February 18, 1916, Oklahoma, of Cherokee and Scots-Irish heritage
Education: Graduated from Art Institute of Chicago, 1938
Service: U.S. Navy, World War II, 1942–1945
Career: Launches Craftsman’s Court, apparel design, Scottsdale, AZ, 1946
Works with Southwest Indian Arts Project, University of Arizona, 1958
Co-founds Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, 1962
Serves as IAIA president 1967–1978, and in many other important
school roles through 2001
Passed: February 8, 2002
Survived by his beloved wife Aysen, two children and five grandchildren
Lloyd Kiva New’s artistic vision and pragmatic approach set the course for many renowned cultural institutions, including the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, the Heard Museum of Phoenix, the Plains Indian Museum of the Buffalo Bill Historic Center in Cody, Wyoming, and the soon-to-be-opened National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. Less known is the fact that this very magazine came to exist through the mentoring and teaching of Lloyd, my friend since 1946. The real legacy of Lloyd Kiva New isn’t necessarily found in the structures of these fine institutions, but rather in the hearts and minds of the teachers, staff and students who have flowered with him. He imbued them with great pride in their Native identity and established the freedom of expression to fulfill their dreams. They, in turn, create and teach others.
This great and humble man never had a bad word for anyone,
but instead sought out the best in everyone. The following remembrances by but a few of Lloyd’s thousands of friends are testimony to a life that touched the world.
Gary M. Avey
Founder and Publisher, Native Peoples Magazine
Phoenix
I met Lloyd Kiva New in the summer of ’61.
He was the director of an Indian art project, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, at the University of Arizona in Tucson. I had been invited to participate as a student. Lloyd and I became friends immediately. I soon realized that Lloyd had a dream: to establish a national arts school for Native American students.
Three years later, after I received my master of fine arts degree, he invited me to join the faculty of the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, the “dream” facility he had envisioned when we first met. For the next five years I enjoyed working alongside Lloyd.
I taught design, drawing, advanced printing and contemporary art history. I received Lloyd’s permission to put together the first light show in New Mexico—remember, this was the ’60s! We brought in films to screen from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. One day, Edna Ferber visited in the morning and Vincent Price read poetry in the afternoon; several days later, Allen Ginsberg put on a performance. Lloyd’s school had become the only bright light in the dark history of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Lloyd was a master at being silent, at listening to each problem and quietly providing a solution which could not be denied.
His creative mind transcended the mundane. This quiet insight was powerful to everyone. His vision influenced us all.
Lloyd was my mentor and my friend. I will always remember
his civility.
Fritz Scholder (Luiseño)
Artist
Scottsdale
Over the years, I talked with Lloyd about his life. I wondered about the beginning of his ideas that led to a journey of so many achievements. I was interested in the shaping of this extraordinary person’s character, beliefs, hopes, and, most of all, vision.
Lloyd recalled his mother with great affection. He alluded to the freedom and support she gave him to seek that which was in his heart and soul as a person, as a Cherokee, as an artist. She taught Lloyd to listen and to create.
She recited stories that were stage sets for traditional lifeways figures: the “Little People,” mischievous and to be avoided; and the “Old People,” who held wisdom. “The Old People,” she told Lloyd, “who could predict things to come, maintained their places in the scheme of life and the universe by listening to the soft whirling clouds. They didn’t get worked up about things; they found answers in life problems by just standing, quietly soaking in the healing powers of the sun.”
She, too, often stood in the warmth of the sun, bringing Lloyd to her side, gently wrapping him with strong yet gentle arms
until, he recalled, “I felt a strange feeling of quiet happiness.”
Lloyd was born to his destiny. He was a visionary in the fullest sense, a man before his time. Like Lloyd, the Institute of American Indian Arts was an idea before its time. Yet, it was an idea realized in time and appropriate to the seismic social changes of the 1960s.
As we talked over the years, I realized that Lloyd’s gift and value to us all was helping us realize our “talent” as human beings. Once, he held an art studio for his daughter, Nancy, and my family in his garage, where we sketched, painted and made collages. These were not exercises in color or technique as much as a way of freeing us to think about the world in a different way. Soon I began closely observing the change in seasons; the way clouds formed, changed color and shaped nuances; and particularly sunsets. Sometimes I would phone Lloyd as evening descended, or he me, to say, “Look out your window, it’s spectacular! What colors, what beauty!” We were happy witnesses to the setting sun of each day.
