James Compton Gallery
“I strive to represent the earliest material I can find,” says James Compton, owner of James Compton Gallery. “The early material is more related to the tribe’s original work, hopefully before too much influence from the Euro-American world.” With this 47-by-34-inch Navajo single dress panel, pictured here, we see the simplest of designs, of only banding, from circa 1850 or earlier. “The ravelled bayeta is a trade item that came available with the advent of outsiders coming into the Southwest,” Compton explains.

 

Antique Native American Baskets
This prize-winning, vegetal-dyed Burntwater Navajo rug, offered by Antique Native American Baskets, was woven by master weaver Rose Yazzie. Note the fantastic vegetal dye colors and the artist’s use of a salt and pepper blended color. In addition, this 72-by-48-inch rug has a winning ribbon from the 2002 Gallup Inter-tribal Indian Ceremonial show.

 

Garland’s
Sarah Paul Begay’s masterpiece, Millennium, pictured here, took more than two years to create, and measures at 123 by 59 inches. Named for its creation around the year 2000, the piece portrays a Navajo healing ceremony. Three-dimensional Yei figures with lifelike movement are created using more than 100 unique dyes. The artist’s design uses curves to create incredibly realistic images in wool. “Begay weaves like other artists can paint,” says representatives at Garland’s in Sedona, Arizona. Begay won the best of show award at the 85th annual Santa Fe Indian Market in 2006.

 

Sorrel Sky Gallery
Navajo weaver Geanita John, from Many Farms, Arizona, has been creating pictorials for more than 40 years. Her weavings depict Navajo life as it was, prior to satellite dishes, trailers and pickups. The “Iron Horse,” or steam engine trains, were a popular theme in Navajo pictorials in the early 1900s. Her work was recently featured in a New York City exhibition of weavings from the American Museum of Natural History. Find more weavings at Sorrel Sky Gallery, online or in person.

 

Tanner’s Indian Arts
This J.B. Moore Storm Pattern blanket carries an incredibly bold and stylistic motif, created around 1900s in Crystal, New Mexico. The oversized Navajo weaving measuring at 69 by 126 inches is all homespun wool with natural greys, natural whites, overdyed black and aniline dye red, and is an adaptation of J.B. Moore Plate XXVIII. JB Moore was an important trader and marketed Navajo weavings around the turn of the 20th century, popularizing these brilliant designs and creating an industry for hundreds of weavers in the area.

 

Zefren-M
Navajo artist Zefren-M (Ephraim Anderson) works with techniques conjecturally reconstructed from images, oral story, archaeology and language, as seen in this double-weave piece titled Bad Moon Rising – The End is a New Beginning. “This gives me the penchant to recreate historical revivals from any era while allowing the freedom to create avant-garde, one-of-a-kind pieces that play with classifications, gender, sexuality and sensibilities,” says the artist. “Weaving and its application is the beginning of a stoic philosophy that has lived through the entire rise and fall of countless human systems since the beginning of time and somehow, it forever endures.”