Dan Namingha

Last updated
Portrait of Dan Namingha in 2012 Dan Namingha, May 2012 (cropped).jpg
Portrait of Dan Namingha in 2012

Dan Namingha (born 1950, Keams Canyon, Arizona) is a Hopi painter and sculptor. He is Dextra Quotskuyva's son, and a great-great-grandson of Nampeyo. He is a member of the Hopi-Tewa member of the Hopi Tribe. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Contents

Early life and education

Namingha grew up with his mother on his grandparents’ ranch in Polacca on the Hopi Reservation. As a child he would draw with coal while using grocery boxes as a canvas. In elementary school, Namingha would arriver early to create in a makeshift studio a teacher had created after noticing a lot of the Hopi and Tewa children had an interest in art. In high school, Namingha attended a University of Kansas summer art program. He also studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. [1]

Style

Dan Namingha has been showing professionally as an artist for 40 years. His heritage inspires his work, which explores connections between physical and the spirit world and includes of Hopi symbolism.

Drawing and painting was a natural part of Hopi childhood. It gave him a way to express his strong feelings about the culture and environment leading to a path of creative freedom. Dan feels that change and evolution are a continuum; socially, politically, spiritually and that the future of our planet and membership of the human race must be monitored to insure survival in the spirit of cultural and technology diversity. He says that only then can we merge the positive and negative polarization and balance so necessary to communal spirit of the universe.

Dan Namingha's artworks are in the collections of the Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University, the Smithsonian Institution, the Sundance Institute, the Wheelwright Museum, the New Mexico Museum of Art, [2] the Heard Museum, and numerous foreign museums, including the British Royal Collection in London. [3]

Recognition

In 2009, the Institute of American Indian Arts awarded him an honorary doctorate and in 2016, the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture named Namingha its 2016 "Living Treasure." [1]

Namingha's work was part of Stretching the Canvas: Eight Decades of Native Painting (2019–21), a survey at the National Museum of the American Indian George Gustav Heye Center in New York. [4]

Family

His son Arlo Namingha is also a well-known sculptor, and his younger son Michael Namingha works in digital art. All three artists exhibit at the Namingha's Santa Fe gallery, Niman Fine Art. [3]

Education

Publications

Related Research Articles

Dulah Marie Evans American artist (1875 – 1951)

Dulah Marie Evans, later Dulah Marie Evans Krehbiel was an American painter, photographer, printmaker, illustrator, and etcher.

Nampeyo Hopi-Tewa potter (1859–1942)

Nampeyo (1859–1942) was a Hopi-Tewa potter who lived on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona. Her Tewa name was also spelled Num-pa-yu, meaning "snake that does not bite". Her name is also cited as "Nung-beh-yong," Tewa for Sand Snake.

Institute of American Indian Arts Public tribal college in Santa Fe, New Mexico

The Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) is a public tribal land-grant college in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The college focuses on Native American art. It operates the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA), which is housed in the historic Santa Fe Federal Building, a landmark Pueblo Revival building listed on the National Register of Historic Places as Federal Building. The museum houses the National Collection of Contemporary Indian Art, with more than 7,000 items.

Allan Capron Houser or Haozous was a Chiricahua Apache sculptor, painter and book illustrator born in Oklahoma. He was one of the most renowned Native American painters and Modernist sculptors of the 20th century.

Olive Rush

Olive Rush was a painter, illustrator, muralist, and an important pioneer in Native American art education. Her paintings are held in a number of private collections and museums, including: the Brooklyn Museum of New York City, the Haan Mansion Museum of Indiana Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Fritz Scholder American painter (1937–2005)

Fritz William Scholder V was a Native American artist. Scholder was an enrolled member of the La Jolla Band of Luiseno Indians, a federally recognized tribe of Luiseños, a California Mission tribe. Scholder's most influential works were post-modern in sensibility and somewhat Pop Art in execution as he sought to deconstruct the mythos of the American Indian. A teacher at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe in the late 1960s, Scholder influenced a generation of Native American students.

Gregory Lomayesva is an internationally recognized painter, sculptor and mixed-media artist who lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He draws imagery and ideas from his Hopi and Hispanic heritage and American popular culture.

