Faust Gallery

Oreland C. Joe, Sr.

Diné (Navajo) & Ute Sculptor

b. 1958, Shiprock, New Mexico · Lives and works in Kirtland, New Mexico

Oreland C. Joe, Sr. is among the most distinguished Native American sculptors working today. Of Diné (Navajo) and Ute descent, he was born in Shiprock, New Mexico, in 1958 and raised across the Four Corners region, on both the Navajo and Ute reservations. He knew by the age of four that he wanted to be an artist — a calling nurtured by a deeply creative family: his father, a silversmith and painter; his mother, a gifted musician; and his grandfather, a keeper of traditional songs and dances. Today he lives and works in Kirtland, New Mexico.

Joe is world-renowned for his work in stone and bronze, carving directly in marble, alabaster, and limestone to create figures rooted in Native history, ceremony, and dignity. Travels to France and Italy in 1978 and 1984, and to Japan in 1986, exposed him to the classical traditions of European sculpture and broadened his artistic vision — an influence that gives his work its rare union of Indigenous subject matter and timeless, monumental form.

In 1993, Joe received a singular honor, becoming the first Native American artist invited into the famed Cowboy Artists of America, where his sculptures have earned multiple Gold and Silver medals. In 1996, he was selected from among fifty artists to create a monumental twenty-two-foot bronze of Chief Standing Bear for Ponca City, Oklahoma — his crowning public achievement. His work is held in private, corporate, and museum collections across the United States and abroad.

A sculptor who joins the dignity of Native history with the timeless language of stone and bronze.