Faust Gallery

Tony Abeyta

Diné (Navajo) Painter

b. 1965, Gallup, New Mexico · Lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Berkeley, California

At Faust Gallery, few artists embody the meeting of tradition and modern vision as completely as Tony Abeyta. Widely regarded as one of the most accomplished Native American painters of his generation, Abeyta is Diné (Navajo), born in Gallup, New Mexico, and raised within one of the Southwest’s most distinguished artistic families. His father, Narciso “Ciso” Platero Abeyta, was a renowned Navajo painter, silversmith, and World War II Code Talker; his mother, Sylvia Shipley Abeyta, was a Quaker ceramicist; and his late sisters, Pablita and Elizabeth, were gifted artists in their own right. Surrounded from childhood by painting, pottery, weaving, and silver, Abeyta absorbed both the craft and the cultural depth that continue to define his work.

He began his formal training at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, where he earned an Associate of Fine Arts and received the prestigious T.C. Cannon memorial scholarship; the institute would later honor him with a doctorate. From there he studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art and abroad in Florence, Venice, and the South of France, before completing a Master of Fine Arts at New York University. This rare blend of Native heritage and classical European training lends his painting an unmistakable sophistication.

Abeyta works in a richly layered mixed-media technique, combining sand, oil, acrylic, gold leaf, encaustic wax, and collage to build surfaces of remarkable texture and luminosity. His large, neomodernist canvases render the New Mexico landscape in the bold colors of his homeland, while his more spiritual works draw on ancestral Diné and Pueblo imagery—the Yei and the Kachina—evoked not as literal depictions but as presences felt through color, form, and movement. The result is a body of work that bridges traditional Native iconography and the language of American Modernism.

His distinctions include the New Mexico Governor’s Excellence in the Arts Award, recognition as a Living Treasure by the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture, the Gene Autry Memorial Award, and, in 2023, the U.S. Department of State’s Medal of Arts. His paintings are held in major public collections across the country, and his murals grace Santa Fe’s historic La Fonda Hotel. We are honored to present his work at Faust Gallery.

A painter of international acclaim whose work carries the colors, spirit, and stories of the Diné homeland into the language of contemporary art.