museum’s permanent collection, the exhibition ranges from the sardonic (Barry Coffin’s rubber chicken-clutching sculpture, “Wally Koshare Meets Rambo”) to the sublime (Marcus Amerman’s delicate beadwork portrait, “Big-Bow-Kiowa”). The rounded, solid pueblo buildings in Hopi-Tewa painter Dan Namingha’s 1979 painting, “Autumn Morning,” speak to the endurance of a traditional way of life after centuries of contact with outsiders.

“The Great Native Dream,” a Pop Art homage by Delamar Boni, is a tart commentary on Indians who try too hard to act like white people, depicting five Indians in sunglasses gazing at lipsticks, with visions of an ice cream cone floating above their heads. And Da Ka Xeen, a young Tlinget photographer, reveals the influence of the late Robert Mapplethorpe in “Trinity,” a stark testament to martyrdom composed of three black-and-white pictures of a manacled Indian man that have been tacked to a rough wooden cross crowned by a halo of barbed wire.

The work may well disturb those who cherish notions of traditional, “culturally pure” Indian art, but that’s part of the point, says Tijerina. She adds that modern Indian art for too long has been dismissed on the one hand as derivative and regional, and on the other regarded as an anthropological curiosity worthy only of consignment to natural history museums.

“I think it’s important that the museum be able to show the contemporary aspect of Native American art that’s being done today,” says Namingha, who studied at the institute from 1967-69. “The mainstream museums shy away from anything done by Native Americans. It’s frustrating to a lot of Native American artists who are working in a contemporary context.”

Namingha, who recently had a successful solo show at the all-contemporary Palm Springs Desert Museum, believes the mainstream arts community might be surprised if it took a close look at modern Indian artists.

“Some of the work being done today has to do with social issues and political issues, as well as spirituality,” he says. “I think if Native American people could get that chance to show their work, it would be very powerful.”

Although it has been open barely a month, the museum already attracts 300 visitors a day in a season when attendance is down at the city’s other major art collections. Some of the foot traffic undoubtedly is due to location. The museum occupies a 70-year-old, nicely renovated building across from historic St. Francis Cathedral, a leisurely, one-block stroll east of the Plaza.

The institute traces its roots to the arts program founded in the 1930s at the Santa Fe Indian School, a boarding school run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. At a time when Indians were taught art skills for strictly vocational purposes, the school’s training studio encouraged students to revive and reclaim traditional artistic styles.

But by 1962, that process had grown constricting. The bureau opened the institute as a secondary school devoted to arts training, attracting students from throughout the country. In the early years, its faculty included such pioneering Indian artists as Allan Houser, Fritz Scholder and Lloyd Kiva New.

Even though it had evolved into a two-year college and leased space on the campus of the College of Santa Fe, the school fell on hard times in the late 1970s, and it was nearly closed early in the Reagan Administration because of federal budget constraints.

The institute was weaned from the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1988, when it was chartered by Congress as a nonprofit educational institution, officially known as the Institute of American Indian and Alaska Native Culture and Arts Development. The school receives an annual appropriation from Congress ranging from $7 million to $9 million.

The school offers an associate of arts degree in museum studies, creative writing, three-dimensional arts (including sculpture, jewelry and pottery), and such two-dimensional arts as film, video, graphics, painting, photography and printmaking.

By the end of the decade, Tijerina hopes the school, which currently has 259 students from 79 tribes, will have built its own campus on 140 recently donated acres, doubled the student body and graduated to four-year degree-granting status.

The museum, founded in 1972, long has been integral to the institute’s mission, according to Tijerina, but for years it was housed in cramped quarters on the grounds of the Indian School, south of downtown. Only a small portion of the collection was on display and it did not receive many visitors. “You really had to make an issue of getting there,” Tijerina says.

The federal government donated the spacious two-story Pueblo Revival-style building that houses the new museum in 1989. Built in 1921-22, the building sported two bell towers, a sidewalk-shading portal and mud-colored stucco in keeping with other buildings in downtown Santa Fe. Over the years it had housed a post office and numerous government offices, including those of the FBI, CIA and IRS.

Congress provided the $2.5 million needed for the basic renovation, which was designed by architects Antoine Predock of Albuquerque and Louis Weller, a Caddo Indian. Overseeing the plan was director Richard Hill, who recently left to become a curator at the Smithsonian’s planned Museum of the American Indian in Washington. (A search for Hill’s replacement is under way.)

Their first task was to clear out the rabbit warren of offices and corridors that cluttered the building’s interior, replacing it with a layout that draws the visitor into the space.

A key feature contributing to a sense of openness is a north-south hallway running the length of the building. With glass-paned doors at either end and full-length windows along the east wall opening onto two sculpture-filled courtyards, it draws a surprising amount of natural light into the building.

Visitors pass from the lobby through smoked-glass doors into a dimly lit welcoming circle where they take their places on a padded ledge that runs around the perimeter and listen to a taped oral history presentation. The room, reminiscent of southwestern kivas and other Indian structures symbolizing the unity of life, is centered around a sculpted “fire pit” made of split wood and metal.

Just beyond the circle is a compact exhibition of traditional Indian handiwork from different parts of the country, accompanied by a map identifying many of the major tribes.

After that brief brush with the past, visitors are thrust into the present as they enter the main exhibition with its exuberant mix of media and messages.

Meanwhile, exhibitions in two smaller galleries lend dimension to the Indian arts story. In “Early Innovators of American Indian Art,” paintings and sculpture from the first half of the century attest to a reliance on traditional imagery, even as the artists, many of them associated with the Santa Fe Indian School, developed their distinctive flat pictorial style. It celebrates the early work of such seminal figures as Houser, Charles Loloma and Pablita Velarde.

A companion exhibition is the collection of posters put together in the 1930s by French artist Paul Coze to promote a display of American Indian art in Paris. The dozen posters, based on original watercolors by Houser and others, remained in France until recently, when a grant from the Toyota Foundation enabled the museum to bring them home.

The 25,000-square-foot building also includes a shop, a bookstore, ample office and meeting space, classrooms for institute students, a state-of-the-art conservation laboratory and climate-controlled storage rooms for the collection.

Most of an additional $2.7 million needed to complete the renovation and pay for museum furnishings has come from the Rockefeller, MacArthur and Kresge foundations. In addition, IBM Corp. has provided $175,000 worth of cash and equipment to set up an interactive video program telling the institute story.

Houser, who recently was awarded a National Medal of Arts for his lifetime achievement in sculpture, has joined with his family in donating $100,000 to convert a parking lot behind the museum into an outdoor sculpture garden.

“It’s wonderful for the young students to go the museum and do research,” says Houser, who taught sculpture and painting at the institute for 15 years. “It’s a good thing to have the exposure for a lot of young students, who have the ability, but no place to show.”

Tijerina is proud that the renovation was completed on time and under budget, although the final touches were barely finished in time for the June opening, which was accompanied by traditional Iroquois and Plains Indian purification rites.

“Indian people are a part of today, a part of the future,” she says. “The mission of the institute is to educate people about Indian arts and culture, and the museum is integral to that.”