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Dan Namingha was born May 1, 1950 on the Hopi reservation in Keams Canyon, Arizona. His introduction to painting and drawing came in the second grade and he continued to pursue this interest through his school years. He attended the University of Kansas and the American Academy of Arts in Chicago before enrolling in the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, graduating in 1969. After serving in the Marine Corps, Namingha returned to do post graduate work at the Institute. He received gallery representation early in his career and had his first solo exhibition in 1973. A year later, he cast his first bronze sculpture and pulled his first lithograph. From that time on, Dan Namingha has been prolific in his artistic creativity, working in several media in both two and three dimensions. While his early work bears the influence of his Hopi background, he later began to compose his sculptural forms into cubist shapes. Although Kachina figures and their faces dominate his symbolism, he minimized that imagery, concentrating instead on balancing solid forms. Content and subject matter have become subordinate to his dominant interest in structure which gives the sculpture its distinctive character. But content and subject matter are never abandoned; he uses his early more traditional work as a foundation for his modernist sensibilities. Namingha says about Symbolism I, “As I progress, I always look back, in this instance to twenty-eight years before. I take elements I favor from every period of my work and incorporate them into something different – totally or at random.”
Namingha’s works are included in museum collections throughout the world; among them the Dahlem Museum, Berlin, Germany; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona; and Naprstkovo Museum, Prague, Czechoslovakia. As well, he has been the recipient of many honors both in the United States and abroad, including the New Mexico Governor’s Award and the Harvard Foundation Award, both bestowed for Excellence in the Arts.
Dan Namingha’s works have been in countless exhibitions; foremost among them are:
Transition and Time at the Montclair Museum in New Jersey; 27th American Indian Artists Exhibition at the Philbrook Art Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma; Hopi Kachina Spirit of Life at California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; and the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; as well as The Artist as Native: Reinventing Regionalism at the Maryland Institute and College of Art, Baltimore; the Westmoreland Museum of Art, Greensburg Pennsylvania; the Owensboro Museum of Fine Art, Kentucky; the Albany Institute of History and Art, New York; the Babcock Gallery, New York City and the Middlebury College Museum of Art, Vermont.
Works by Dan Namingha currently on view in the sculpture park:
Symbolism I, 1997
bronze edition of 6
51" x 31" x 17 3/4" |
