DAN NAMINGHA

– DAN NAMINGHA –

Hopi, 1950—

Dan Namingha is a Hopi–Tewa painter and sculptor born in Keams Canyon, Arizona, and raised on the Hopi reservation on First Mesa. He comes from a remarkable lineage of artists: he is a great-great-grandson of the celebrated Hopi potter Nampeyo, a family context that immersed him in Indigenous visual traditions from childhood. 

Formally trained at institutions including the Institute of American Indian Arts, the University of Kansas, and the School/American Academy of Art in Chicago, Namingha’s work synthesizes Hopi/Tewa cosmology, landscape motifs, and modernist abstraction. His paintings and sculptures often explore dualities — spirit/land, sky/earth, interior/exterior — using bold fields of color, layered surfaces, and emblematic shapes that echo kachina iconography and weather symbolism while remaining resolutely contemporary. 

Namingha has shown widely since the early 1970s and is represented in the permanent collections of many major museums and institutions. His work appears in collections that include the Fogg/Harvard Art Museums, the Smithsonian, the Denver Art Museum, the Heard Museum, the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Museum of Northern Arizona, and international and diplomatic collections, and he has been included in important surveys of Native painting. Major solo and group exhibitions include “Fragments of Symbolism and Landscapes” (Harvard Art Museums), a 2001–02 retrospective at the Reading Public Museum, a 2013 presentation associated with the Denver Art Museum, and his participation in the national survey Stretching the Canvas: Eight Decades of Native Painting (2019–2021).