The Art Of Dan Namingha

The Art of Dan Namingha

Drawing upon the landscape and culture of his native American Southwest, Dan Namingha blends abstraction and reality. Boldly colored and powerfully constructed, his works evoke the stark red sandstone desert of New Mexico and Arizona, the buttes and mesas of the Hopi land, and the emblems and symbols of Hopi ceremonies, to which he is strongly connected.His great-great-grandmother was the legendary Hopi potter Nampeyo, and numerous family members create traditional and innovative art of high distinction - pottery, kachina dolls, paintings, and graphic works. Raised in the combined tradition of two Pueblo peoples, the Hopi and the Tewa, Namingha marries the colorful, geometric imagery of his indigenous roots with the tradition of twentieth-century abstract modernism. His artistic schooling includes formal training at Santa Fe's Institute of American Indian Arts and brief, but important, studies at the University of Kansas and the American Academy of Art in Chicago.