NATANI NOTAH
April 4 - 28, 2019
Natani Notah, When Saturn Cracks, White Tears Will Follow, Bolo (4/7), from Seven Generations of Bolo Ties (a series), 2018, leather, glass seed beads, found shell, bicycle reflectors, brake light fragment, and thread, 5'7" tall
Divinely Diné explores the connections between culture, politics, and survival. Through mixed media sculptures and detailed works on paper the exhibition aims to illustrate the beauty that results when fragments come together to create a better whole. For the artist, bringing disparate entities together to coexist serves as a generative act of healing from intergenerational trauma. Part prayer and part declaration, Divinely Diné disrupts our conceptions of what we think it means to be a Native American woman living in the present-day U.S.
Notah’s art practice explores contemporary Native American identity through the lens of Diné (Navajo) womanhood. Inspired by acts of decolonization and Indigenous feminism and futurism, her work dares to imagine a world where Native sensibilities are magnified. By way of fragmented abstraction, bodily scale, and the marrying of natural and synthetic materials, her work provokes conversations about what it means to be colonized. Additionally, drawing upon minimal forms derived from Diné symbolism, Notah’s drawings, sculptures, and installations become living bodies of sharp resistance to assimilation.
Natani Notah is an interdisciplinary artist, poet, and graphic designer. She is an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation (Diné) on her father’s side, and mixed part Lakota and Cherokee on her mother’s. Notah has exhibited her work across the United States and is the recipient of numerous awards including The San Francisco Foundation’s Murphy Cadogan Scholarship and the 2018 International Sculpture Center’s Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award. Notah holds a BFA and minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Cornell University, and an MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University. She is the recipient of the 2018-2019 Headlands Center for the Arts Graduate Fellowship and currently lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.
To learn more about Natani and her work, follow her on instagram @nataninotah and check out her website www.nataninotah.com