New PBS documentary brings Institute of American Indian Arts to the world

By André Salkin asalkin@sfnewmexican.com
Dec 9, 2025

Financial troubles led Emmett Navakuku, 42, to depart the Institute of American Indian Arts the semester before he was set to graduate in 2010.

Over the following decade, the Hopi artist from Polacca, Ariz., said an artistic part of himself started to slip away. He endured marital tumult and the loss of his grandmother to COVID-19 — a tragedy that shook the community and left him feeling he “didn’t get the chance to say the ‘thank yous’ that I wanted to.”

So after 15 years, he returned this semester to the Santa Fe institution to bring to life a series of four painted portraits featuring his great-grandmother in black-and-white tones; his late grandmother in rich, warm sepia; his wife on a blue background and his daughters on a purple one.

“ I feel like at some point in time I forgot, kind of, about the people that I care about. … I feel like as a Hopi man, sometimes we tend to overlook the things that these women have done for us,” he said, defending his senior project Friday alongside younger seniors doing the same.

Returning to the studio environment and working on the portraits alongside other artists at the school, he said, brought back his artistic direction and sense of gratitude, along with a new desire to teach art in his community.

But soon, the school’s artistic offerings are set to reach a far broader audience.

IAIA is one of the main subjects of the latest season of “Craft in America,” a four-episode documentary series from PBS set to premiere on television screens at 10 p.m. Dec. 19 and available now on the PBS app and website.

Emmett Navakuku talks Friday about a series of portraits of family members he painted as students and faculty at IAIA gather to critique work by graduating seniors on display in the Robert Martin Academic building at IAIA.
Jim Weber/The New Mexican

‘The most important institution in the country’

The series has since 2007 produced episodes examining centuries of artistic development across the continent and its islands. IAIA, which appears in the West episode — set to screen alongside the East episode, while the North and South episodes will premiere in 2026 — is part of the roughly hourlong PBS special, screened to a small invited audience at Sky Cinemas Thursday evening.

In the episode, students are featured alongside an Idaho master saddlemaker, a Texas bootmaker and a slate of Hawaiian artisans reviving Native art forms nearly lost amid the islands’ colonial upheaval.

“For the West, IAIA was the first place we thought about,” said Patricia Bischetti, executive producer and director of the series, as she spoke at the premiere last week. “We think it’s the most important institution in the country.”