John Abbott College Faculty Member Sheila Nadimi Receives Canada Council for the Arts Grant for Landmark Photographic Project
Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue (Québec) – March 10, 2025 – John Abbott College proudly announces that Sheila Nadimi, Co-Chair of the Visual Arts Department, has been awarded a Canada Council for the Arts Concept to Realization Grant to support the exhibition of her decades-long photographic project documenting the buildings that housed the Intermountain Indian School in Utah. This school was the largest federal off-reservation Native American boarding school in the United States. The grant has enabled Nadimi’s work to culminate in a powerful solo exhibition at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art in Logan, Utah.
Over the past 25 years, Nadimi has meticulously built a spatial archive documenting this historically significant site, originally a World War II military hospital before its transformation into a federal Indian boarding school. Through photography, archival research, and collaboration, her work has become a form of ‘deep mapping,’ preserving the traces of Indigenous students’ presence—such as murals and markings—that would have otherwise been lost to history. Her photographic archive remains the most comprehensive visual record of the school and dormitory buildings prior to their demolition.
The official exhibition launch took place on January 31, 2025, at The Russell/Wanlass Performance Hall at Utah State University, drawing over 300 attendees, including alumni of the school, former faculty, and Indigenous leaders. The event opened with a blessing by Darren B. Parry (Northwestern Band of the Shoshone) and featured a presentation on federal Indian Boarding School history by Farina King (Diné, citizen of the Navajo Nation), Associate Professor of Native American Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Nadimi also presented a talk at the opening event, sharing an overview of her project. Her 38 never-before-seen photographs, printed and framed in Montreal and shipped to Utah in custom crates, are now exhibited at the museum, offering a rare glimpse into the visual history of the site.
In a room adjacent to Nadimi’s photographs, a selection of 11 murals painted by Indigenous students—recently restored after years of neglect—are on view for the first time. These murals, created on dormitory walls by Indigenous students in their shared living spaces, represent only a fraction of the artwork once contained in these buildings. Nadimi’s photographs remain the only visual record of many murals that were not salvaged and provide crucial documentation of those that were, marking an invaluable contribution to the preservation of Native American art and history.
Along with this museum exhibition, Nadimi has produced a 400-page limited-edition artist book as the culmination of her long-term project. This book would not have been possible without the dedication of two graduate students from the Peter Guo-hua School of Architecture, Hassan Saab and John Vaccaro—an alumnus of John Abbott College’s Arts and Sciences program and a former student of Nadimi. Over the past few years, Saab and Vaccaro have worked tirelessly alongside Nadimi on book design, advising on the selection and placement of photographs and generating original maps identifying the tribal nations and communities from which students arrived.
Moreover, two additional John Abbott College alumni and students assisted in aspects of the project. Maddy Coache (Arts and Sciences) designed a poster for an international conference in Germany in September 2024, while Irene Morgan, a current Graphic and Web Design student, assisted in preparing a selection of photographs for an upcoming feature in “L’Œil de la Photographie” magazine in France.
John Abbott College extends its deepest gratitude to the Canada Council for the Arts for making this project a reality and applauds the hard work and dedication of Sheila Nadimi and her students. Their collective efforts have created an invaluable historical record that will serve as an educational and cultural resource for years to come.
The exhibition remains open to the public until December 26,2025 at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art in Logan, Utah.
Photo: Sheila Nadimi, Eagle Village (1996-2021)
Photo: Sheila Nadimi, Eagle Village (1996-2021)
This mural, created by Michael Polk, a student from the Yakama Nation in Washington State, was the final one documented before the buildings were demolished. Polk passed away in 2015.
Mapping History: Tracing Student Journeys
A striking visual element of the exhibition is the map that traces the federal boundaries of tribal nations and communities from where students enrolled at the Intermountain Inter-Tribal Indian School arrived from. This intricate map, created by Hassan Saab and John Vaccaro together with Sheila Nadimi and with input from Ronald Geronimo, Tohono O’odham, alumni of the school, illustrates the vast distances students traveled from their home communities across the United States to the school in Utah. Using archival information from commencement pamphlets from 1981-1982 and1982-1983 school years and using native-land.ca digital platforms this map transforms historical records into a compelling visual narrative, revealing the school’s far-reaching impact on Indigenous youth.
