Dan Namingha

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.

Portrait of Dan Namingha in 2012

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
  • The Art of Dan Namingha by Thomas Hoving, Abrams Publishing, New York

References
  1. 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. 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.
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