Linda Lomahaftewa learned from early icons, became renowned herself, then passed it on.
High school has sometimes been known to change lives, and in the case of Hopi-Choctaw artist Linda Lomahaftewa, it set her on a path that today finds her within six degrees of separation from much of the contemporary Indigenous art world.
Born in 1947, Lomahaftewa began creating art as a child in Phoenix and Los Angeles. When she was in ninth grade her mother read a newspaper article about a new Indian art school in Santa Fe. “She called me on the phone and asked if I would like to go,” Lomahaftewa remembers. “I said yes. And that was IAIA.”
Sustenance #1, Late ’60s – Early ’70s; Oil on canvas, 71” x 41ó”; Private Collection; © Linda Lomahaftewa (PHOTOGRAPHY: Jason S. Ordaz).
Lomahaftewa entered the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) as part of its first class in 1962, attending alongside such soon-to-become art stars as T.C. Cannon (Kiowa, Caddo), Kevin Red Star (Crow), and Earl Biss (Crow). Her teachers included the illustrious and influential Allan Houser (Chiricahua Apache), Charles Loloma (Hopi), and Lloyd Kiva New (Cherokee). From there, she obtained a scholarship to the San Francisco Art Institute, earning both her BFA and MFA in painting. She remained in the Bay Area, teaching at Sonoma State University then at the University of California, Berkeley, before heading back to IAIA for 40 years, where her students have included Tony Abeyta (Navajo). Among her cousins are the Choctaw bead workers Marcus and Roger Amerman. She has since been awarded emeritus faculty distinction at IAIA and honorary doctorate degrees from IAIA and the San Francisco Art Institute.
A mixed-media artist herself with a focus on acrylic painting and printmaking, Lomahaftewa is known for her abstract expressionist and modernist works referencing symbolism such as parrots, crosses, spirals, corn, and plants — much of it stemming from her Hopi culture.
Now 76 and no longer teaching full time, she maintains a studio in the midtown district of Santa Fe. “I’m trying to work with both my tribes in my work,” she says. “Most currently, I’ve been doing monotypes and collages.” What inspires her today is what has inspired her from the outset. “It’s about who I am as a Hopi-Choctaw woman and who my clans are and the stories I’ve grown up with — and how I can use that in my artwork.”
Dancing Spirits, 1996; Acrylic on canvas, 36” x 36”; Collection of the artist; © Linda Lomahaftewa (PHOTOGRAPHY: Eric Wimmer).
That viewpoint traces back to her formative years at IAIA, where she took a team-taught class from Houser. “It was about who we are as Native people and how to use our culture in our work,” she recalls. As for her colleagues there, “I remember Kevin Red Star and Earl Biss in the studio. They had their own areas where they painted large canvases. Everyone was trying everything. I would watch them tear up pieces of canvases and glue them onto a canvas for collage and texture or use a lot of paint and glue things onto a canvas and paint over it. To me, that was really inspiring.” The group dynamic? “I think Earl Biss was probably the talker. Kevin was quiet. T.C. had a studio off-campus somewhere.”
In San Francisco, she was once again in the right place at the right time. It was the 1960s heyday of the love generation, with free concerts, peace marches, and powwows at the Native American-occupied Alcatraz. But come the mid-1970s, she was ready to return to Santa Fe and IAIA: “By that time, I had two kids. I wanted to bring them back to the Southwest to know their culture.”
Her abstract work from the ’60s and ’70s is earning renewed attention in the show Space Makers: Indigenous Expression and a New American Art at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which examines the Indian Space Painters, a mid-century art movement, similar to abstract expressionism, that drew inspiration from Indigenous visual forms. “Lomahaftewa has been a leader in the modern Native art movement across an incredible nearly 60-year career, and we are privileged to have her and her daughter, Tatiana Lomahaftewa-Singer, curator of collections at the IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, as advisors to the exhibition,” says Christopher Green, a visiting assistant professor of art history at Swarthmore College and curator of the exhibition. “Lomahaftewa has long been engaged in cutting-edge aesthetic exploration since her time as a student at the IAIA, where she creatively collaborated with peers from diverse tribal backgrounds and made use of modernist tactics like abstraction to find new expressions of her own visual heritage. Two of her early paintings in the exhibition, Untitled (1970s) and Sustenance (late 1960s), are prime examples of Lomahaftewa’s engagement with the broader history of modern art and avant-garde movements like abstract expressionism and the Indian Space Painters, as explored in this exhibition, in concert with cultural forms from her Hopi community.”
Four Rivers #8, 2008; Monotype on paper, 26 ” x 33 ”; Collection of the artist; © Linda Lomahaftewa (PHOTOGRAPHY: Eric Wimmer).
Sustenance #1 is a magnified abstraction of growth, earth, sky, and plants. “I painted in oils then, so it was a lot of exploring techniques and blending, which creates the illusion of space,” Lomahaftewa says. Dancing Spirits was inspired by a visit to New Zealand’s indigenous Maori people. Four Rivers is based on a story about the Hopi having to cross four rivers to come to where they are today, with the spirals representing migration paths.
In an uncertain world, art remains a North Star, and her Indigenous identity a touchstone. Accordingly, Lomahaftewa has given and followed one piece of advice throughout her career: “Never give up, and know who you are and where you come from. That can always guide you.”
Linda Lomahaftewa’s art is on view through September 30 in Space Makers: Indigenous Expression and a New American Art at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Indian Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. She is represented by Gallery Hozho at Hotel Chaco (galleryhozho.com) and Richard Levy Gallery (levygallery.com) in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
From our August/September 2024 issue.
