Jolene Nenibah Yazzie is an American graphic designer, specializing in comic art. Her artwork predominantly features women as Native American warriors, and she utilizes bright colors and contrast in her works.

Early life

Yazzie was born and raised in Lupton, Arizona. She went on to earn her B.A. in graphic design from Collins College. Afterwards, she attended the

Institute of American Indian Arts The Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) is a public tribal land-grant college in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The college focuses on Native American art. It operates the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA), which is housed in the historic S ...

in Santa Fe, New Mexico. When Yazzie was a young child, she was introduced to art at an early age by her brother. Her mother was an important figure in her life growing up, and she inspired Yazzie in her artworks. As a child, she had trouble finding women superheroes in the comics that she liked to read, aside from Wonder Woman.

Artistic influence

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 ...

art and the art of storytelling is a major foundation in Yazzie's works. Because of the similarities of telling a narrative story in both comics and traditional Navajo art, the ability to combine the two is possible; according to Yazzie, many of the Navajo creation stories are similar to superhero stories in our current pop culture. Her mother and sister were also important figures in Yazzie's works. Yazzie's sister had suffered sexual abuse in the past, and everyone in her family had decided to cover up the incident. Her mother had also worked in a battered women's shelter, and both of these experiences had a profound impact on Yazzie's outlook on women in her art. The women in her artwork are meant to reflect her mother and the other strong women figures in her life. Yazzie wanted to create strong and powerful female figure that would be the type that someone could look at and look up to, along with helping inspire their own inner strength.

Work

She experiments with many different mediums in her work, but uses

Adobe Photoshop Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc. for Microsoft Windows, Windows and macOS. It was originally created in 1988 by Thomas Knoll, Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, the software has become the indu ...

and

Adobe Flash Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a multimedia Computing platform, software platform used for production of Flash animation, animations, rich web applications, application software, desktop applications, mobile apps, mo ...

to create her artworks. She also transfers her designs onto skateboards, and attempts to create her work unique from other graphic design artists. The bright contrast and colors in her work represent the power that she wants to show the women in her works to have, along with showing them as strong warriors.

Exhibitions

The largest exhibition that her artwork was featured in, ''Comic Art Indigene'', was displayed in the

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 ...

in Washington D.C. Yazzie's work was used for much of the publicity materials for the show.Rhode, Michael. "Comic Art Indigene." International Journal of Comic Art 11.2 (2009): 495-97. Web.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Yazzie, Jolene Nenibah 1979 births Living people American graphic designers Artists from Arizona Institute of American Indian Arts alumni American women graphic designers People from Apache County, Arizona