Faust Gallery

Dan Namingha

Hopi-Tewa Painter & Sculptor

b. 1950, Keams Canyon, Arizona · Lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico

At Faust Gallery, we are proud to present the work of Dan Namingha, one of the most distinguished Native American artists of his generation. A Hopi-Tewa painter, sculptor, and printmaker, Namingha was born in 1950 in Keams Canyon, Arizona, and raised by his grandparents in Polacca on the Hopi Reservation — within a family whose artistic legacy is without parallel. He is the son of celebrated potter Dextra Quotskuyva and a great-great-grandson of Nampeyo (1856–1942), the legendary Hopi-Tewa potter who transformed the art of Hopi ceramics. Art surrounded him from the start: given clay by his grandmother as a small boy, he was later drawn to painting by a second-grade teacher who turned a vacant sandstone building into a studio for the reservation’s young artists.

That early encouragement led to a summer art scholarship at the University of Kansas, and then to the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, where his gifts were quickly recognized. He continued his studies at the American Academy of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, where exposure to contemporary art began to shift his vision. By the early 1970s, Namingha had moved from realism toward the abstraction that would come to define his career.

Namingha works across an extraordinary range — acrylic and oil painting, watercolor, mixed media and collage, and bronze and steel sculpture, having cast his first bronze in 1974. Whatever the medium, his subjects remain rooted in his Hopi-Tewa heritage: the sacred landscape of the Southwest, the Katsina as spirit messengers and cloud people, and the dualities of light and dark, positive and negative. His work seeks the centerline between the physical and spiritual worlds, abstracting tradition into a powerful and unmistakably contemporary visual language.

Namingha held his first solo museum exhibition at the Museum of Northern Arizona in 1977 and has since earned international acclaim. He received an honorary doctorate from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2009 and was named a Living Treasure by the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture in 2016. His work is held in major museums and embassies worldwide — including the Smithsonian Institution, Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, and the British Royal Collection in London — and he has created projects for clients such as the Smithsonian and NASA. He exhibits alongside his sons, sculptor Arlo Namingha and artist Michael Namingha, at the family’s Santa Fe gallery, Niman Fine Art.

An artist of international renown whose work carries the landscape, symbolism, and spirit of the Hopi-Tewa world into the language of contemporary art.