The Namingha family of artists blends ancient ways with a modern worldview
By Nancy Zimmerman | Portraits by Kate Russell
Imagine a world without time, where past, present, and future merge seamlessly to form a never-ending circle of life, its gentle rhythms guiding us, sustaining us. Such is the world of the Hopi, descendants of the ancient Sikyatki people whose artistic achievements rival the finest from any culture, anywhere. Their designs were so sophisticated that they don’t look out of place today in a contemporary gallery or museum, despite having been created with rudimentary tools and materials. Ask a Hopi how it is that this ages-old artistry manages to be simultaneously historic and current, and you’ll probably get a patient smile in response. To Western civilization, obsessed as it is with measuring, saving, and spending time, it seems impossible that the intricate, abstract Hopi designs could have been created in a prehistoric world that predated the modern impressionistic, cubist, and abstract art forms they often resemble.
Butterflies, spirals, and Hopi Cloud People are united to create a healing force in his Passage #43 (2016), acrylic on canvas.
Dan Namingha’s Katsina (2016), mixed media on board, uses abstracted elements of traditional symbols.
But to the Hopi people, who still occupy the lands of their ancestors in Arizona, there’s nothing surprising about it. “In our culture, we believe that the past is the future, the future is the past,” says Santa Fe–based Dan Namingha, an award-winning contemporary painter and sculptor.
Namingha is part of an extraordinary family of artists who descend from Nampeyo (c.1860–1942), the Tewa-Hopi woman who single-handedly revived the distinctive pottery of the Sikyatki people and who is considered one of the finest artists of her time. Nampeyo’s talent lives on in her descendants, who have taken their art to new heights in a variety of mediums while honoring their creative heritage, one born of a cosmology that celebrates the connections among all things on the planet.
Namingha was first exposed to design and color by his mother, Dextra Quotskuyva, Nampeyo’s great-granddaughter and a renowned potter who has continued to refine the unique designs of her forebears to create works of exceptional beauty. Now retired, she has received numerous awards throughout her life, among them the designation of Arizona Living Treasure in 1994, the Arizona State Museum’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998, and the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts (SWAIA) Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004.
Namingha was also influenced by his grandmother, Rachel, who was a talented potter, and his grandfather, Emerson, a farmer, rancher, carpenter, stonemason, and composer of songs for Hopi ceremonies. He was raised primarily by Rachel and Emerson during his early life while Dextra, a trained nurse, left Hopi to work at the hospital in Winslow, Arizona. “I recall my grandmother giving me some of her clay to play with,” he says. “I must have been about six. Instead of doing ceramics I ended up making sculptural figures like horses and cows and chickens. I was intrigued with color. My grandfather would take me to his kiva in Middle Village and I’d watch the katsina ceremonies. It made a strong visual impression on me.” To this day he creates sculptures, working in bronze and steel rather than the clay of his early boyhood.
His introduction to painting came while he was attending elementary school in the village of Polacca on the Hopi reservation. His teacher, Lillian Russell, was a painter herself, and she provided the kids with watercolors, oil paints, charcoal, and casein in powder form, and set up a studio at the school for the kids who had an interest in art. “She would reserve an hour for all the kids to come in early and have a session with the materials. She basically instructed us in how to use them, but then left it to us to experiment with them as we pleased. That was my motivation to get up extra early, just to get to school and fiddle around with the materials.”
Dan Namingha with Katsinum Montage (2016), acrylic on canvas (left) and Katsinum #3 (2006), acrylic on canvas (right).
Since those early days, Namingha has remained true to his influences while creating a body of work that’s astonishing in its breadth, subtlety, and seemingly effortless artistry. He first studied at the University of Kansas, then later at IAIA and the American Academy of Art in Chicago. Among his numerous awards are an honorary doctorate from IAIA granted in 2009 as well as that organization’s Visionary Award, conferred in 1997. He received New Mexico’s Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in 1995 and was honored by the Santa Fe Rotary Foundation as Distinguished Artist of the Year, also in 1995. In 1994 he received a special tribute from the Harvard Foundation and Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, and he has been the subject of two PBS documentary films and a segment of CBS’s Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt. Thomas Hoving, the former director of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, was a devoted fan of Namingha’s work and published a book, The Art of Dan Namingha, in 2000.
