A Celebration of Diné Textiles with Melissa Cody
January 26 @ 5:00 pm
The Fine Arts Center recently received a generous gift of 19th and early 20th century textiles by Diné weavers. Help us welcome these remarkable works into our care. View a selection of textiles in the Agents of Care gallery and enjoy a reading by CC Professor of English Natanya Ann Pulley and a talk by visiting artist Melissa Cody, a fourth-generation Navajo weaver, who will reflect on these textiles as well as her current works.
This event is free and open to the public.
About Melissa Cody
Born 1983 in Arizona, Melissa S. Cody is a member of the Navajo Nation. In 2005, she received a Bachelor’s degree in Museum Studies and AFA in Studio Art from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
A fourth-generation Navajo weaver, Cody’s intricate tapestries are often associated with the weaving style that distinguish a complex interaction of the traditional and historical Germantown Revival. This stylistic movement is named after the government wool from Germantown, Pennsylvania that was rationed to the Navajo during the time of the Long Walk. Traditional vegetal dyes were supplemented with the commercially dyed wool, prompting new economic pressures for the Navajo to enterprise and adapt on. This created new bold textiles, with a commercial viability that meant the practice could continue and thrive despite the alterations.
Cody’s work is a balance of tradition, history and the contemporary. Working on a traditional Navajo loom, Cody fuses classical patterns into intricate geometric overlays and tantalizing colorways. She transforms motifs of bright Germantown wools into dreamscapes where deeper connections and hourglass spiders can roam. The viewer’s eyes travel through spinning whirling logs and encapsulated squares of 2 and 3-ply wool, creating various forms of (mis)direction and subversion. Cody is creating and redefining the tactile surface, establishing the limitless nature of her storytelling through warp and weft.
Melissa Cody’s work has been featured in many museums and galleries, such as: the Stark Museum of Art (2014, Orange, Texas); Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Institute of American Indian Arts (2017–2018, Santa Fe); Ingham Chapman Gallery, University of New Mexico (2018, Albuquerque); Navajo Nation Museum (2018); SITE (2018–2019, Santa Fe); MASS Gallery (2019, Austin); Heard Museum (2019, Phoenix); Exploratorium (2019, San Francisco); Museum of Northern Arizona (2019, Flagstaff); National Gallery of Canada (2019–2020, Ottawa), Art Basel Miami (2019,2021, Miami) Museum of Art of São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (2023, Brazil), and PS1 MOMA (2024, NYC).Her works are featured in a number of museum collections, including those of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The Autry Museum of the American West, and the Stark Museum of Art, Orange, Texas.
About Natanya Ann Pulley
Natanya Ann Pulley is a Diné writer (Kinyaa’áani and Táchii’nii clans). She’s published in McSweeney’s, Phantom Drift, Split Lip, and The Massachusetts Review (et al). Her essays have been anthologized most recently in Shapes of Native Nonfiction, The Diné Reader, and Unbound: Composing Home. She is a 2022 recipient of a NEA fellowship in Creative Writing. Her short story collection With Teeth (New Rivers Press) is the winner of the 2018 Many Voices Project competition.
Natanya is the founding editor of Hairstreak Butterfly Review and currently editing an anthology of Flash Fiction by Native American writers and a Dińe Writers on Craft issue of HBR. Her recent writing projects include a creative nonfiction collection (The First Narcissism), a novel reimagining Peter Pan, and Gapp’s Basement (an experimental novel-in-stories). Natanya is an associate professor of English at Colorado College. She teaches texts by Native American writers, fiction writing, and experimental forms.
This generous gift was provided by the Paula Ryan and Family Collection.
Top image: Attributed to Hastin Deet-si Be Ahd (Diné), Rug, c. 1911, Wool, aniline dyes, Gift of the Paula Ryan and Family Collection (detail)