Melissa
Cody
She // Her // Hers
[ID: A headshot of a woman with her dark hair pulled into a bun on her head. She wears geometric earrings and a denim jacket adorned with enable pins on the pocket. She has a tattoo of a spider on her neck, its web visible over her shirt.]
Long Beach, CA
2022 USA Fellow
This award was generously supported by the Windgate Foundation.
_
Born in 1983 in No Water Mesa, Arizona, Melissa S. Cody is an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation. In 2007, Cody received a bachelor’s degree in studio arts and museum studies from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe.
A fourth-generation Navajo weaver, she approaches weaving as an ever-evolving craft tradition and art form. Her intricate tapestries are often associated with the Germantown Revival, a style named after the government wool supplied to the Navajo during the time of the Long Walk. The vivid dyes and new economic pressures prompted enterprising Navajo weavers to adapt, creating bold, new, commercially viable textiles that could sustain them. Her work carries that balance of tradition, history, and contemporaneity forward. Working on a traditional Navajo loom, Cody recombines traditional patterns into sophisticated geometric overlays and haptic color schemes, often integrating disparate visuals from contemporary life.
Cody’s work has been featured at many museums and galleries, including the Stark Museum of Art in Orange, Texas (2014), the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (2017–18), the Ingham Chapman Gallery at University of New Mexico (2018), the Navajo Nation Museum (2018), and SITE Santa Fe (2018–19), among many others.
Portrait photo courtesy of the artist.
World Traveler, 2014. Wool warp, weft, selvedge cords, and aniline dyes, dimensions 90 × 48 inches. Collection of Stark Museum of Art, Orange Texas. Photo courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.[ID: A vertical wall hanging covered in horizontal fields of clashing geometric patterns in bright, warm colors with highlights of cerulean and green. The patterns are inspired by traditional textiles and computer-generated shapes.]
Dopamine Regression, 2010. Wool warp, weft, selvedge cords, and aniline dyes, dimensions 70 × 48 inches. Photo courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.[ID: A vertical wall hanging covered in clashing geometric patterns. Thick black lines, resembling architectural blueprints, as well as more traditional designs, are superimposed atop a bright spectrum of colors and patterns beneath.]
Walking Off No Water Mesa, 2021. Wool warp, weft, selvedge cords, and aniline dyes, dimensions 127 × 38 inches. Collection of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. Photo courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.[ID: A long vertical wall hanging covered in clashing geometric patterns. The warm-colored, diamond-shaped pattern of the background is sporadically interrupted with pixelated shapes; like a computer generated glitch in the otherwise traditional textile.]