Linda Lomahaftewa, Hopi/Choctaw Artist

Lobby and Concourse Galleries

This exhibition curated by Michele Ellis Pracy, FAM Executive Director & Chief Curator

Linda Lomahaftewa of the Hopi Nation in Arizona is the Council of 100’s Distinguished Woman Artist for 2025. A practicing Native American artist since 1964, her exhibition at the Fresno Art Museum concentrates on the years 1965 through 1976, when she left her homeland to live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area. On exhibit will be major paintings accomplished over this period when her use of Native iconography and abstract desert landscapes starkly contrasts with the Bay Area Figurative Movement which at that time dominated the Northern California art scene. In addition to the significant early paintings exhibited in the Lobby Gallery, recent prints will be shown in the Concourse Gallery.

Born in 1947 in Phoenix, Arizona, Lomahaftewa attended the Phoenix Indian School, then the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Upon graduation from the IAIA, Lomahaftewa earned a scholarship to attend the San Francisco Art Institute in California where she earned her BFA and MFA degrees in the late 1960s and early 1970s respectively. Remaining in the Bay Area, she taught at the San Francisco Art Institute between 1971 and 1975 and at the University of California, Berkeley from 1974 to 1976.  Yearning to return home, Lomahaftewa accepted the position of Professor of Painting and Drawing back at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe in 1976. Retired from teaching, she currently resides in Santa Fe where she continues making art. In 2021, the IAIA mounted a retrospective exhibition for Lomahaftewa "uniting the ancient world with the contemporary in a symphony of shape and color." The paintings in this Fresno Art Museum exhibition pull from the early paintings selected for her 2021 IAIA retrospective, The Moving Land: 60+ Years of Art by Linda Lomahaftewa. The paintings and prints exhibited at the Fresno Art Museum are loaned from the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts Permanent Collection, private collectors, and the artist herself.

Images (left to right): Linda Lomahaftewa (Hopi, Choctaw), Sustenance, 1965-1970, Oil on canvas, 57 1/2" x 50", Private Collection | San Francisco Nightscape, 1965, Oil on canvas, 9 3/8" x 7", Collection of Marcus Amerman | Pandemic Blue II, 2020, Monotype on paper, 37 5/8" x 29 5/8" (framed), Collection of the Artist I All images © Linda Lomahaftewa, Photographs of artwork by Jason S. Ordaz

Linda Lomahaftewa with her grandfather Viets Lomahaftewa, San Francisco, 1971