Polly Nordstrand, curator of Southwest Art at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, has been awarded a Curatorial Research Fellowship by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The $45,000 grant will support Nordstrand’s research for the development of an upcoming exhibition, “Queer Indigenous Visualities,” scheduled to open at the Fine Arts Center in September 2021. Nordstrand will drive the curation of the exhibition designed to provide a corrective to historical considerations of Native American art that have ignored the significant contributions of queer artists.

“As an academic museum, the FAC is committed to presenting new scholarship to our public,” says Nordstrand. “The exhibition will be an important contribution to the fields of art history and Indigenous Studies by bringing awareness to the work of queer artists. As a collaborative curatorial project, we anticipate the dialogues in planning the exhibition to also be generative for our communities.”

The Fine Arts Center is the first Colorado-based nonprofit to receive a Curatorial Research Fellowship since the program’s inception in 2008.