Dan Namingha

Dan Namingha (born 1950) is a Hopi-Tewa painter and sculptor born in Polacca, at Tewa Village on First Mesa in the Hopi reservation. He attended the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe before earning a fine arts degree from the American Academy of Art in Chicago, and later studied at the University of Kansas. Namingha's paintings and bronzes translate the abstract geometric patterns of ancient Hopi pottery and the iconography of kachina figures into a personal, contemporary visual language — one that moves between pure abstraction and encoded cultural symbol. His large-scale canvases are built from layers of pigment and mark-making that recall both Hopi pottery design and Abstract Expressionism without being reducible to either. His work is held in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian, the Heard Museum, and major museums internationally. His sons Michael and Arlo Namingha are also accomplished artists with international exhibition careers.