Dan Namingha

Namingha was born in Keams Canyon, Arizona, and grew up with his mother on his grandparents' ranch in Polacca on the Hopi Reservation. As a child he would draw with coal while using grocery boxes as a canvas. In elementary school, Namingha would arriver early to create in a makeshift studio a teacher had created after noticing a lot of the Hopi and Tewa children had an interest in art. In high school, Namingha attended a University of Kansas summer art program. He also studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.{{cite news |last1=Roberts |first1=Kathaleen |title=Living treasure: Indian arts festival honors Hopi-Tewa painter, sculptor, printmaker |url=https://www.abqjournal.com/778140/living-treasure.html |accessdate=21 October 2020 |publisher=Albuquerque Journal |date=22 May 2016}}

Dan Namingha has been showing professionally as an artist for 40 years. His heritage inspires his work, which explores connections between physical and the spirit world and includes of Hopi symbolism.

Drawing and painting was a natural part of Hopi childhood. It gave him a way to express his strong feelings about the culture and environment leading to a path of creative freedom. Dan feels that change and evolution are a continuum; socially, politically, spiritually and that the future of our planet and membership of the human race must be monitored to insure survival in the spirit of cultural and technology diversity. He says that only then can we merge the positive and negative polarization and balance so necessary to communal spirit of the universe.

Dan Namingha's artworks are in the collections of the Museum of Northern Arizona, the Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University, the Smithsonian Institution, the Sundance Institute, the Wheelwright Museum, the New Mexico Museum of Art,{{cite web|title=Dan Namingha|url=http://sam.nmartmuseum.org/view/people/asitem/N/1?t:state:flow=20c230dd-fe4d-456e-b376-3223f3e7a5a7|publisher=New Mexico Museum of Art|accessdate=8 January 2014|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140109002458/http://sam.nmartmuseum.org/view/people/asitem/N/1?t:state:flow=20c230dd-fe4d-456e-b376-3223f3e7a5a7|archive-date=9 January 2014|url-status=dead}} the Heard Museum, and numerous foreign museums, including the British Royal Collection in London.[http://www.musnaz.org/press/press2007.shtml#2 DAN AND ARLO NAMINGHA ─ A FASCINATION WITH DUALITIES] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140702234623/http://musnaz.org/press/press2007.shtml |date=2014-07-02 }}, Museum of Northern Arizona, 2007

In 2009, the Institute of American Indian Arts awarded him an honorary doctorate and in 2016, the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture named Namingha its 2016 "Living Treasure."

Namingha's work was part of Stretching the Canvas: Eight Decades of Native Painting (2019–21), a survey at the National Museum of the American Indian George Gustav Heye Center in New York.{{cite web |title=Stretching the Canvas: Eight Decades of Native Painting |url=https://americanindian.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/item?id=975 |website=National Museum of the American Indian |access-date=7 March 2021}}

His son Arlo Namingha is also a well-known sculptor, and his younger son Michael Namingha works in digital art. All three artists exhibit at the Namingha's Santa Fe gallery, Niman Fine Art.

• University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas
• Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico
• Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

• The Art of Dan Namingha by Thomas Hoving, Abrams Publishing, New York

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• [http://www.namingha.com Niman Gallery Santa Fe] - Artist's online portfolio and biography
• [http://korologosgallery.com/dan-namingha/ Ann Korologos Gallery] - Paintings by Dan Namingha, biography, press, and video.

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Category:1950 births

Category:Living people

Category:Artists from Santa Fe, New Mexico

Category:Hopi Tribe of Arizona people

Category:Institute of American Indian Arts alumni

Category:Native American painters

Category:Native American sculptors

Category:Painters from New Mexico

Category:Pueblo artists

Category:20th-century American sculptors

Category:21st-century American sculptors

Category:Sculptors from New Mexico

Category:20th-century Native American artists

Category:21st-century Native American artists