Native American art has, for a long time, been confined to a certain sector of the art world — craft, niche, maybe touristy. The same could be said for fiber arts. But, Melissa Cody is taking both of those things and putting them on the walls at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Cody is a fourth generation Navajo weaver. And her latest show, “Webbed Skies,” is on display at MoMA through September. Her work is both traditional and modern — exploring everything from uranium mining on the Navajo reservation to the pixelated video games she grew up playing.
The Show spoke with her more about it.
LAUREN GILGER: Let’s start with a little bit about this moment that you’re in. This is a big deal to have a show at MoMA and kind of a big deal, not just for you, but it sounds like for women in fiber art in general, maybe for Indigenous art in general, right?
MELISSA CODY: Yeah, definitely. You know, I’ve been weaving since I was 5 years old, so it’s exciting to see more one, female artists, but also Indigenous artists who are making waves and kind of breaking out from the little Indian art bubble and really having a lot of exposure on a national scale and also being able to just have such a wide range of audience.
GILGER: So let’s talk a little bit about the history of this, about your own history in this. I think lots of folks know about Navajo weaving and kind of have an idea of what it looks like, but you’re a fourth generation weaver, is that right? You grew up, you said, since the age of 5 doing this?
CODY: Yeah, I learned from my mother, but I have a large extended family, so a lot of my aunts and cousins and my other grandmas, they were all very much visible as artists in their own way growing up. So I really had a, you know, a large community behind me who was just kind of rooting for me to begin with. So being, again, on like a wide platform now, that energy is still carrying me on.
GILGER: That’s really cool. Tell us a little bit about the kind of traditional Navajo designs you started creating when you were learning, and the way that your work has evolved over the years, which I know has been through many different versions. But there seems to be some kind of experimenting that you do now where you combine contemporary themes with traditional Navajo design.
CODY: Yeah. When I started weaving, I learned kind of like the foundational regional patterns, the traditional designs with serrated diamonds and really bold imagery with heavy geometric styles, and that was very much so influenced by my mother, who does these incredible textiles that are heavily detailed and really focusing on being excellent in terms of the technical quality.
So the foundation was laid very early on to really strive to push yourself while you’re at the loom. Having that background really allowed me to take the reins when I was ready to start experimenting and bringing in my own personal flair to it. And that was probably around the late ’90s and then early 2000s when I went to college in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
And so, just being exposed to other mediums just kind of really opened my eyes in terms of looking at fiber art and textiles from a different lens and really being able to open myself up to self-critique and being able to find a voice behind each textile that I create.
GILGER: So I know in the past you’ve had work focused on water issues, on uranium mining and the health impacts of that in your community. You’re now kind of working in — and the show at MoMA is a lot about — the influence of like, ’80s video games. Is that right?
CODY: Yeah, yeah. Again having all of these different perspectives, I really wanted to start creating like kind of capsule bodies of work where I’m really going in depth and exploring the different themes. And at that time, when I was looking at the area that I’m from on the reservation, that was a big issue, was the uranium mining that had happened and the lack of clean up that never took place and how it was affecting not only the wider community but also my family.
So a lot of these issues really hit home. So I wanted to explore and use my art to have a voice behind these issues. And kind of still having the influence of technology in the video games. The more recent body of work is kind of coming full circle because working with the Jacquard loom and it being its own type of technology, I’m really trying to explore — a heavy theme is all of these kind of foundational inspirations.
And looking at the video games and the 8-bit pixel, I really want it to highlight the pixel quality and really explore the technology that I’ve grown up with. I started with Atari, the first Nintendo and Super Nintendo, being introduced to the first cellphones and also growing up without the internet and now being in a heavily technology driven world. These are all things that I still want to explore.
GILGER: So talk a little bit about Jacquard, because this is when you say a whole different type of technology, it is in a way that I’m not even sure I understand. I think we can kind of picture what a large-scale loom looks like and how that work goes, but this is a different thing that you’re doing a little bit, right?
CODY: Yeah. I’m still using a lot of the imagery that I do in my hand-woven pieces, but being able to revisit some of the, patterning that I had done maybe 10-15 years ago and feeding it into computer software and being able to manipulate the geometrics into really complex configurations that I wouldn’t be able to hand-weave on a traditional Navajo loom — again, it’s like opening my creativity up into a whole other scope of “What can I do?” And it's exciting.
GILGER: It’s super cool. So do you think that the public, like the broader, maybe the art world’s perspective on this kind of textile art and on Navajo weaving in particular is also changing? Are you at the forefront of that?
CODY: I believe so. A lot of it is bringing about conversation: craft versus fine art, Indian art versus modern art. How do we classify ourselves in terms of being Indigenous artists and taking the reins of telling our own stories and having our own voices — whether it’s how we put our artwork out into the market or how is it being seen within a gallery or museum context?
So really being open to conversation has been, I think, a big, big influence in terms of elevating the work and bringing it to a wider audience where there is more conversation around Navajo textiles and where they are going into the future.
Because when especially Native art is talked about, it can be kind of restricted into, it’s kind of frozen in time. You have this idea of what traditional Navajo weaving is. And so for me to be weaving these super elaborate textiles and this bright electric color palette and really bringing it into a current age, I think it brings about this idea that we’re ever-evolving people, and the art also evolves with us.
