Diné College art history department receives $299K in state and federal grants

The Diné College School of Arts, Humanities and English (SAHE) recently received federal and state grants to support art history initiatives.

The federal grant of $99,000 from the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) supports the “Contemporary Navajo Art and Artists: Identity, History and Culture” project.

The state grant is in partnership with the Indigenous Design and Planning Institute at the University of Mexico. That $130,000 grant is from ArtPlace America. The purpose of the grant is to empower students at the post-secondary level at Diné College to reimagine their communities through new curricula focused on indigenous design and planning.

“The NEH grant emphasizes the importance of reading, research and writing as a way of understanding the role that visual arts play within the human experience, particularly with respect to Navajo litera-ture, language, art and history,” said Dr. Karla Brittona, a Diné College art history professor and princi-pal investigator of the two grants.