IT’S A MYSTERY
A 140- to 150-year-old Navajo transitional blanket may have been intentionally woven to form sacred symbols when folded in certain ways. Or perhaps it’s simply a nice weaving.
One thing about art which is always predictable, and that is a person’s reaction to art is never predictable. This is because art, no matter the form, can touch someone’s soul while another person just doesn’t get it. Case in point: a beautiful yet rather unusual Navajo weaving which truly defies predictability on so many levels. To some, it’s intriguing, colorful and interesting. To others, including the former owners and current owner, this piece holds a hidden message of healing and culture, which they believe is coming through loud and clear.
First, the basic facts, which everyone agrees with: This Navajo blanket is considered late classic/early transitional, likely from the early 1870s, with handspun warp threads and hand-carded, hand-spun Churro wool, 79 by 51 inches. The colors, indigo blue and the red Saxony plied yarn remain brilliant as the very asymmetrical pattern meanders across a white field. It’s also in excellent condition.
Where this blanket was until the 1980s is really not known at this time. That was when it came to the attention of the late Andrew Nagen, who worked in partnership with Ray Dewey, a consultant and collector, and co-founder of Dewey Galleries Ltd & the Santa Fe Gallery Association in Santa Fe. They held it off the market for a few months, keeping it in their private collection, but finally made it available, and it was quickly snatched up.
“This piece was very unusual, and I was sort of tempted to just keep it, because I had never seen anything quite like it,” Dewey remembers. “The use of the amount of indigo in it is interesting, because that’s a very precious, rare dye at that time.”
The design as well was something he never forgot. “It appears to have a border, but it is floating in the white field. It’s not attached to the sides or the ends, like many regional rugs were coming years later.”
“I have not seen anything like it before,” says the next owner, Steve Getzwiller of Nizhoni Ranch Gallery. “That’s what attracted it to me in the first place…it was a really unusual design.”
So, the non-traditional blanket with unusual design remained with Steve and Gail Getzwiller in their Sonoita, Arizona, gallery until that day a little over a year ago when a collector from Minnesota stopped in. She had recently started collecting Navajo weavings and has a fondness for transitional-era pieces. (For this story, she asked for her name to be withheld).
“The sort of transitional, which could be pretty wild in colors, I love,” she says. “I think it’s sort of like French Impressionism to me. It’s like they’re (the weavers) just really breaking out and doing what they wanted, rather than doing what people told them.”
“I’m a very thorough buyer,” the collector says. “And this piece was so abstract it was just not attractive to me, when I went in and bought my first two pieces. But…i don’t know what it was, but I woke up and thought, ‘I’ve got to find out if it’s still available and buy it.’”
It was, and she bought it then and there, over the phone. “This piece is right there in that transition, and it was very different from all the other transitionals I was looking at…so maybe I didn’t have the taste for it in the beginning, but there was something that just kept saying ‘I’m unique! I’m unique!’”
Now that she owned this unique blanket, what was she going to do with it? While it was being shipped to her, the new owner put a sheet of tracing paper over a photo of it on her phone, and traced the design. Near the middle, the white warp threads suddenly switch to black for about three inches, before changing again back to white. She started folding the paper…and…
“I started seeing it was making these Spider Woman
crosses,” she says. “I wasn’t sure, because of tracing it off my phone. So when I got it, I laid it out and…” Sure enough, there it was, just like it had with her traced version of the blanket on paper. Folded along one side of the black warp section, it made three crosses. And along the other side of the black threads, a fourth cross at the top, with two small squares below.
“It had all the elements to say, ‘I’m a serious piece. Everything was done for a reason. So figure it out.’” Which is exactly what she is trying to do. And like with so many different art pieces, or even like the Internet controversy a few years ago over whether a photo was of a gold and white dress, or one that was blue and black, opinions can go one way or the other.
Again, on the basic known facts—such as the age, the era, what it’s made of—everyone agrees. It’s the perception beyond that, however, of what this anonymous weaver did, or what the weaver’s intent was, where there are different opinions.
Dr. Ann Marshall at the Heard Museum in Phoenix has seen the blanket, but even after consulting with several weavers who know about older pieces could not quite agree with the collector on the intention. “I think the incredibly wide range of designs that occurred during [the] Transitional Period is more likely for this unusual design,” wrote Dr. Marshall. “The piece does
have a really unique conceptualization of its pattern— so asymmetrical.”
