Dextra Quotskuyva Nampeyo (born September 7, 1928, Polacca, Arizona) is a Native American potter and artist. She is in the fifth generation of a distinguished ancestral line of

Hopi The Hopi are a Native American ethnic group who primarily live on the Hopi Reservation in northeastern Arizona, United States. As of the 2010 census, there are 19,338 Hopi in the country. The Hopi Tribe is a sovereign nation within the United ...

potters. In 1994 Dextra Quotskuyva was proclaimed an “Arizona Living Treasure,” and in 1998 she received the first Arizona State Museum Lifetime Achievement Award.Dextra Quotskuyva
at Holmes Museum of Anthropology In 2001, the Wheelwright Museum organized a 30-year retrospective exhibition of Quotskuyva's pottery, and in 2004, she received the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts Lifetime Achievement award.

Family

She is the great-granddaughter of

- Tewa potter Nampeyo of Hano, who revived

Sikyátki Sikyátki is an archeological site and former Hopi village spanning on the eastern side of First Mesa, in what is now Navajo County in the U.S. state of Arizona. The village was inhabited by Kokop clan of the Hopi from the 14th to the 17th c ...

style pottery, descending through her eldest daughter, Annie Healing. Dextra is the daughter of Rachel Namingha (1903–1985), and sister of

Priscilla Namingha Priscilla Namingha Nampeyo (1924 - 2008) was a Hopi-Tewa potter who was known for her traditional pottery. Namingha mined her own clay and created her own pigments for her large pots. Her work is in the collection of several museums and cultural c ...

, who are other notable Hopi-Tewa potters. Her daughter, Hisi Nampeyo is also a potter, and her son, Dan Namingha, is painter and sculptor. Her husband, Edwin Quotskuyva, was a veteran and a Hopi tribal leader.

Work

Dextra began her artistic career in 1967, following Nampeyo's rich heritage rooted in Sikyatki decorations. At first, following the advice of her mother to stay true to the old styles, Dextra's design repertoire was limited to traditional Nampeyo migration and bird designs. After her mother died in 1985, Dextra felt at greater liberty to express her personal creativity. She was the first Nampeyo potter to produce a commodity for public consumption. Quotskuyva experiments with the traditional materials usually used for pottery, gathering clay from different sources from her reservation and creating variations on the characteristic orange, tan, and brown hues of Hopi bonfire pots. For the decorations, she uses bee-weed plant for the black and native clay slips for the red. In describing her way of creating pottery, she said: "One day my pottery calls for me, and then I know this is the day I must do it". Noted American Indian art dealer and collector, Martha Hopkins Lanman Struever, authored a book about Dextra entitled "Painted Perfection", exploring a collection of her works which were exhibited at 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 medi ...

Selected public collections

* Lowell D. Holmes Museum of Anthropology, Wichita State University *

Minneapolis Institute of Art The Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) is an arts museum located in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. Home to more than 90,000 works of art representing 5,000 years of world history, Mia is one of the largest art museums in the United State ...

* Nelson Atkins Museum of Art *

National Museum of the American Indian The National Museum of the American Indian is a museum in the United States devoted to the culture of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. It is part of the Smithsonian Institution group of museums and research centers. The museum has three ...

* Museum of Texas Tech University, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX.

References

Pecina, Ron and Pecina, Bob. ‘’Hopi Kachinas: History, Legends, and Art’’. Schiffer Publishing Ltd., 2013. ; p. 161

External links

Dextra Quotskuyva biography
at Holmes Museum of Anthropology. The best biography available online.
Another capsule biography
by Martha Hopkins Struever.
Dextra Quotskuyva pottery at Google Images
{{DEFAULTSORT:Quotskuyva, Dextra 1928 births Hopi people Living people Native American potters Artists from Arizona Native American women artists Women potters 20th-century American artists 20th-century ceramists 20th-century American women artists 21st-century American artists 21st-century ceramists 21st-century American women artists People from Navajo County, Arizona American women ceramists American ceramists 20th-century Native Americans 21st-century Native Americans 20th-century Native American women 21st-century Native American women Native American people from Arizona

Family

Work

See also

Selected public collections

References

Further reading

External links