Betty Manygoats

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.