Environmental Arts & Humanities Initiative
In 2017, professor Subhankar Banerjee established the Environmental Arts & Humanities Initiative at UNM, with a Lannan Foundation Endowment Fund and a five-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Each year, two Art & Ecology graduate fellowships and up to four scholarships to undergraduate Indigenous students are offered. The Initiative also provides additional support for faculty and student research, including for conference travel, exhibition, and lectures/panels. We have organized in partnership with other UNM departments and community organizations two interdisciplinary conferences (Decolonizing Nature in 2017 and the last oil in 2018); two speaker series lectures; three exhibitions (Species in Peril Along the Rio Grande in 2019, Long Environmentalism in the Near North in 2017-2018, and Decolonizing Nature in 2017), published a student book (the last oil: students respond in 2018), and provided support for several other projects, including most recently the performance Migrant Songs at the National Hispanic Cultural Center and the panel Encuentro de Semillas // Gathering of Seeds at the Albuquerque Museum.