D.Y. Begay (born 1953) is a

Navajo The Navajo (; British English: Navaho; nv, Diné or ') are a Native American people of the Southwestern United States. With more than 399,494 enrolled tribal members , the Navajo Nation is the largest federally recognized tribe in the United ...

textile artist born into the Tóʼtsohnii (Big Water) Clan and born from the Táchiiʼnii (Red Streak Earth) Clan.

Biography

Begay is a fourth generation weaver who grew up surrounded by women weavers. From them she learned sheep herding and shearing, and how to work with wool. She learned to spin and card wool, and traditional

Navajo weaving Navajo rugs and blankets ( nv, ) are textiles produced by Navajo people of the Four Corners area of the United States. Navajo textiles are highly regarded and have been sought after as trade items for over 150 years. Commercial production of h ...

. Her mother taught her to identify plants to make dyes and to understand the dyeing process. At the age of 12, Begay sold her first rug. She later studied fiber arts at

Arizona State University Arizona State University (Arizona State or ASU) is a public research university in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, ASU is one of the largest public universities by enrollment in the ...

where she received her teacher's certificate. She lives in Tselani on the Navajo Nation and in

Santa Fe, New Mexico Santa Fe ( ; , Spanish for 'Holy Faith'; tew, Oghá P'o'oge, Tewa for 'white shell water place'; tiw, Hulp'ó'ona, label=Tiwa language, Northern Tiwa; nv, Yootó, Navajo for 'bead + water place') is the capital of the U.S. state of New Mexico. ...

Artwork

Begay's artwork is influenced by her Navajo identity, the forms of nature and the colors of the landscape, flora and fauna. She experiments with combining a natural color palette with unconventional non-reservation color. In a video produced by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, she describes how she makes dyes from plant matter and soils, and thinks of the weaving process as analogous to "painting with yarn". The horizonal motifs in her work are reflective of the vistas, mesas and plateaus in Navajo country. Some of the ingredients in her dyes are chamisa, juniper berries, sage and a particular fungus that grows on juniper trees. She obtains her wool from her sister who is a sheep farmer. Begay has traveled extensively to

Bolivia , image_flag = Bandera de Bolivia (Estado).svg , flag_alt = Horizontal tricolor (red, yellow, and green from top to bottom) with the coat of arms of Bolivia in the center , flag_alt2 = 7 × 7 square p ...

Guatemala Guatemala ( ; ), officially the Republic of Guatemala ( es, República de Guatemala, links=no), is a country in Central America. It is bordered to the north and west by Mexico; to the northeast by Belize and the Caribbean; to the east by H ...

, and Mexico to learn with other indigenous makers. She describes her work in relation to her cultural heritage: ''"Everything in my weaving is natural. I use the same techniques passed from my ancestors to me to create designs that have artistic and traditional value."''

Exhibitions

Begay's work has been exhibited at the National Museum of the American Indian Smithsonian Institution in New York; the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts; the

National Museum of Scotland The National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, Scotland, was formed in 2006 with the merger of the new Museum of Scotland, with collections relating to Scottish antiquities, culture and history, and the adjacent Royal Scottish Museum (opened in ...

, Edinburgh, the

Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian The Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian is a museum devoted to Native American arts. It is located in Santa Fe, New Mexico and was founded in 1937 by Mary Cabot Wheelwright, who came from Boston, and Hastiin Klah, a Navajo singer and medici ...

; the

C.N. Gorman Museum C.N. Gorman Museum is a museum focused on Native American and Indigenous artists, founded in 1973 at University of California, Davis (UC Davis) in Davis, California. History The C.N. Gorman Museum was founded in 1973 by the Department of Nativ ...

at the University of California, Davis; the

Kennedy Museum of Art Ohio University is a public research university in Athens, Ohio. The first university chartered by an Act of Congress and the first to be chartered in Ohio, the university was chartered in 1787 by the Congress of the Confederation and subsequen ...

, Athens, Ohio; and the

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston The Museum of Fine Arts (often abbreviated as MFA Boston or MFA) is an art museum in Boston, Massachusetts. It is the 20th-largest art museum in the world, measured by public gallery area. It contains 8,161 paintings and more than 450,000 works ...

among others. Her artwork was included in the exhibition "Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists." In 2020, her art was exhibited in the landmark exhibition
Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists
' at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. A 2018 retrospective exhibition of her work entitled ''Tselani/Terrain: Tapestries of D.Y. Begay'', was organized by the Museum of Northern Arizona.

Awards

In 2013, Begay received a Native American Art Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award. Begay was named a 2018 USA Fellow by the United States Artists organization. In 2010 she received a SWAIA Discovery Fellowship, which supported her travel to Peru to work in collaboration with weavers there and participate in a Tinkuy de Tejedores gathering of weavers. She then traveled to Bolivia and Guatemala to facilitate workshops with local weavers. In 2019, she was named a Fellow by the Mellon Indigenous Arts Program, University of Virginia.

Collections

Begay's work is included in the collection of the

Heard Museum The Heard Museum is a private, not-for-profit museum in Phoenix, Arizona, United States, dedicated to the advancement of American Indian art. It presents the stories of American Indian people from a first-person perspective, as well as exhibitio ...

in Phoenix, Arizona, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the

Virginia Museum of Fine Art Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions of the United States, between the Atlantic Coast and the Appalachian Mountains. The geography and climate of the Commonwealth are s ...

and the

Bibliography

References

External links

* *“D. Y. Begay, Navajo Weaver,” Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: https://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/collecting-stories-native-american-art/d-y-begay *“Hear My Voice: Artist Profile,” Virginia Museum of Fine Arts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9wmz5rf1

*“Woven by the Grandmothers: 19th Century Navajo Textiles,” Smithsonian Institution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imjtRvvA_OQ {{DEFAULTSORT:Begay, D. Y. American textile artists Native American women artists Women textile artists Navajo artists 21st-century textile artists 21st-century American artists 21st-century American women artists Artists from Arizona Living people 1953 births Native American textile artists 20th-century Native Americans 21st-century Native Americans 20th-century Native American women 21st-century Native American women