Reznet

Navajo artist Melanie YazzieReznet Photo by Andi Murphy

The Making of an Artist

By Andi Murphy

LAS VEGAS, N.M.—A Navajo woman from Ganado, Ariz., told her story of travel and inspiration for her widely known art.

Art students from New Mexico Highlands University filled the two benches in the room and lined the walls of Burris Hall, the school's art building. They listened as Melanie Yazzie told her story of becoming an artist and struggling through college.

After learning Spanish in Mexico and living with a Mexican family around the age of 17, Yazzie went to college at Arizona State University in Tempe. She took English and literature classes, considering a career in them.

"My parents at first were like, 'You don't want to be an artist,' " Yazzie said. "I didn't really know what an artist was; I just thought that it would be really cool to make stuff."

Along with English classes, Yazzie took art courses and did anything to keep herself tied to the art world. At one point, Yazzie said, she had to get a job as a tour guide at ASU just to pay for art supplies. She also bought a bike at a yard sale to get her art supplies.

On her second-hand bike, she carried a large bulletin board to her room and made a sort of art studio, a requirement from her art instructor. "When you're looking at the drawings, you actually start to have conversations with the work," Yazzie said of her little studio.

Yazzie eventually moved on to printmaking. She kept it simple, so when she moved back to the Navajo Reservation, she could still make prints. "I always focus on doing stuff where I'm not dependent," Yazzie said.

She graduated from ASU in 1990 with a bachelor's degree in studio arts and entered graduate school at the University of Colorado in Boulder. She pursued printmaking with a passion.

She turned her apartment into a studio, putting plastic on the walls and canvas on the floors. "'If you're driving your partner crazy and making your apartment a print studio, you should come here,'" Yazzie said, quoting one of her art instructors at Boulder.

"I have to make art," she said.

And she did. Yazzie became a beginning, advanced and intermediate printmaking instructor at CU to pay for school. She was nervous at first because the position was proposed on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. But she bit down and taught students while being a student herself in the art of printmaking.

After receiving her master of fine arts degree in printmaking in 1993, Yazzie started to feel the pull on her heartstrings from the reservation. She wanted to live in a place between Colorado and the Navajo Nation. So she moved to Santa Fe, N.M., and became an art instructor at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

She told the class that a drunk driver crashed into her and she injured her spine. Later she had a scare with cervical cancer, she said. Her reaction? "I started doing happy paintings," Yazzie said.

Tests showed the cancer scare was a false alarm, she said, adding she takes her experiences as inspiration for her art.

Spinal cords are visible in her abstract paintings and prints. They show courage and represent fish, which are very valuable to all the tribes Yazzie has visited. She also creates clay figures that represent people and her two Chow Chow dogs, Luna and Sombra.

Yazzie is now back at the University of Colorado, where she is an associate professor of art. She's exhibited her work in New Zealand, France, Russia, Canada, Bulgaria, Northern Ireland and South Africa.

Todd Christensen, a printmaking and Intro to Art instructor at NMHU, was at the closing reception.

"I love her work, I absolutely love it," Christensen said. "She was teaching at the University of Arizona when I went to graduate school there. We became good friends. ... She helps motivate me."

Students left the art hall, and a few people stayed behind and snacked on cookies and punch. They shuffled along the walls looking at colorful canvases and sculptures. Yazzie was crowded for questions and her friendly, energetic voice and laughter added more color to the atmosphere.

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View some of Melanie Yazzie's artwork

List of Melanie Yazzie's honors, awards and exhibitions

Order “Rez Dogs” notecards from American Indian College Fund

Listen to a Melanie Yazzie lecture called “Holding the Truth: The Personal and Political in Art”

 

Andi Murphy, Navajo, is a student at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. A graduate of the Freedom Forum's 2007 American Indian Journalism Institute, Murphy interned as a reporter at The Daily Times in Farmington, N.M., last summer.