`Color Riot' is a vibrant display of Navajo textiles at the Museum of Arts in Florida
ST. PETERSBURG — The exhibition “Color Riot: How Color Changed Navajo Textiles” at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, is a welcome display of color and pattern — a vibrant escape from the gloom.
Organized by the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, where it debuted in 2019, the exhibition explores the color and design experimentation that came into Navajo textiles during the late 19th century.
These works were born out of a dark time for the Navajo people. Between 1863-1868, they were forced by the United States Army from their homeland on what's known as the Long Walk to the Bosque Redondo, an imprisonment site in New Mexico. During that period, Navajos were given commercial yarn and 1,000 Hispanic blankets as part of rations. The weavers were exposed to different patterns they then borrowed design elements from.
The Navajos subsequently returned to their diminished homelands and onto a reservation. Upon return, markets where indigenous Navajo weavings were traded were gone. Coupled with the influx of commercial Germantown and Saxony yarns and aniline dyes, textiles took a leap outside of neutral color palettes from homespun wool and natural dyes into vibrant color and expanded design schemes. Weavers felt free to experiment and change. This experimental time between 1868-1910 is known as the Transitional Period.
After that period, as trading came back stronger, traders began dictating what design elements were more marketable, based on Oriental rugs. Weavers were told to make textiles less colorful.
The exhibition was curated by three Navajo women on the Heard's staff: Ninabah Winton and Natalia Moore, who are fellows of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Velma Kee Craig, a former fellow who is now an assistant curator at the museum and oversees the fellowship program. The women participated in the research, selection and preparation of the exhibition. The exhibition labels include anecdotal information on the textiles written by each woman.
“Color Riot!” came to fruition when the Heard Museum was planning an exhibition from the Guggenheim, “Josef Albers in Mexico” and planned a small companion exhibit of the weavings that echoed Albers' graphic, colorful style. They delved into the Heard's collection and found a number of weavings from the Transitional Period. Nearby collectors contributed and the exhibition grew to stand on its own.
Visually, “Color Riot!” makes an impact. There are 89 textiles in all, some stacked high on a vast gallery wall. It's divided into nine sections, each one as vibrant as the next.
Stephanie Chill is the curatorial lead of the exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts. She worked closely with the Heard museum and led a tour at a preview event in December.
“The curators looked at dividing up these things by design and pattern style,” she said. “They did that by looking at the elements and the motifs that we see in the textiles that break away from what is more commonly known as Navajo textiles. A lot of what people are familiar with are really trader imposed ideas.”
These textiles from the Transitional Period were unknown to many, even Craig, the curator from the Heard, who is a weaver herself. “If you look at books about Navajo weaving, they're mostly covering the classic periods and catalogues put out by traders after 1910,” she said in a phone interview. “It has been ignored because the others were so easy to classify.”
Craig said it was a special experience for herself, Winton and Moore to discover the textiles in the museum's collection and in collector's homes.
“There's always a reverence when we're approaching a new textile,” she said. “We all have an experience with someone weaving in our home, the sound of weaving, the smell of yarn. For all of us it brings us back to our childhood.”
Individual artists' names are not known because the textiles were traded or sold without identification. Not much is known about the stories behind the textiles either, but the curators' research provides compelling information about the work.
The exhibition opens with Chief Blankets, the styles of which changed between 1870 and 1885 and were known as Transitional Chief Blankets or Chief Blanket Variants. Diamond patterns emerged and took on new movement. Contrary to the name, the garments weren't strictly reserved for leaders.
Banded blankets are one of the oldest design types in Navajo weaving. But in the Transitional Period artists were introducing diamond patterns and curving lines, updating the banded style.
The zig zag patterns of colorful wedge weave textiles make the eyes dance.
“These textiles are really where the term `eye dazzler' is thought to come from and early on in scholarship it was a perjorative term,” Chill said. “The colors and constant zigzags were called `garish' and `gaudy' and it
wasn't until the 1970s when scholars started to look at these as expressions and ingenuity in artistic design and vision.”
She said that the contrast in colors and motion created in not only wedge weave but in much of the Navajo weavings is meant to express movement of life.
The exhibition ends with a section on contemporary works from Navajo weavers called Still Rioting!
“One of the big takeaways is that experimentation is still here,” Craig said. “The tradition is still thriving.”