Lloyd, your mother once again enfolds you in her arms, and the warmth of the eternal sun nourishes you both.
Dave Warren (Santa Clara Pueblo)
Former President
Institute of American Indian Arts
Santa Fe
My relationship with Lloyd Kiva New goes back 40 years this fall. Lloyd would want me to say he was a modest man, but he was also a great man, a great national figure. I tend to judge a person in part by where he started in life and how far up the ladder he went. Lloyd started at the bottom. As Tony Hillerman recently wrote of his mother once saying, “Blessed are those who expect little, for they will seldom be disappointed.” That is the environment Lloyd started in.
But his mother had the courage, because Lloyd showed promise and an interest in the arts, to go to the Bureau of Indian Affairs and demand that they give him a little money to go along with the scholarship he’d received to attend the Art Institute of Chicago. That experience opened his mind to the Native peoples of the world, and it started the train of thoughts that ended in his masterful grasp of the importance of Native cultures and peoples.
Lloyd was a starting teacher at the old Phoenix Indian School before World War II. Few people know that he also served at Iwo Jima, in the Pacific, as a landing craft Naval officer. He never talked about that. After the war, Lloyd had saved a bit of money, and he opened a little shop in Scottsdale, Arizona with Charles Loloma (Hopi), another major artist-in-the-making. His customers included Frank Lloyd Wright and Eleanor Roosevelt. Thus, Lloyd played a major role in launching Scottsdale as a significant arts center.
Then, in 1962, Dr. George Boyce asked him to come and supervise the art programs at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. He gave up most of what he had and signed on. He made that commitment. He had a vision, and he lived simply. You might have thought from his wonderful “Big Room” in his house—the most magical room in Santa Fe—that he possessed some wealth; but no, he was a modest man and lived modestly. And, Lloyd developed a wonderful, concise way of expressing himself, becoming a spokesperson for the Native people of this country because he saw the strength of their cultures.
In 1962, there was a feeling in Congress, expressed in the Termination Policy, that the idea of Native people having reservations and land was a mistake. People looked down their noses at the Indians in this country. But with people like Lloyd, the situation began to turn around. Who would have thought 40 years ago that there would be a beautiful Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall in Washington? That’s a measure of how far we’ve come in this country.
A British poet once wrote something along these lines, which provides a fitting epitaph for Lloyd: “None knew him, but to love him/or named him, but to praise.”
The Honorable Stewart Udall
Former U.S. Secretary of the Interior
Santa Fe
Lloyd loved museums—for the reason that he loved art. He was often called “the father of Native American contemporary art,” and was himself a highly successful American Indian artist. Lloyd’s involvement with the Heard Museum began more than 50 years ago. The year following the death of Maie Bartlett Heard in 1951, Lloyd was invited to sit on the Heard Museum’s Board of Trustees. The Heard was then a small, fledgling museum in an emerging community with its future ahead of it. Much of what it has become in the last 50 years is the realization of Lloyd’s vision for an Indian museum in the 21st century.
Lloyd was the first Native American elected to the Heard’s Board of Trustees; he served as a Life Trustee until the time of his death. He served as a vice president on the board, retiring from trusteeship in 1962. It was during these formative years that much of the philosophical and programmatic direction of the Heard Museum was established. Lloyd was a major force behind these decisions. The 1954 landmark exhibition that he organized for the Heard, comparing modern haute couture fashion with traditional Native American clothing, caught the eye of the New York fashion world. Lloyd’s message then, and up to the time of his death, spoke about the non-ghettoization of Native art. He hoped that Native artists would join the mainstream of American late–20th century art.
More than anyone, Lloyd shaped the contemporary fine arts program at the Heard and was instrumental in the decision to establish the Heard’s Indian Art Gallery. The Indian Art Gallery continues to focus attention on the best contemporary Native art and has helped to launch many a career. Lloyd rejoiced in the success of young Indian art students.
