Eagle Village: Selected Photographs by Sheila Nadimi

March 7 @ 10:00 am – May 9 @ 5:00 pm

This exhibit explores the spaces and the artworks that defined the Intermountain Inter-Tribal Indian School, which operated in Brigham City from 1950–1984. Based on Sheila Nadimi’s beautiful and informative book, Eagle Village: A Deep Mapping of Fallow Architecture, the exhibit centers the students’ artwork that defined the hallways, classrooms, and dorm rooms of the largest Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school in the United States. With the buildings now demolished, very few of these artworks remain. Nadimi’s photographs present an unflinching and at times haunting perspective on the art, its absence, and the political realities that define the landscape they inhabited. The exhibit will also feature a selection of artwork and ephemera from IIS students now held in the collection of the Brigham City Museum of Art and History.

Sheila Nadimi is a visual artist with a background in geography and environmental studies. She has been on faculty in the Visual Arts Department of John Abbott College in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec since 2005. In 2021, she was a Visiting Fellow at the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University. Her research focuses on the forces that shape and reshape the built environment. Nadimi’s book, published in 2024, grew out of a project that began in 1996. Eagle Village takes a deep mapping framework to reveal the cultural and political forces that shaped and reimagined this site over time and generates a spatial archive of place following over 25 years of observation, outreach, research, and contemplation. At its core, this project is an engagement with the material traces of some of the key narratives of American society. More than clarifying what unfolded on this parcel of land, Eagle Village presents its contradictions and paradoxes.

Contact:
- Phone: 435-226-1439
- Email: museum@bcutah.org