LINDA LOMAHAFTEWA

– LINDA LOMAHAFTEWA –

Hopi-Choctaw, 1947—

Linda Lomahaftewa is a prominent Native American painter, printmaker, and mixed media artist whose work has been central to the development of modern Indigenous abstraction in the United States. A member of the Hopi tribe and from Choctaw descent, she came of age during a transformative period in Native art education, enrolling as part of the first generation of students at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in the early 1960s. She later continued her studies at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she earned both her BFA and MFA by the early 1970s. Immersed in the experimental atmosphere of the Bay Area during a period dominated by abstraction and countercultural movements, Lomahaftewa developed a visual language that merged modernist techniques with Indigenous cosmologies, grounding her work in landscape, memory, and cultural symbolism.

Over a career spanning more than six decades, Lomahaftewa has become widely recognized for her richly layered abstractions that draw upon Hopi iconography, including references to land, directionality, and spiritual knowledge. Her compositions often incorporate symbolic color systems and organic forms that evoke desert environments and ancestral narratives. While her early paintings from the 1960s and 1970s reflect the influence of Abstract Expressionism, her later work expands into monotype printmaking and collage, maintaining a deep engagement with place and identity. Alongside her studio practice, Lomahaftewa has had a profound impact as an educator, teaching at institutions such as the San Francisco Art Institute, University of California, Berkeley and Sonoma State University before returning to IAIA in 1976, where she taught for more than forty years and helped shape generations of Indigenous artists. 

Lomahaftewa’s work has been exhibited extensively across the United States and internationally, with both solo and group presentations at institutions including the Heard Museum, the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, the Whitney Museum and the National Gallery of Art. In recent years, her career has been reassessed through major exhibitions such as The Moving Land: 60+ Years of Art by Linda Lomahaftewa (2021) at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts and her inclusion in Action/Abstraction Redefined: Modern Native Art, 1940s–1970s (2023) at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Her work also continues to be featured in contemporary surveys, including exhibitions at the Fresno Art Museum and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Her artworks are held in numerous public collections, notably the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, the National Gallery of Art, the Heard Museum, the Wheelwright Museum, the Millicent Rogers Museum and the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Indian Arts and Crafts Board, among others.