20/5235. Courtesy, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.
Earliest Navajo weavers developed their talent through skills learned from the Pueblo people. Their blankets were greatly traded throughout the Southwest, and became prized possessions of tribal leaders of the Plains and Plateau. Eastern visitors to the Southwest developed a demand for larger versions as rugs, and trading posts engaged weavers to fill their orders. Woven into their designs were reflections of their environment, spiritual insights and meanings, and inherited patterns. Designs and colors sometimes took on a southwestern Spanish influence. Always one-of-a-kind, always an intricate message told within a complex thought process, Navajo textile excellence has endured in the people, despite times of oppression, starvation, removal, and reservation relocation. The renaissance of this art is on-going, re-vitalizing itself with 21st century weaving talent.
The Navajo Art stamps are the sixth issue in the American Folk Art series. Designer Derry Noyes based each of the four stamp designs on an actual Navajo weaving. Issued in Window Rock, Arizona, September 4, 1986.
Late Classic small wearing blanket, woven from natural handspun yarns and commercially manufactured yarns that were unraveled from trade cloth and re-worked by Navajo weavers around the 1870s. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.
“Germantown” blanket woven entirely of four-ply yarns of the type manufactured in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and traded through trading posts on the Navajo Reservation around 1890. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.
Classic serape, woven of three-ply aniline-dyed Germantown yarn manufactured only from 1864 until about 1875. Collection of the Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami.
Classic serape, woven of natural handspun yarns, blue indigo-dyed yarn, and yarn spun from unraveled red trade cloth, around 1850 to 1860. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.
