Linda Lomahaftewa

Artwork Dawn Reno writes of Linda's work that, "She unites the ancient Indian world with the contemporary in her modernistic paintings and has done a series of abstract landscapes which are considered the most powerful in her body of work."

Although best known for her printmaking, Ribbon Shirt, her contribution to the major traveling exhibit, Indian Humor, is a typical contemporary ribbon shirt bedecked with an array of medals, buttons, and award ribbons from various Native American art shows.

In response to viewing the retrospective exhibition of Lomahaftewa's work, The Moving Land: 60+ Years of Art by Linda Lomahaftewa, art writer Michael Abatemarco observed, "The landscape orientation is an ever-present aspect, as is a collage-like use of representational imagery. The show includes rare pieces from the start of her career, like an untitled acrylic photo transfer from the late 1960s that shows the unmistakable likeness of Beatles drummer Ringo Star amidst a confluence of abstract shapes and lines in liquid movement. But a clear division between the swarming shapes and an open upper portion, where more figures take on less vibrant and more corporeal form than those in the lower portion of the composition, suggests the separation of earth and sky."

Career and honors alt=Entrance to the exhibition, showing the title, curatorial statement, and four 2D artworks. Installation view of the 2021 exhibition of "The Moving Land: 60+ Years of Art by Linda Lomahaftewa" at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, featuring works created in 2019.alt=Abstract expressionist paintings in bright colors hanging on the museum wall. Installation view of the 2021 exhibition of "The Moving Land: 60+ Years of Art by Linda Lomahaftewa" at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. These paintings were created during the artist's time in San Francisco during the early 1970s. She has participated in innumerable group and solo exhibits including those at the American Indian Contemporary Art gallery in San Francisco; the Heard Museum in Phoenix; the American Indian Community House in New York City; and the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe.

Via Gambaro Gallery, which was launched by Retha Walden Gambaro and Stephen Gambaro to spotlight contemporary Native American artists, included Lomahaftewa's work in its 1980 National American Indian Women's Art Show.

She was listed in the 8th Edition of the International Who's Who in 1984. Her work can be found in such public collections at the Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona; the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, Santa Fe, New Mexico; the Millicent Rogers Museum, Taos, New Mexico; the US Department of the Interior, Indian Arts and Crafts Board, Washington, DC; the Southern Plains Indian Museum, Anadarko, Oklahoma; the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada; the Native American Center for the Living Arts, Niagara Falls, New York; and the Center for the Arts of Indian America, Washington, DC.

Linda began teaching at Sonoma State University and later at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1976, she accepting a position teaching two-dimensional studio arts at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where she taught for more than forty years before retiring.

Linda Lomahaftewa was a participant in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art Pandemic Oral History Project in September 2020. The oral history series recorded responses to the global pandemic across the American art world. Conducted virtually, the Pandemic Oral History Project featured eighty-five short-form interviews with a diverse group of artists, teachers, curators, and administrators, including Linda Lomahaftewa.

Personal Linda has a son, Logan L. Slock, and a daughter, Tatiana Lomahaftewa-Singer, who is the curator of collections at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts. Her first cousins Roger and Marcus Amerman are internationally known Choctaw beadworkers. 2024: Space Makers: Indigenous Expression and a New American Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR 2023–24: The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC 2021: The Moving Land: 60+ Years of Art by Linda Lomahaftewa, IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, NM 2012: Low-Rez: Native American Lowbrow Art, Eggman and Walrus Art Emporium, Santa Fe, NM 2012: Octopus Dreams: 200 Works on Paper by Native American Artists, Ekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts

Public collections Heard Museum Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian