A Family Tradition
Two generations of the Namingha family artists will exhibit their work at Reading Public Museum.
READING, PA
In the Hopi creation story, the people first emerged into the fourth world through a portal known as sipapu located in the Grand Canyon. Dan Namingha often portrays a spiral in his paintings, the center of which is sipapu, “the center of the world.” He often connects another spiral to it, symbolizing the people’s journey through the present into the future. “The past is our future,” he says. “The future is our past. We are never disconnected from our past.”
His great-great-grandmother was Nampeyo (18591942), the matriarch of the Corn Clan, grinding corn meal the people in the village needed for ceremonial purposes. Nampeyo is well-known for her innovative pottery. She
reached into her own past and adapted designs she found on sherds of Sikyátki pottery produced from about 1375 to 1625.
Dan recalls, “I would take part in ceremonies and listen to the words of a song and vignettes of images would come to me. There were 10 to 20 songs in the ceremony, each different. The words were very poetic to me. Lots of deep thought went into creating the songs from centuries ago and the songs being created now. They tell how the deities are part of us and talk about clouds, lightning, thunder and rain. All plant, animal and human life react to that. We feed off what we grow and animals survive on the plant life. Everything is connected, including the stars, the sun, the moon. All that is in the songs.”
He expresses the long history of his family’s artistic tradition in paintings, beginning as a realistic landscape painter. “Today, I break them down into very minimalist forms,” he explains. “If I’m looking out at a landscape, nature has a lot to provide— the mountains, the color of the sky, the buttes, the arroyos, the shrubbery. It all exists in the landscape. I break that down to simple forms. A horizontal contour line indicates possibly a butte, a mountain or hill.”
In his other paintings, such as Montage #21, he paints what he calls “snippets” of symbolism from his culture. A katsina on the left, for instance, represents the divine and ancestral spirit beings integral to their ceremonies. On the far right, a circle of small round shapes represents the cycle of the sun.
He explains that when a non-hopi person attends a ceremony “they have no idea what they’re watching. They’re getting a glimpse of the culture, a glimpse of the symbols that relate to our universe.”
His elder son, Arlo Namingha, refers to the same glimpse in his work. In his bronze sculpture Butterfly, “the wings are half of katsina faces and the body is from old katsina dolls. There is a butterfly ceremony based on the ideas of fertility and metamorphosis. When the men come back from battle, the women do the ceremony in hopes that the men will not to have to go back into battle. The butterfly is also a symbol of peace. I started out carving katsinam. It became repetitive and I began fragmenting the images.”
In his Indiana limestone sculpture Dialogue #1, the two forms resting on a base—all cut from the same piece of limestone—seem to be in dialogue. Arlo says, “I was always tearing down larges pieces of stone and began to realize I could control the break
and developed my own tools to do that.” The smooth surfaces belie the fact that there are breaks in the stone that hold the three separate pieces together and allow them to be taken apart and rearranged by the collector, creating a dialogue between the themselves and the artist as well as with the sculpture. “Dialogue is necessary in our world today,” he says.
Michael Namingha works in several media. Among them is photography. As a freshman at Parsons School of Design in New York, one of his teachers showed a slide of a Georgia O’keeffe Black Place painting. He says, “I asked where it was painted and he told me it was a site near the Four Corners here in northern Mexico.” In 2017, Mike was invited by the Georgia O’keeffe Museum to create images in dialogue with O’keeffe’s paintings of the area. He has continued his response to the site in a series of works called Altered Landscape.
“I started looking at the site through Google Earth,” he explains. “It allows you to view a site with aerial perspective, zooming in and zooming out. I finally made the trip with the O’keeffe curators who have the GPS coordinates for the sites O’keeffe painted. Because I was accustomed to Google Earth, I took a drone to photograph and do some video footage. The site is very fragile and I encountered the facilities for oil and natural gas extraction there, which made the body of work become more environmental. In 2014 NASA discovered a large methane cloud over the region, which showed up on their images in red and yellow.
“I also wanted to take photography outside the realm of a square or a rectangle. I often went to the Metropolitan Opera and saw how set designers skew a set to trick the eye. Like Nampeyo, I am taking traditional methods, in my case photography, and creating something innovative.”
An exhibition, The Art of the Naminghas: Dan, Arlo, and Michael, is at the Reading Public Museum in Reading, Pennsylvania, through January 5, 2020. An artists’ reception will be held October 10.