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Weaving a Community

The U.N. has proclaimed this the International Day of the World's Indigenous People.

Today we honor America's indigenous peoples with a contemporary artwork by Navajo weaver Fanny Pete."It's easy to make a rug from a pattern supplied by a trader," this decidedly nontraditional Navajo weaver has said, "and I have done it on order. But what I feel I must do is make rugs from my imagination—rugs that have never been made before."

Pete's comments reflect the economic realities faced by Native American craft artists, as a need to make objects for commercial purposes collides with her strong personal vision. Pete is among a growing number of younger Navajo rug makers who have chosen to produce picture rugs rather than reproduce the traditional geometric Navajo designs.

In this piece, Pete seems to deliberately play on the tension between tradition and innovation in Navajo weaving. The angular red borders at the top and bottom quote a traditional Navajo motif, but the subject—literally hogging the center of the piece—is a cartoon-style pig, confident and smiling serenely.

Source: Tom Patterson. Contemporary Folk Art: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (New York and Washington, D.C.: Watson-Guptill Publications, in cooperation with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2001).

Pictured: Fannie Pete, born 1958, Pig, about 1987, handspun wool, native and vegetable dyes, 32 x 27 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Chuck and Jan Rosenak and museum purchase.