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 Unite ...

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 The Lowell D. Holmes Museum of Anthropology began in 1966 as the Museum of Man, at the bequest and initiation of Dr. Lowell Holmes, Professor of Anthropology at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas, United States. Over the next 33 years ...

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 style pottery, descending through her eldest daughter,

Annie Healing Annie may refer to: People and fictional characters * Annie (given name), a given name and a list of people and fictional characters with the name * Annie (actress) (born 1975), Indian actress * Annie (singer) (born 1977), Norwegian singer The ...

. Dextra is the daughter of

Rachel Namingha Rachel () was a Bible, Biblical figure, the favorite of Jacob's two wives, and the mother of Joseph (Genesis), Joseph and Benjamin, two of the twelve progenitors of the tribes of Israel. Rachel's father was Laban (Bible), Laban. Her older siste ...

(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 ce ...

, who are other notable Hopi-Tewa potters. Her daughter, Hisi Nampeyo is also a potter, and her son,

Dan Namingha Dan Namingha (born 1950, Keams Canyon, Arizona) is a Hopi painter and sculptor. He is Dextra Quotskuyva's son, and a great-great-grandson of Nampeyo. He is a member of the Hopi-Tewa member of the Hopi Tribe. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. E ...

, 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 medici ...

Selected public collections

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

Nelson Atkins Museum of Art The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art is an art museum in Kansas City, Missouri, known for its encyclopedic collection of art from nearly every continent and culture, and especially for its extensive collection of Asian art. In 2007, ''Time'' magaz ...

* National Museum of the American Indian * 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

. The best biography available online.
Another capsule biography
by

.
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