Melanie Yazzie: Peace Walking

Yazzie employs iconography featuring animal, plants, land maps and female figures to tell a story that is deeply personal but also communal in nature. Her work conveys qualities of wonder and healing, while encouraging viewers to engage with complex Indigenous experiences. 

About the Artist

Now based in Colorado, Yazzie was born in northeastern Arizona to a family from the Salt Water and Bitter Water Diné (Navajo) clans. Her early life was filled with the intertwined relationships of friends, family, animals and the landscape, experiences that inform both her artwork and the ways in which she relates to the world around her. As an artist, she works to serve as an agent of change by encouraging others to learn about social, cultural, and political phenomena shaping the contemporary lives of Native peoples in the United States and beyond. 

Yazzie has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad. Among others, her work is included in permanent collections at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, Providence, RI; the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico and the Kennedy Museum of Art at Ohio University, Athens, OH. Yazzie is currently professor of arts practices and head of printmaking at the University of Colorado at Boulder. 

Melanie Yazzie is represented by Glenn Green Galleries in Santa Fe, NM.