Artist

Betty Manygoats

born Shonto/Cow Springs, AZ 1945
Media - manygoats_betty.jpg - 90075
Originally photographed by Chuck Rosenak. Image is courtesy of the Chuck and Jan Rosenak research material, 1990-1999, in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Also known as
  • Betty Barlow
Born
Shonto/Cow Springs, Navajo Nation, Arizona, United States
Nationalities
  • American
Biography

Navajo artist Betty Manygoats lives with her husband, William, and their ten children in a cluster of prefabricated houses in Cow Springs, Arizona (Chuck and Jan Rosenak, Museum of American Folk Art Encyclopedia, 1990). Growing up, she learned to weave and create jewelry, and when she was twenty-five, her grandmother taught her to make functional pottery. Manygoats exaggerates the shape and decoration of traditional Navajo pottery and in the late 1970s first added her trademark horned toads to the surface of the clay (Chuck and Jan Rosenak, The People Speak: Navajo Folk Art, 1994). She taught many of her children to make pottery, and today they create wedding vases, bowls, and jugs decorated with the distinctive horned toads.