In many of Namingha’s paintings he takes a minimalist approach to his subject matter, distilling the physical features of the landscape down to their essence and breathing life into the lines and curves, creating shapes reminiscent of the abstracted symbols found in Hopi pottery. “I make a landscape that’s very realistic,” he says. “I then break it down into an impression, then break it down further into an abstract form, then even further into something completely minimal. I’m trying to get to the core of the form of the landscape, and then everything else fits in. It’s like a haiku—it still sustains itself and has a sense of power and strength even though it’s very minimal.”
But it’s not all abstraction and minimalism. “I did a painting recently that’s based on butterflies,” he says, “with one side of it butterflies, the other half symbols. In the center are four figures that are referred to in Hopi as the Cloud People. My mother once told me that butterflies were a form of healing, so I wanted to do something with that.” Namingha’s younger son, Michael, had shown him a photo of a Syrian butterfly that’s on the verge of extinction, so he incorporated it into the painting and surrounded it with other butterflies from Latin America all the way through to Alaska. “I put it there because of all that’s happening in the Middle East, and the exodus of families from Syria,” he explains. “Fixing that is a long-term process, so I used their butterfly to try to heal that place.”
Namingha reduces the landscape to its essence in both Desert Mountain #6 (2014), acrylic on canvas, and Mountains and Arroyo (2016), oil on canvas (top).
Namingha’s heart is never far from the ancient civilization whose life lessons and artistic expression inform his work. “In my paintings I often put a spiral in the center, which is referred to as a sipapu, the center of the world, a place of emergence based on our creation myth,” he says. “We came out of that place, that spiral, and then began our migration. And then it continues with another spiral, when we’ve reached our current home.
“The two spirals are connected, the beginning and the current place,” he says, “by the frequent pilgrimages Hopis still make to their sacred places, back to the past and the future.”
He explains that these connections have a profound influence on the culture. “There are different points throughout the Southwest that are important for the Hopi, points that connect us that we refer to as the Domain. They’re shrines that are not really visible to most people—they’re very low-key, which protects them. They’ve been there for centuries.”
Arlo Namingha’s Maiden (2008), bronze edition of four.
Namingha still speaks fondly of the teacher who first let him loose with art materials, and he emulated Russell’s laissez-faire approach while his own sons, Arlo, 43, and Michael, 38, were growing up. “It was a fortunate introduction to the arts for us,” says Arlo, who was honored with the Mayor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts for 2016. “Our father’s studio was open to explore, but we were never told what to do or how to express ourselves. We were free to experiment and do things our own way.”
Arlo’s work shares the minimal aesthetic of his father, but his materials of choice are wood, clay, stone, and bronze. “I prefer working with natural materials,” he says. “You create a relationship with them—you have to accept their nature because you don’t always know what they’ll do. Mother Nature always wins, so that keeps me humble.”
Ever ready to experiment, Arlo says he is constantly exploring new ideas, and he even re-engineers his tools to “make them do what I want them to do.” Many of his sculptures are interactive, with parts that can be detached, rearranged, and turned on their sides to form a variety of different sculptures, all from the same basic pieces. Simultaneously playful and profound, their reductive lines and curves reflect the ancient Hopi designs in what Arlo calls a “dialogue through form,” conveying an earthy sophistication that connects the natural world to a subtly cerebral worldview. “I address issues by playing on mythology and current events,” he says. “My work has become more and more minimal, but there’s always a hidden element of symbolism, a little glimpse of the culture.”
Arlo in his studio with works in progress (top). The components of Sikyatki (2016), Indian limestone, can be rearranged to form a variety of sculptures (bottom right). Cultural Images #21 (bottom left).
