With a Higher Ed Partnership, a New Foundation Is Spotlighting Indigenous History and Culture

Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax̂), Never Forget, 2021. Forge Project Collection, traditional lands of the Muh-he-con-ne-ok. Photo: Jason Wyche.

Bard College has long been a leader when it comes to out-of-the-box thinking in higher ed — including through its innovative admission policies and education models, and a path-breaking initiative to educate people behind bars.

Now, the private liberal arts college, located in New York’s Hudson Valley, is deepening its commitment to Indigenous people, and their history and culture, thanks to a $25 million gift from the Gochman Family Foundation. That gift was matched by a $25 million commitment from George Soros and the Open Society Foundations as part of the college’s endowment drive. 

The new funding, which will support Native American and Indigenous Studies in undergraduate and graduate academics and the arts, will allow Bard to create a Center for Indigenous Studies and to appoint an Indigenous curatorial fellow at the college’s Center for Curatorial Studies. In addition, Bard’s American Studies Program will be renamed American and Indigenous Studies, according to the announcement, “to more fully reflect continental history and to place Native American and Indigenous Studies at the heart of curricular innovation and development.” The funding will also support faculty appointments and student scholarships.

The Gochman Family Foundation (which doesn’t have a website) is a new grantmaker, created in 2021 by Becky Gochman, whose husband, David, is the former president and CEO of Academy Sports & Outdoors. Originally a tire store founded by David Gochman’s grandfather in 1938, the business later sold military surplus goods, and then transitioned again in the 1980s to become Academy Sports & Outdoors, a sporting goods retailer. David Gochman sold a major stake in the company for more than $2.1 billion in 2011, according to Forbes. 

The Gochman Family Foundation’s funding interests include sustainable agriculture, education and the arts. Becky Gochman, a former art teacher, also created the Forge Project last year to increase recognition of Indigenous art and to support and amplify the work of Indigenous artists. The Forge Project is headquartered near Bard, and the two institutions worked together to develop the college’s new initiative.

“This gift represents institutional change, which has been building at Bard and is core to the vision of Forge Project,” said the Forge Project’s executive director, Candice Hopkins, when the new funding was announced. “These lands are layered with histories that are inextricably bound by the displacement and forced removal of Indigenous peoples, yet also rich with knowledge. This gift provides the basis for the future building of this knowledge to shift and expand discourses across fields of study, whether it be in Indigenous and American studies, art history, or curatorial practice.”

Indigenous placemaking

Raven Halfmoon (Caddo), Hadeh’coosha, 2021. Forge Project Collection, traditional lands of the Muh-he-con-ne-ok. Photo: Courtesy the Artist and Kouri and Corrao Gallery.

When Becky Gochman first began charting a direction for her family’s philanthropy, she knew she wanted it to support social justice and art, but hadn’t settled on specific funding areas. She bought property in the Hudson Valley and later learned that it was Muh-he-con-ne-ok land, which helped shape her giving strategy. “It became obvious that we would do an Indigenous project,” she told the New York Times. 

Gochman co-founded the Forge Project with Zach Feuer, a former art dealer, who also runs the Gochman Family Collection, a separate art collection. They recruited Candice Hopkins, an experienced curator of Tlingit descent and a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation, as the organization’s executive director. The team then began purchasing Indigenous art to display at the project’s unique headquarters: two buildings that happen to be the only residential structures in the U.S. designed by Chinese artist and political activist Ai Weiwei. 

The Forge Project, which does not receive funding from the Gochman Family Foundation but is funded privately, loans Indigenous artworks to art galleries and museums. To date, Forge has loaned works to the Venice Biennale, Houston’s Blaffer Art Museum, the Tucson Museum of Art, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and other institutions. The Forge Project also sponsors a fellowship and residency program that provides grants to six artists a year.

Hopkins described Forge as a “project of Indigenous placemaking” in a recent interview. “We want to provide opportunities for Native artists in the region, and with our fellowship program, we bring artists from other places and from a variety of backgrounds,” she said. “And we have our lending collection; we lend artworks to museums and cultural centers as a way of enabling what we consider to be the radical accessibility to this kind of work, particularly for institutions in New York City, which don’t have the best track record with Native artists. We’ve started a publishing arm as well — we just launched a journal, and the first edition will be published later this year.”  

The partnership between the Forge Project and Bard was a natural fit: Not only is the college located nearby, but Hopkins herself attended the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard) and has maintained connections there. The two institutions have worked closely together since the Forge Project was founded in 2021. Bard students often work in the Forge Project library and participate in programs held there. “We see Forge as sort of an extended classroom of Bard,” Hopkins said.  

Bard is also a good fit because the college was already committed to Indigenous issues. Its Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck project, for example, is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary examination of local Indigenous history. That project received a $1.49 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation through its Humanities for All Times initiative earlier this year. 

Meanwhile, the Open Society Foundations — founded by investor George Soros — have consistently backed Indigenous people and other underrepresented groups. Last year, for example, OSF invested $10 million in Native-led organizations as part of its commitment to build and protect multiracial democracy, as IP reported. Open Society-U.S. launched this strategy in 2020 with $220 million to support organizations and leaders in Black communities. OSF also champions artists, particularly those working to oppose repression. Its Soros Arts Fellowship, for example, supports artists whose work advances “pluralistic, democratic and just societies.”

What’s in a name?

Jeffrey Gibson (Member of The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, and half Cherokee), SHE KNOWS OTHER WORLDS, 2019. Forge Project Collection, traditional lands of the Muh-he-con-ne-ok. Photo: Courtesy the Artist.

Before launching the initiative with Bard, the Forge Project team worked closely with Bard representatives to decide what it would look like and how to structure it to support diverse students and faculty. “We wanted to try something really different with this gift, and that was to think about how philanthropy can help produce institutional change,” Candice Hopkins said. 

Too often, Hopkins said, institutions try to increase diversity by hiring a single person to represent DEI issues, which places too much of a burden on one person. “We’ve been working on creating cohorts of faculty, and on recruiting more Native students,” she said. “Not only do students need to see themselves reflected in faculty, they need to see other students like them on campus. We’re also thinking about ways to help students succeed once they are here.”

Hopkins herself will join the faculty of CCS Bard as a fellow in Indigenous art history and curatorial studies. She will teach in the program, and curate an art exhibition in 2023 to inaugurate the Gochman Family Foundation gift. She will also lead archival acquisitions for the CCS Bard and work closely with Indigenous students. 

As noted earlier, Bard will change the name of its American Studies program to American and Indigenous Studies. Hopkins believes the name change is particularly significant because it signals the college’s commitment. “The college was already working in this area, but the name change means that we are going to bolster that: We’re going to work on more course development, and increase hires at all levels,” she said. “It is one thing to receive a grant for something, it is another thing to make the commitment visible. And that is what the renaming does.”

Hopkins hopes that the initiative at Bard will inspire other colleges and universities to raise the visibility of Indigenous history and culture — and inspire more philanthropists, like the Gochman Family Foundation, to support similar programs. This work is particularly vital now, at a time when American history and how we talk about it has become a major front in the culture wars. Around the country, conservative leaders are banning books and restricting what educators can teach children about slavery and structural racism, Native American genocide, and other complex and painful aspects of the U.S. origin story. Efforts to explore and amplify Indigenous history and culture will help ensure a place in that story for people who were here long before the country was founded — and are too often written out of it.