Dickinson College’s New Building, The Jim Thorpe Center for the Futures of Native Peoples & the Samuel G. Rose ’58 Art Gallery
View from Northeast at Sunset
Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA is launching an ambitious new project on its historic campus: a home for the Center for the Futures of Native Peoples and the Samuel G. Rose ’58 Art Gallery. More than just a new building, this effort is meant to deepen understanding, healing, and celebration connected to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (CIIS), which operated only a few miles away. The CIIS’s devastating mission, summed up by its motto, “Kill the Indian to Save the Man,” sought to strip Indigenous children of their cultures and identities. This new Center is a direct response to that history, offering space for truth-telling, learning, and honoring Indigenous resilience.
Gathering Gallery
Named after legendary Olympian Jim Thorpe, a CIIS alum, the Center will become a major resource and gathering place for exploring Indigenous cultures and histories. It will include educational and ceremonial spaces, along with gallery areas showcasing an extraordinary collection of Indigenous-themed works and pieces by leading Native American artists. With its focus on reckoning with the past while uplifting Indigenous futures, the facility will stand apart on campus as a destination for students, scholars, and visitors from across the country.
View from High Street
The project brings together O Z Collaborative, architect of record, and Jones + Jones Architecture and Landscape Architecture as design architect. Guided by Principal Johnpaul Jones, FAIA, whose heritage is Choctaw, Cherokee, and Welsh American, Jones’s work, including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, is known for expressing Indigenous values through form and narrative. His leadership has helped shape a design rooted in modern Indigeneity, drawing inspiration from the Four Worlds Gifts, the natural, animal, spiritual, and human realms, and from the artworks and stories the building will hold.
View from Northeast
None of this would be possible without the generosity of Samuel G. Rose ’58, whose commitment to uplifting Indigenous cultures through philanthropy has been instrumental in bringing both the building and its art collection to life. Earlier this fall, a ground blessing ceremony marked the project’s beginning, an important and moving step toward realizing this transformative vision.
Aerial View
Read Dickinson College’s press release on the project here.