This 4th Generation Navajo Weaver’s Video Game-Inspired Art Is on Display at MoMA

Native American art has long been confined to a certain sector of the art world: crafts, a niche, even a tourist sector. The same could be said of textile arts. But Melissa Cody takes both disciplines and exhibits them on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Cody is a fourth-generation Navajo weaver. Her latest exhibition, “Webbed Skies,” is on view 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 played growing up.

The show told him more about it.

LAUREN GILGER: Let’s start by talking a little bit about this moment that you’re in. It’s a significant event to have an exhibition at MoMA and kind of a significant event, not just for you, but it seems like it’s for women in fiber art in general, and maybe for Indigenous art in general, right?

MELISSA CODY: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I’ve been weaving since I was 5 years old, so it’s exciting to see more female artists, but also Indigenous artists who are making waves and kind of breaking out of the little Indian art bubble and really getting a lot of visibility nationally and being able to reach such a wide audience as well.

GILGER: Let’s talk a little bit about the history of this craft, your own history in this field. I think a lot of people are familiar with Navajo weaving and have an idea of ​​what it looks like, but you’re a fourth-generation weaver, right? You grew up, you say, doing this since you were 5 years old?

CODY: Yeah, I learned from my mom, but I have a big extended family, so a lot of my aunts and cousins ​​and other grandmothers were all very visible as artists in their own way growing up. So I definitely had a big community behind me that was encouraging me in the beginning. So, being, again, on a big platform now, that energy still carries me.

GILGER: That’s really cool. Tell us a little bit about the kind of traditional Navajo designs that you started creating when you were in training, and how your work has evolved over the years, and I know it’s gone through many different iterations. But it seems like you’re kind of experimenting right now with combining contemporary themes with traditional Navajo designs.

CODY: Yes. When I started weaving, I learned the fundamental regional patterns, the traditional designs with jagged diamonds and very bold images with strong geometric styles, and that was very influenced by my mother, who makes these incredible textiles that are very detailed and really focused on excellence in terms of technical quality.

So I laid the foundation early on to really push myself when I was at the loom. That background really allowed me to take the reins when I was ready to start experimenting and putting my own spin on it. And that was probably in the late ’90s and early 2000s when I went to college in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to the Institute of American Indian Arts.

And so just being exposed to other mediums has really opened my eyes in terms of looking at fiber art and textiles from a different perspective and really allowed me to open myself up to self-criticism and find a voice behind each textile that I create.

GILGER: I know that in the past you’ve worked on water issues, uranium mining, and the health impacts of those activities on your community. Now you’re working on the influence of ’80s video games, as seen in the MoMA exhibit. Is that correct?

CODY: Yeah, yeah. Again, with all these different perspectives, I really wanted to start creating sort of capsule pieces of work where I would delve deeper and explore the different themes. And at that time, when I was studying the area where I come from, on the reservation, that was a big issue, was the uranium mining that had taken place and the lack of cleanup that never happened and how that affected not only the broader community, but my family as well.

A lot of these issues really resonate with me. So I wanted to explore and use my art to have a voice on these issues. And in a way, I continue to have the influence of technology in video games. My most recent work kind of comes full circle, because working with the Jacquard loom and as a technology in its own right, I’m really trying to explore — a big theme is all these sort of fundamental inspirations.

And looking at video games and the 8-bit pixel, I really want to highlight the quality of the pixel and really explore the technology that I grew up with. I started with Atari, the first Nintendo and the Super Nintendo, I was introduced to the first cell phones and I grew up without the internet and I’m now in a world that’s very technology-driven. Those are all things that I still want to explore.

GILGER: Let’s talk a little bit about Jacquard, because that’s when you’re talking about a completely different type of technology, in a way that I’m not even sure I understand. I think we can imagine what a large-scale loom looks like and how that work is done, but this is a little bit of a different thing that you’re doing, right?

CODY: Yes. I still use a lot of the images that I make in my handwoven pieces, but being able to revisit some of the patterns that I created maybe 10 or 15 years ago and put them into computer software and be able to manipulate the geometric shapes into really complex configurations that I couldn’t hand-weave on a traditional Navajo loom—again, it’s like opening my creativity to a whole other realm of, “What can I do?” And it’s exciting.

GILGER: That’s super cool. Do you think that the public, and maybe the art world in general, has also changed its perspective on this type of textile art and Navajo weaving in particular? Are you at the forefront of that movement?

CODY: I think so. There’s a lot of discussion around that: craft versus fine art, Indian art versus modern art. How do we classify ourselves as Indigenous artists and take control of our own story and voice—whether it’s in how we present our work in the marketplace or in the context of a gallery or museum?

So really being open to the conversation has had, I think, a big influence in terms of elevating the work and getting it out to a wider audience where there’s more discussion around Navajo textiles and their future.

Because when you talk about Native American art, it can be kind of limited, frozen in time. You have this idea of ​​what traditional Navajo weaving is. And so, for me, weaving these super elaborate textiles and this electric, bright color palette and really bringing it into the current era, I think it brings out this idea that we are an ever-evolving people, and art is evolving with us as well.