This is another fact that everyone agrees on… when the blanket is laid out flat, the rambling design is practically the definition of the word “asymmetrical” itself.
Master weaver D.Y. Begay says weavings are very precise, and need to make sense, mathematically. “A lot of the designs, like step patterns and zigzag, [are] very mathematical for sure…some of the earlier weavers were very astute about weaving a complete pattern with all the right dimensions.”
It doesn’t really add up, either, for Jeff Voracek, owner of Red Mesa Gallery in Penryn, California. “My whole career, I’ve been folding these things and looking at the geometrics of it, and what it would represent if you were using it, and that’s where I don’t think things are by chance. There’s a lot of numerology in blankets. I think there’s a ton of hidden meanings,” he says, talking about other historic blankets he’s handled over his career. “But in this one? I just don’t see it at all. I just see a neat fold, on an open end, in sequences the Navajos would not have folded.”
And, as Dr. Marshall also pointed out, the crosses in the blanket do not match what some who have studied Native American weavings consider to be true Spider Woman crosses, which are those with small square appendages on the outer points. Others, including some experienced weavers, say that can be open to interpretation.
This blanket was also woven during a traumatic time for the Navajo people. In 1864 they were driven off their native land then forced to travel, under guard and on foot, more than 100 miles to the east to Fort Sumner, Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico. After enduring four years of anguish and captivity, they were finally allowed to return, again on foot, to their homeland. The trek both ways is remembered as “The Long Walk.”
That is what Dewey uses as a reference point in regards to the blanket. “This floating design…it’s not attached to anything, and that’s the whole thing. It’s almost like they are re-entering their country. To me, it’s a piece of revival…they’re coming back.”
He also pointed out how, when folded along the other side of the black warp which forms a cross on the top, and the two small squares below it, there’s now what appears to be four peaks on the bottom, like the four sacred mountains marking the four corners of the Navajos’ homeland. “There’s something about this piece that’s very, very unusual…and when you fold it… it’s in a direct line to the Spider Woman Cross.”
“I think what you have here is some type of personal expression, of a weaver that’s created, to me, a modernist masterpiece,” Dewey continues, “but I think it has a lot of cultural context.”
Getzwiller agrees, adding he believes it to be all part of the weaver’s design. “Because of the fact it’s so symmetrical when folded. I wouldn’t venture a guess as to why she did it, but I’m sure it was intentional.”
And the new owner totally agrees with that. “As it was woven within a decade of the “Long Walk” it made me think about the horrific period of Bosque
5
Redondo, where the Navajo were forbidden from practicing ceremonies, singing their songs or praying in their language.”
She compares the meandering inner design to the trail which became “The Long Walk.”
“I felt the abstract design was intentional and meant to hide a story,” she says.
“Somebody really, really put a lot into it,” says Kathy Marianito. Now in her late 80s, she is a direct descendant of Manuelito, a Navajo leader who fought hard against capture in 1864 and fought just as hard to secure the eventual treaty and release of his people in 1868. She showed photos of the piece to her husband and uncle, both medicine men, and the three of them concluded this piece was a healing blanket.
“It can be when you’re well, nothing is wrong and you get sick, and they heal you back,” says Marianito. “You fold it, wrap it around you and you get well.” She continues, “There’s some prayers in that. Everything not right, you fall in…look for medicine man, with songs and prayers. Fold it, fold it again, and it will help you stand on your own two feet.” She explained how all three of them never saw anything like this weaving before, and Marianito, who has won countless awards and ribbons for her own textile art, is in awe of the person who made this blanket. “She was someone really, really intelligent,” she says. “Something happened to her, that later on made her well, and inspired her to make this.”
Dewey agrees wholeheartedly “What was this human thinking? What had she experienced? What was she looking for?” he wondered. “I think overall it’s in a transitional period with her people, and this very well could reflect that, but I think there’s also a lot of tradition there.”
Nagen, who first found this blanket in the 1980s once wrote, “Art patrons are generally not privy to the artist or the artist’s inside/out process. This process is private, personal, and often sacred.” So, it’s left up to the interpretation of the person looking at it, admiring it, and possibly understanding it.
“It’s got a life of its own,” says its current owner. “It’s as if they were telling stories with their healing blankets, which I just think…it just feels like this is a secret they kept.” (If anyone knows of anything more about this piece, they can send comments to the owner at navajomystery@gmail.com.)