Charles Arnoldi, also known as Chuck Arnoldi and as Charles Arthur Arnoldi is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker. He was born April 10, 1946, in Dayton, Ohio.

Fred Kabotie American painter (c. 1900–1986)

Fred Kabotie was a celebrated Hopi painter, silversmith, illustrator, potter, author, curator and educator. His native name in the Hopi language is Naqavoy'ma which translates to Day After Day.

Albert Henry Krehbiel American painter

Albert Henry Krehbiel, was the most decorated American painter ever at the French Academy, winning the Prix De Rome, four gold medals and five cash prizes. He was born in Denmark, Iowa and taught, lived and worked for many years in Chicago. His masterpiece is the programme of eleven decorative wall and two ceiling paintings / murals for the Supreme and Appellate Court Rooms in Springfield, Illinois (1907-1911). Although educated as a realist in Paris, which is reflected in his neoclassical mural works, he is most famously known as an American Impressionist. Later in his career, Krehbiel experimented in a more modernist manner.

Martha Hopkins Struever Native American art dealer

Martha Hopkins Struever (1931–2017) was an American Indian art dealer, author, and leading scholar on historic and contemporary Pueblo Indian pottery and Pueblo and Navajo Indian jewelry. In June 2015, a new gallery in the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, was named for her. The first permanent museum gallery devoted to Native American jewelry, the Martha Hopkins Struever Gallery, is part of the Center for the Study of Southwestern Jewelry.

Harrison Begay, also known as Haashké yah Níyá was a renowned Diné (Navajo) painter, printmaker, and illustrator. Begay specialized in watercolors, gouache, and silkscreen prints. At the time of his death in 2012, he was the last living, former student of Dorothy Dunn and Geronima C. Montoya at the Santa Fe Indian School. His work has won multiple awards and is exhibited in museums and private collections worldwide and he was among the most famous Diné artists of his generation.

Dextra Quotskuyva Native American potter and artist

Dextra Quotskuyva Nampeyo is a Native American potter and artist. She is in the fifth generation of a distinguished ancestral line of Hopi potters.

Neil David Sr.

Neil Randall David, Sr. Is a Hopi-Tewa American Indian artist and katsina carver. He learned the basics of carving from his grandfather Victor (Kawayo) Charlie.

Nathan Begaye (1969–2010) was a Native American ceramics artist of Navajo and Hopi descent.

Otellie Loloma was an American artist, specializing in Hopi traditional pottery and dance, and working with her husband Charles Loloma on jewelry design.

Lloyd Henri Kiva New was a pioneer of modern Native American fashion design and a cofounder and President emeritus of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Susan Folwell is a Native American artist from Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico, known for her work in the ceramic industry. Her work ties in Native designs and history and has been used by Folwell to demonstrate her viewpoints on society and politics. Folwell has been described by the Heard Museum as an "innovator in Pueblo pottery".

Jason Garcia (artist)

Jason Garcia is a contemporary Native American artist in the United States, who was born in Santa Clara, New Mexico. His work has been exhibited the Smithsonian in Washington D.C, the Heard Museum in Phoenix, the Palm Springs Art Museum, and many more. He won the 2018 Mentor Fellowship Award under the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation amongst many others.

Romando Vigil, also known as Tse Ye Mu was a Native American self-taught painter and a leader in the San Ildefonso school. He briefly worked for Walt Disney Studios as a painter and illustrator in the 1950s.

References

  1. 1 2 Roberts, Kathaleen (22 May 2016). "Living treasure: Indian arts festival honors Hopi-Tewa painter, sculptor, printmaker". Albuquerque Journal. Retrieved 21 October 2020.
  2. "Dan Namingha". New Mexico Museum of Art. Archived from the original on 9 January 2014. Retrieved 8 January 2014.
  3. 1 2 DAN AND ARLO NAMINGHA ─ A FASCINATION WITH DUALITIES Archived 2014-07-02 at the Wayback Machine , Museum of Northern Arizona, 2007
  4. "Stretching the Canvas: Eight Decades of Native Painting". National Museum of the American Indian. Retrieved 7 March 2021.