Grantee Database
Your Neighborhood Museum
Grant Year
2025-26
Grant Program
Impact Projects
Award Amount
$18,000.00
Project Description
With support from the California Arts Council, Your Neighborhood Museum will bring together Native artists, culture workers, and repatriation specialists for a 2-day convening. We will establish a cohort that will build upon the evolving role of Native artists in the repatriation of cultural items from museums and universities. Our goals are to support Native artists who are seeking informed guidance as they encounter repatriation practice in museums, foster mutual support among the cohort, build awareness of the impacts of repatriation by examining the tensions faced by Native artists who must engage with museums that are interested in their art while simultaneously falling behind on the return of ancestral remains and cultural items. The convening will empower artists to engage institutions in meaningful discussions, advocating for artists while also supporting repatriation.
Organization Summary
We utilize mutual aid frameworks to provide museum services like conservation, archiving, exhibitions, public programs, grant writing, repatriation support, and research directly to our communities, as well as training in these areas. We do this by creating more sustainable community-led models for curation, preservation, and programming.
We make these skills and resources accessible to those under-resourced and under-recognized by traditional art institutions. We leverage our skills, networks, and experience to support preservation projects led by communities. We create systems that better serve the immediate needs of communities while investigating and addressing root causes, such as inequities in preservation investments and a lack of diversified options for training and development.
Our collaborators have decades of cumulative experience in social justice organizing and cultural heritage care both within and outside of traditional institutional structures. We provide training and mentorship, sacred site protection, heritage care workshops, and technical and administrative support. Previously supporting our communities as volunteers, in 2019 we began formalizing to build our capacity and received our 501c3 status in 2021.
Our largest program is CARE: Caring for and Repatriating Everything, a seminar and workshop series that supports California Tribes reclaiming cultural items under the Federal and California Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Acts (NAGPRA/Cal-NAGPRA). This program covers the repatriation processes and caring for cultural materials with Know-Your-Right and skills based training, grants for cultural workers, and building networks of mutual support.
Workshops with Community Partners: we offer hands-on training, like basket cleaning with CA Tribal partners, removing museum labels on repatriated items, testing for harmful pesticides on repatriated items, addressing fire and smoke damage on art and belongings in LA.
Mentorship: Providing hands-on skills-building, field work, and intellectually rigorous experiences for students by utilizing existing YNM programs for training while co-developing leadership opportunities with students to facilitate programs.
Organization
Your Neighborhood Museum
Address
4707 Fountain Ave
Los Angeles
90029
County
Los Angeles
Region
South – Los Angeles & Orange
Phone
(323) 788-3012
