Artist Dan Namingha is fascinated by passages and passageways, both literal and figurative. Much of his work deals with physical and metaphysical passages and the transitory states between everyday reality and the spirit realm. To Namingha, life is composed of dualities: night and day, darkness and light, the divine and the human, life and death, outside and inside, the underworld and the upper world, positive and negative. These dualities are not inherently good or evil; they simply exist as counterbalances to one another.
One might call his art a metaphorical map of his Hopi/Tewa heritage, which stresses that a good life is one lived in balance. In bringing this worldview to light, one might see Namingha as a bridge-builder spanning his Native culture and the non-Native world. Or perhaps he's best described as a visual poet.

In a recent interview in his light-filled studio on the outskirts of Santa Fe, he described how he takes complex images derived from the real world-say a mesa or a collection of Hopi kachina dancers (the colorful deities that appear during Hopi ceremonies)-and transforms them into powerful and energetic works of art. "I try to condense them down into simple forms, the way a poet will take traditional words and break them up and abstract them to create poetry."

He calls it a process of fragmentation and assembly, a search to convey the greatest artistic effect with the minimal artistic elements.

The term "fragments" is multifaceted. Life is a mystery of which we catch only fleeting glimpses-fragments-of its underlying order. Fragmentation also refers to revealing only pieces of his tribe's profound cosmology, a philosophical and religious orientation the Hopi have strenuously protected for eons. The term also reflects the shattering effect the non-Native world has had on the Native world, and the universal, age-old dislocation and melding of all cultures since time began. The fragmented style also is linked to the artist's familiarity with and appreciation for the tenets of modern art, beginning with the impressionist school of painting and extending through minimalist art and sculpture. Less is more in Namingha's vocabulary, to suggest is better than to state.

These are the landmarks Namingha uses to navigate over his artistic landscape. Remarkably, they are the same landmarks he set out to reach decades ago when he was a young artist searching for the first faint marks of his path. He has yet to reach his destination, but the landmarks still guide him.

In a wonderful, just-released monograph of Namingha's life and work titled The Art of Dan Namingha written by Thomas Hoving, Ph.D.(see Books, page 98), the artist notes a turning point in his life in 1969. At the time, he was serving a stint in the U.S. Marines, after having completed a period of intensive artistic training, including a stint at Chicago's American Academy of Art. "My time in the Corps gave me precious opportunity to think. I spent hours analyzing what my art should become, and one day it just came to me. Suddenly, I knew that my artistic mission was to transform the subject matter of Native American art and its customary realism into an abstract, almost minimal, form."

He has succeeded brilliantly. Although his work has continually evolved, the evolution has always been a journey toward the realization of the objectives noted above.

His direction was first set by the land and people of his youth. Born on May 1, 1950 on the Hopi reservation in northeastern Arizona, he was raised as a young boy by his grandparents. His mother, Dextra, now a full-time potter, was a nurse whose work off the reservation often kept her away from home. Dan was quite close to his grandfather, Emerson Namingha, who was a stonemason, carpenter, rancher and farmer. "He was always busy with something, and would move flawlessly from one project to the next. He continues to inspire me today," says Namingha, who often jumps from medium to medium-including having a hand in designing his home and studio.

His great-great-grandmother was the famous Hopi potter, Nampeyo (1860-1942), and numerous uncles, aunts, and cousins were potters and kachina carvers. Thus, Dan's childhood artistic interest was encouraged by his family, as well as a series of teachers he was fortunate to encounter.

The Hopi have managed to retain a large degree of their ceremonial life, and as a child Dan often attended kachina dances and social dances with his grandfather on the high mesas overlooking his home village of Polacca. Kachina images and other spiritual imagery-abstracted, fragmented and reformatted-have formed a considerable body of the artist's work to date.

The Hopi reservation is also a realm where the land itself cries out for attention. Atop the stony mesas, the horizon stretches out seemingly forever, the edge of the world punctured by distant jagged blue mountain ranges and silhouetted mesas. Water is precious, appearing only in sacred springs-tiny oases of green locked in a landscape of ochres, cadmium yellow, pale reds, soft blues and infinite shades of brown and pastel oranges. After a rain, the colors come alive, and the air carries a crystalline bite and scent of sage.

Namingha often works in series, some extending through evolutionary stages over decades such as Ceremonial Dance Series II (right), 26" x 4012", Acrylic/Collage on paper, ©1996

Summers can be brutally hot and dry, broken by the drifting immense thunderheads that crack open and spill their precious stores of rain over the appreciative land. Winters can be bitterly cold, muzzled in deep blue skies that release swirling snows. To live here is to know the land and its precious cargo; one cannot avoid its overwhelming power. Namingha's work reflects this as well.

"I am mashing a lot of things together: formal concepts of modern art and composition, combined with personal ideas and thoughts, and glimpses of the symbolism associated with my culture. Among other objectives, I hope to convey an appreciation of beauty, a reverence for the natural world, and a respect for Native cultures and sensibilities."

