[AIW] Exhibition: Dan Namingha: Metaphors of Culture and Space, Landhut/Germany, May 25 to July 14, 2012

[AIW - Bartl]

Date:

Thursday, May 24 2012, 7 p.m.

Exhibition Opening: Dan Namingha: Metaphors of Culture and Space

Opening Remarks: Consul General Conrad R. Tribble, U.S. Consulate General,
Munich

The artist is present.

 

Place:

LAProjects Art Space, Kirchgasse 239, 84028 Landshut, Germany

Time: May 25 to July 14, 2012, Fr 3 - 6 pm, Sa 11 am - 6 pm and by
appointment

Fon 0049 + 871 40427659, Email: info at LAProjects.de; www.LAProjects.de 

 

LAProjects, an art space dedicated to contemporary art and to transatlantic
dialogue

presents, in cooperation with the U.S. Consulate General Munich, recent
paintings,

drawings and prints by Dan Namingha, one of North America's most important
Native

American artists. The exhibition Dan Namingha: Metaphors of Culture and
Space is open

from May 25 to July 14, 2012, Fr 3 - 6 pm, Sa 11 am - 6 pm and daily by
appointment:

Fon 0049 + 871 40427659, Email: info at LAProjects.de. Website:
www.LAProjects.de

 

Dan Namingha, born 1950, grew up on the Hopi Reservation, an arid piece of
land in

Northeastern Arizona, where on three high plateaus eleven villages are
sheltered by tall

wind-and-weather- shaped sandstone formations. In the Tewa-village of Hano
Dan's

great-grandmother, the legendary Nampeyo, had revived the ancient tradition
of Hopi

pottery at the turn of the 20th century, his grandmother Rachel Nampeyo, his
mother

Dextra Nampeyo and his sister Camille have continued that pottery
traditition while his

grandfather and his uncles have excelled as carvers of Kachina dolls, those
manifold

interpretations of the Kachina dancers that serve as messengers in the Hopi
spiritual

cosmos.

 

Since his Hopi childhood the motifs, colors, forms and contents of Dan
Namingha's art

have reflected the nature and expanse of his people's homeland and their
spiritual

traditions and symbols. From his encounter with European-American modern art
during

his studies at the University of Kansas, the Academy of American Art in
Chicago and

the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and through the rebellion
of his

generation against collective visions and tribal constraints Dan Namingha
develops a

continuously new, authentic "Indian Modernism" in which abstraction and
realism,

minimalism and symbolism are fused in an original, powerful and convincing

iconography.

 

As early as 1979 Alfred Frankenstein, the art critic of the San Francisco
Chronicle at the

time, wrote on the occasion of a Namingha exhibition in San Francisco: " Dan

Namingha may well be the most gifted, original and important Native American

painter currently at work. The point is the grandeur of his abstractions,
the manner in

which images of nature (and of his traditions) are marshaled at the command
of a

thoroughly creative imagination. No doubt about it, Namingha is a major
figure."

Since this time Dan Namingha has participated in numerous one-person and
group

exhibitions in the United States and, last in 1983-1986, in Europe. His
paintings, sculptures

and drawings are part of many important public and private collections,
among them

the National Museum of American Indian Art of the Smithsonian Institution in

Washington, D.C., the fine arts museums of San Francisco, Denver, Santa Fe,
Palm

Desert and Dallas, the Harvard University Fogg Art Museum in Boston, and the

collections of NASA, the U.S. Department of the Interior, the U.S. Federal
Reserve and

the U.S. State Department. His largest painting, 7 feet by 29 feet, graces
the

International Airport in Phoenix, AZ.

 

In 1995 Dan Namingha received the New Mexico Governor's Award of Excellence
and

Achievement in the Arts; in 2009 he was awarded the Honorary Doctorate of
the

Institute of American Indian Arts; in 2012 the Heard Museum in Phoenix, AZ
honors him

and his sons Arlo and Michael as Artists of the Year with a year-long
exhibition. In 2000

Abrams Books published The Art of Dan Namingha, a monograph by Thomas
Hoving,

retired director of the Metropolitan Museum, New York.

 

Dan Namingha lives and works in Santa Fe, NM.

 

This exhibition is a co-operation with the gallery Niman Fine Arts in Santa
Fe, NM.

"He (Dan Namingha) gives those of us who look at art access to a world we
would not

normally see, in a language we already understand." (Stuart Ashman,
Director, New

Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe)

 

 

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