The relationships and connections among the components of his sculptures speak not only to humanity’s relationship to the planet and each other but also to the infinite possibilities this relationship inspires, achieving a kind of universality that has worldwide appeal. It’s thus no surprise that his work, a uniquely American expression of creativity and inclusiveness, is especially popular among U.S. embassies, where it’s displayed in places as disparate as Switzerland, Uzbekistan, Cambodia, and the Central African Republic.
His brother Michael’s conceptual work using digital inkjet images printed on canvas, paper, Plexiglas, and vinyl evinces a similar sensibility, but with an edgier, more urban vibe. “I work with text—sayings and words,” he says, and he particularly likes working with vinyl. “I was frustrated with problems of scale, but vinyl lets me shrink things or blow them up. I was looking for a way to do something unique.”
When he studied at Parson’s School of Design in New York City, Michael first explored architecture and design, and he started out by creating branding concepts that targeted consumers. “My work doesn’t relate so much to Hopi culture,” he says. “It reflects my own experience.”
That experience includes having lived through the trauma of 9/11 during his time in New York, something he’s still coming to terms with, and his fascination with all aspects of pop culture. Although he now is back in Santa Fe, his hometown, he still makes frequent trips to New York for inspiration. “I love spending time there, going to the galleries, museums, and concerts and just wandering around the city. Then I come back to Santa Fe to process it all,” he says.
During one recent trip to New York he stumbled across proof that his Hopi ancestors would have felt right at home in today’s contemporary art world. “I was at the Met one day and I saw Salvador Dalí’s Christ of St. John of the Cross next to a Nampeyo pot!”
The minimalism that characterizes the work of his father and brother is evident in Michael’s work as well, and its apparent simplicity belies the complexity of his social commentary, which manages to convey multiple ideas in very few words, sometimes in just a single word. The message is delivered so quietly that the viewer is inclined to linger a bit to ponder the work, letting the message sink in slowly.
Michael with Useless Regrets (2016), adhesive-backed vinyl letters, a piece for an exhibition on Fred Harvey at the Santa Fe Community Gallery that uses one of the maxims Harvey used to attach to his calendar (top). Love (2015), archival pigment print on Hahnemühle paper (bottom).
Michael Namingha’s Grand Canyon (2016), digital C-print face-mounted to Plexiglas.
As different as his work is from the others, there’s an unmistakable quality to the art of all three that suggests that, in addition to an underlying Hopi aesthetic, there’s a Namingha aesthetic as well, one that persists through the generations. “My sons have their own vision of how they see things and how they want to project that,” says Namingha. “It’s built into our name, in fact. ‘Na-ming’ means ‘by itself,’ and ‘ha’ means ‘growing.’ It refers to a volunteer plant that grows without being nurtured. My sons spent time in my studio and fiddled around, just as I did as a kid. As a metaphor, they’ve grown on their own. This is why I think our work stands alone, each different from the other but at the same time complementing one another.”
It all comes together at the gallery, Niman Fine Art, which Dan and his wife, Frances, established in Santa Fe in 1990. The gallery is run by Frances and Arlo’s wife, Nicole, both of whom hail from Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo and have a background in business. Their assiduous stewardship of the commercial side of the enterprise affords Dan, Arlo, and Michael an enviable freedom to concentrate on their art, and the family’s closeness and obvious enjoyment of one another’s company makes this division of labor as much an expression of love as it is a practical allocation of individual talent.
“The culture is our foundation,” Namingha concludes. “I tell my sons that beyond that you can do anything you want because you’re a part of this planet and a part of the family of humanity. Whatever you apply through your medium doesn’t necessarily have to be Native American, but it can be something that covers the planet and all its inhabitants because you are part of that family. We’re all connected.”
Left: Dan Namingha’s Hopi Eagle Dance (1996), acrylic on canvas. Right: Left to right, Michael, Frances, Dan, Arlo, and Nicole, with Michael’s dog, Camden, in the gallery. In the background is Dan’s Points Connecting (2015), acrylic on canvas.
From the Fall 2016 issue
