Tyrell Tapaha’s Transgressive Navajo Weaving

Tyrell Tapaha lives in the Four Corners region of the American Southwest, raising sheep for wool to dye, spin, and weave. But he likes to play with what is signified by notions of the typical Navajo weaver. His work stood out in “Young Elder,” a group show last year at James Fuentes gallery in New York, for its woven textual provocations bearing messages like fuck and kkkolonization. And when I spoke to the Diné artist in March, he was preparing a pointedly atypical figurative piece on a self-made floor loom in his kitchen. “[Traditional Navajo weavers] will lose it if you weave a triangle, let alone a man,” he said.
“My work gives me leeway to poke fun at Navajo textiles and traditional motifs.”

Transgressive yet still informed by tradition and the resource-rich agrarian Southwest, Tapaha hand-dyes and hand-spins Churro sheep wool to use in his work. Contrasting the nearly cubist silhouettes of historical pictorial weaving, his renderings of shimá sáni (grandmothers) and ovine themes are less abstract, constructed with emoji-level realism and detail. “Navajo designs were once pop,” Tapaha said, alluding to the Industrial Revolution’s standardizing impact on Navajo weaving styles. Demand for weavings across America in the late 1800s reduced the complex figures and symbols representing the mise-en-scène of Navajo life, going back hundreds of years, to simpler motifs produced at scale by companies like Pendleton.

On top of that, much pop Navajo weaving is kept in museum archives, uncredited and unincorporated into public perceptions of a rich tradition. Tapaha, for his part, flips the switch on dimly lit views of his textile progenitors. Proudly queer, he draws inspiration from such contemporary sources as the app Grindr: some of his pieces percussively juxtapose his heritage with exchanges of gay social dynamics, deploying pictorial figures and irreverent phraseology like butt stuff and all that for a boy? TruEeeE…

Tapaha’s colorful form-bending style also echoes that of Jean-Michel Basquiat, pairing figures and sociopolitical text with vibrant tones in a way that evokes the artistic output of an imagined downtown Manahatta. His path has also led to projects working with the textile collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History, both in New York, and those led to different kinds of involvement and consultation on the 2023 exhibitions “Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest” at the Bard Graduate Center in Upstate New York and “Horizons: Weaving Between the Lines with Diné Textiles” at the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture in Santa Fe.

“There’s interest now in traditional methods, oral histories, and why we made things this way,” he said, while expressing a mix of optimism and, in classic Native realist tradition, skepticism about the glare of “ethnic spotlight.” With new opportunities far from home, Tapaha faces the prospect of staring down a sort of Indigenous Hydra: to stay or to leave the reservation. The former focuses on man and nature (namely Navajos and Churro sheep); the latter, an ontological turn from Diné materiality toward Western enlightenment’s supercilious man-versus-nature divide. Both present a crisis of conscience.

For now, Tapaha balances demand and production based in the Four Corners with escapades in New York for shows and archival work, uplifting thousands of anonymous weavings as his muses while putting his own spin on the unadulterated origin story of his artform.