Southwestern Association for Indian Arts

The Southwestern Association for Indian Arts (SWAIA) is an 89 year old Native arts and culture advocacy organization best known for its planning and staging of the annual Santa Fe Indian Market. Indian Market is an exceptional event because of its inclusiveness, size, and variety of art forms; its centrality as the annual convening of the native arts and culture community; and its incomparable education foundation and opportunities. Indian Market also provides unprecedented opportunities for art sales, as a venue and in the encouragement for new and innovative work, and bringing together a critical mass of art experts and appreciators.

Funding in this initiative assisted SWAIA in developing and building a master artist database, consolidating unsystematically organized images, paper records, and artist commentary. It is anticipated the database will initially include upwards of three-thousand artists. The proposed database will document Native arts and culture, while also exponentially expanding SWAIA’s efficiencies, educational capacities and development of new commerce venues and opportunities, immediately improving the planning and organizing of Indian Market.  In addition, it will provide external access to artists and the general public via electronic web-based applications.   These other externally uses could help promote educational, commercial, and research activities by providing easy access to the end-user.

In the organization’s stewardship are an unsurpassed record of Native artists and their work that includes hundreds of tribal styles and art forms, documenting the historic and ongoing generations of individual and community participation in Indian Market. These records are photographic prints, slides, and digital images; as well as scattered and disorganized paper records of Indian Market participation, awards lists, and correspondence. The resources SWAIA holds are irreplaceable and not duplicated elsewhere.  The database will be modeled on duplicating the first person experience of talking with an artist at Indian Market but with the educational difference of incorporating the contexts of multiple generations and an artist’s own ever-evolving artwork. It is anticipated that the SWAIA database can be linked to other databases as well as providing encouragement to other culture and art organizations to create databases whose accessibility and usability are modeled on Native explanatory principles.  SWAIA will eventually incorporate newspaper, additional archival sources and private collections into the database. Moreover, by using SQL standards, the SWAIA database can then be linked and cross-referenced to other historic archives and public collections to help sort out and make accessible museum collections on the basis of who people are today to work alongside extant historic and academic models.

The efficiency gains will help build organizational and staff capacities, including the broadening of vital arts infrastructure support through generation of a first-person and accessible database of artists.  Administratively it will improve organizational efficiencies through centralizing record keeping, reducing time spent sorting paper, and permanently archive records in a secure and stable format.