He often works in series, some extending through evolutionary stages over decades. Take, for instance, his series "Ceremonial Dance." He describes it as "movements and forms, nothing too representational, although realism is the foundation of the shapes. When I was much younger, I would do these realistic drawings of dancers, then by the late sixties and early seventies, I began shifting to much more abstract forms." The end result: a composition of lines and curved shapes that merely suggest the dancer's energy and presence.

He also loves to tinker with new materials and ways of working. Although best known for his acrylic paintings, collage remains a favorite medium, often including use of his own handmade papers. He works in oil pastels, he draws, and he sculpts.

Although he first explored drawing and painting as a child and young man, he was soon drawn to sculpture and cast his first bronze in 1974. Today, his elegant, spare and beautiful sculpture forms a significant part of his work.

Even Namingha's paintings without implied or illusionary negative space touch upon the concept of passages. In the same way, Hopi pottery always has an opening or break in designs to allow energy to pass back and forth, Namingha rarely frames his large paintings or collages. "This is basically to let the painting breathe, instead of enclosing it," he explains.

He currently begins his paintings with a dark gray background, so that the images appear out of darkness. "I experimented with that. I've begun paintings with a pure white background, which is great for washes. I've also used solid red background, which provides some interesting effects, as does black."

He also works huge to tiny. In 1980, he completed his largest painting to date, a 27 by 12-foot mural titled View from Walpi for Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix, and he continues to produce large canvases and sculptures. But, a series of 10-by-10-inch paintings is currently stacked here and there in his studio, as are small works in clay.

Nor does he restrict himself to traditional artist's tools. Under a Smithsonian project, he has also worked in film, and with all natural materials collected from the outdoors to create sculptures. The film was used in an installation with these works. "The work reflected on man in Nature, materialism and Nature, the idea of technology moving so fast it can override our ability to morally control it."

Even in his painting, he searches for unusual applications, as in his use of plaster trowels to create smears and blurred cloudlike effects. He'll layer up paint, then chip it and hack it away to reveal underlying colors and textures. He'll drip paint, dab it with cloths and sponges, scribble through it when damp, all to achieve his remarkable repertoire of surface features and forms.

"The idea of the artist is to take one's ideas and interests further and further," he explains. He often goes back to older work and reviews its motifs and style and then explores where he can take those elements further. "It's part of a creative journey, a process, to reach this particular place in time. I refer to this process as a teaching tool. I feel the best teacher is yourself, if you push yourself, are observant, and keep your options open all the time. I am always looking for something in my work that catches my eye, that will then take me in a new direction."

He also uses music in his work. As a teen-ager, he played in several bands and is a huge fan of jazz and blues, as well as traditional Hopi music. Three guitars-two Fenders and a Paul Reed Smith-grace his studio. He sometimes plays at home with his oldest son, Arlo, and has been spotted jamming with bands at Evangelo's and The Catamount in downtown Santa Fe. But he feels he can't pursue both careers simultaneously and long ago determined, "Music is secondary, art is primary."

In 1993, Namingha was asked by the Zimbabwe National Gallery to be one of only five artists from around the world to judge an exhibition, Zimbabwe Heritiage: Contemporary Visual Arts. NASA brought him in twice to witness a space shuttle launch and landing and commissioned him to create several works for the NASA art collection. In 1999, the New Mexico State Capitol Art Foundation commissioned him to create a sculpture now found in front of the capitol. He also has received many prestigious awards, including the Harvard Foundation Award for his contribution to American art, and the New Mexico Governor's Award for Excellence and Achievement in the Arts, and has been the subject of an Emmy-winning PBS documentary and a "CBS Sunday Morning" program.

His list of one-man exhibitions numbers more than sixty, while his group shows have been even more numerous, spanning the world. The current year produced a group show in Berlin with four European artists, and one-man exhibitions at the Susan Duval Gallery in Aspen, Colorado; the Vanier Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona; and the J. Cacciola Gallery in New York (November 2000). A sixty-piece show-including paintings, sculptures, collages and works on paper-opens in September at the Reading Public Museum in Pennsylvania; it will travel on to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in January 2001.

As if this weren't enough, he also helps to oversee-along with his wife Frances, his two sons and his daughter-in-law-his own gallery in Santa Fe, Niman Fine Art. The museum-like facility opened in 1990. "The idea was to take control of my direction . . . There seems to be this notion that art created by Native Americans is not good enough for the art system. When you see a non-Indian create something that has a Native feel to it, it's accepted. But if it's a Native American who actually knows about the culture, who understands the symbolism, just because they are ethnic, they aren't recognized. But it's a general problem of all Western artists, who are classified as regionalists, and the difficulties facing other minorities. It is a real challenge to break down those barriers."

But all in all, Namingha is modestly happy with his direction and life. Things are working for him. "I see myself as a kind of bridge between worlds, trying to find that center line of balance. It's not always easy, but I don't think it's always easy for any human being."

Daniel Gibson has been writing about Indian issues, individuals, and arts for over 15 years. He is the author of three guidebooks: "The American Southwest" and "New Mexico" (both John Muir Publications), and the just-released "Audubon Guide to National Wildlife Refuges: Southwest" (St. Martin's Press).