Master Artist Workshop | Navajo Weaving with Melissa Cody

I'm Melissa Cody. I am from the Edgewater Clan of the Navajo Nation, originally from Loop, Arizona, No Water Mesa, Arizona. I am a fourth-generation textile artist, and I work in the realm of Germantown Revival Style. My artwork conveys my personal story. When I first started weaving, I just learned a basic framework. So I learned the so-called traditional patterning that were regional styles brought in from the traders. I also learned utilitarian styles like chief's blankets, things like that. But I think that was just to give me a foundation to expand and grow from there. I finally got the courage to break out of that and start experimenting, mixing patterns together and getting the approval of my elders, other weavers, and seeing if it was something that I was allowed to do. Because at that point, it was really almost taboo to break those boundaries. When I went to school at the Institute of American Indian Arts, I went there as a studio arts, fine arts major. So when I went there, I studied printmaking, I studied ceramics, painting, drawing, photography. And all of those things helped my weaving get better because I was able to look at 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional art forms and see how they applied to what I was doing on my own loom. So from there, I was also able to see what kind of parallels I could find in the process. So within that, I found that printmaking kind of fit the same type of mind frame in terms of layering. Because when I work, I layer the wefts back and forth. And with printmaking, you're layering the ink and you're constantly changing and moving with each layer, building. The idea of the community loom came about because it spoke to me in a sense where within my family, I've heard stories from my mother and my aunts saying that when we were growing up, it wasn't just one person who would weave the rug and finish it. One person may do all the design work, but the kids would finish the ends or maybe somebody else, another relative, would finish the ends. So in that sense, it was community help, whether it was within a nuclear family or within an actual community of Navajo people. I think that just by having these types of events where we're bringing in younger people, we're having this dialogue about fiber dyeing, even just bringing in little aspects of that, it's a connection to not only the past generations who have kept it and held it close and made it survive this long, but it's also a connection to oneself because that resilience and being able to be a part of that timeline, that history, that legacy, it really is something to be proud of.