Melanie Yazzie

Melanie Yazzie (born 1966 on the Diné Nation in Arizona) is a Diné (Diné) printmaker, sculptor, and professor of art at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she has taught since 1993. Her work - spanning monotype, etching, linocut, and cast aluminum sculpture - is rooted in specific cultural knowledge and lived experience, and carries an emotional warmth and intimacy that gives it a distinctive quality within the often more cerebral world of contemporary printmaking. Yazzie's prints are densely layered and richly colored, filled with Diné women, horses, dogs, birds, and the texture of everyday domestic and ceremonial life. The imagery is personal and particular - rooted in the specific visual world of the Diné Nation and in the details of her own family's experience - but it communicates with a directness and warmth that reaches well beyond any cultural boundary. Her work is not about being Diné in the abstract; it is about being this woman, in this landscape, with these relationships and these animals and these ceremonies. The specificity is what makes it universal. Her cast aluminum sculptures extend this vocabulary into three dimensions, producing figures and forms that carry the same intimacy and cultural groundedness as her prints. The work in multiple formats reflects a restless creative intelligence unwilling to be confined to a single medium or a single mode of making. Yazzie has exhibited internationally, with work in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian, the Denver Art Museum, and major public and private collections across the country. She has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and other major arts organizations, and her teaching at the University of Colorado has shaped a generation of students in the Mountain West. She is recognized as one of the most important Diné artists of her generation.