At a time when Indian markets were anything but de rigueur, Lloyd was the driving force behind the organization of the now-famous Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair and Market. Forty-four years after its founding, the Heard’s Indian Fair and Market is the premier museum event of its kind. This year’s fair was dedicated to its founder.
Lloyd Kiva New’s impact on the Heard Museum extends over the landscape like a late-afternoon shadow on a sunny day. It gets longer and longer as the sun dips to the horizon. If you care to look, Lloyd’s presence at the Heard is still everywhere.
Frank H. Goodyear, Jr.
Director
The Heard Museum
Phoenix
Lloyd Kiva New was the epitome of the 20th century warrior. His battle was a lifelong struggle to effect a living renaissance by helping Native peoples find the “Beauty Way of Life.” He fought to restore the human spirit to Native peoples by looking to the best of the old for the restoration of the kind of Beauty that is so essential to the human spirit. As the Institute of American Indian Arts celebrates its 40th anniversary, we sorely miss our beloved President Emeritus.
His surname was synonymous with creativity. He was always full of New thoughts, New ideas and New plans. He was a man of great intellect, wisdom, humor and talent. He had an amazingly widespread influence. His leadership and contributions on many different boards throughout the nation were all orchestrated toward one end: promotion of the arts. In Lloyd’s own words, “Without the arts there would be little evidence of our past, and our present and future would be very bleak, indeed.”
I remember how thrilled Lloyd was when the new IAIA campus was built. I truly wish he were here to be a part of the next stage of development, to see another one of his dreams come true: expansion of our curriculum beyond fine arts. In the future, IAIA will have programs in visual communications, fashion design, textile design, furniture design, pre-architecture, entrepreneurship and cultural tourism. Lloyd frequently commented that “not everyone can be a fine artist. These young people need to know how to make a living.” He was excited about students opening their own arts businesses.
Lloyd’s legacy is the Institute of American Indian Arts. In the past several years, he worked tirelessly with me to find the resources to help build the Design and Applied Arts Center, and to secure funding for scholarships, for a new dormitory, and for a student union with a cafeteria. Lloyd taught us well. He taught us, as he said, that “Culture is defined by its art, and art is defined by culture, and the Beauty of the human spirit is defined by both.”
At IAIA, we will strive to inspire our students to find, in Lloyd’s words, “the exuberance of life through spiritual awakening to a sense of Beauty that results in a can-do spirit…IAIA has become the flagship for creative expression; a flood of art now pours out in all media from Indian artists across America. But perhaps its real legacy, as expressed by many of its graduates, lies in the sense of personal strengths they have found through the arts in the reinforcement of pride in their identities as Indian peoples.”
Della Warrior (Otoe/Missouria)
President
Institute of American Indian Arts
Santa Fe
I have been fortunate to have known Lloyd Kiva New since I was five years old. But I appreciated the passion and wisdom of this remarkable man most when I became the founding director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian.
Eight years ago, Lloyd wrote an essay in the NMAI publication All Roads Are Good titled “Translating the Past,” in which he discussed the relationship between NMAI’s collection and both the past and the future, and offered a series of challenges:
“People and cultures—like any living organisms—have to adapt to environmental changes; those that don’t, die. The relationship of the past to the future has been stated in many ways—I like the declaration that ‘the future lies in the future, not the past.’ As a generic institution, the museum has been more interested in digging up than in planting. … NMAI should develop vigorous, ongoing, blockbuster exhibitions of the finest traditional objects and activities of the past combined with the finest current visual and performing arts productions. Such shows should be representative of the works of Native peoples from this hemisphere; they should also be designed to show Indian truths to the world in a manner never afforded them before.”
Lloyd’s words seem particularly appropriate as we prepare, in September 2004, to swing open the doors of our stunning new museum at the foot of the nation’s Capitol. In that moment, as the first citizens of this hemisphere assume, finally and definitively, their rightful place at the very head of America’s National Mall, a Native cultural past and future will be honored and affirmed for the ages as it has never been before. Lloyd Kiva New had everything to do with making this noble and sometimes challenging journey possible, and I know he will be there to greet us as we cross that threshold of history.
Rick West
Director
National Museum of the American Indian
Washington, D.C.
For information about donating to the Lloyd Kiva New Memorial Foudation at IAIA, call 800/804.6423.
