warp and heft
R
amona Sakiestewa is about as clear and forthright and sweet as any person could hope to meet or be. Which explains in part why her woven abstract paintings, often devoid of anything figurative, narrative, or perceptible, have appealed to so many people: as nonrepresentational as they are, they’re beautiful but full of sinew and depth, elegant, straightforward but inherently, deceptively complex. And in a way—much like Sakiestewa herself— almost defiant and reluctant at being put into a box. (How, after all, can anyone delimit the range of someone who, after teaching herself how to weave based on the writings of anthropologists, went on to create her own versions of Navajo textiles, who abstracted katsina motifs, and who had the intuitive genius to make pieces based on designs by Frank Lloyd Wright and paintings by Kenneth Noland?) “When I was a teenager, I had a very bad experience with my mom’s second husband when we spent one year living in Daytona Beach, Florida,” recalls Sakiestewa, seated in the cozy A-V kitchenette of the large studio she shares with her husband, Andrew Merriell (who designed their spacious atelier, across from their house, and whose company plans and designs museums and exhibits). “It was a household of No. So when people say No it’s pretty much not relevant when I really want to do something.” So never mind her Native roots. Never mind her gender. Never mind the traditional assumptions about what weaving is or where it belongs or who should or shouldn’t be doing it. Sakiestewa, without ever making an issue out of her Hopi background, her femaleness, her medium, simply put forward herself and her art, clearly, candidly, confidently. Which is how she’s approaching her latest incarnation—having given up weaving for the worlds of printmaking and architectural design. But
renowned weaver Ramona Sakiestewa leaves behind her loom for other media by Devon Jackson
Opposite: one of the elevator cab interiors designed by Sakiestewa for the National Museum of the American Indian; above: Equinox 4, clay print—one of the new media directions Sakiestewa has gone in.
june/july 2011
santa fean
55