Beginning to Weave It Together

Opening Nov. 5, 2021, on display through Feb. 13, 2022

The Heard Museum exhibition Toward the Morning Sun: Navajo Pictorials from the Jean-Paul and Rebecca Valette Collection is set to open in November. It will feature a little more than half of the 57 pictorial textiles donated to the Heard by Jean-Paul and Rebecca Valette in 2018. The collection includes pictorial textiles with woven images of elements originally depicted solely in sandpaintings, as well as depictions of scenes from the dance portions of multi-day ceremonies, some of which are no longer practiced or not practiced as widely.

The exhibition’s co-curators are Director of Research Ann Marshall and Assistant Curator Velma Kee Craig, and the Mellon Fellows, Roshii Montano and Ninabah Winton. Our third Mellon Fellow, César Bernal, also worked on the exhibition up until June, when he had to leave for Maine to participate in an artist residency. Before his departure, he wrote this short reflection on how his participation in a Master Artist Diné weaving workshop facilitated by Gerard Begay helped him to better understand and appreciate the textiles within the collection. Enjoy!

—VELMA KEE CRAIG, ASSISTANT CURATOR

Beginning to Weave It Together

BY CÉSAR BERNAL | ANDREW W. MELLON FELLOW

César Bernal

Having grown up in Phoenix, it is unfortunate that I never got the opportunity to visit the Heard Museum until I was in college. If I had, I would have encountered the value of weaving much sooner. While studying the visual arts, I learned about and practiced various techniques in artmaking but never tried my hand at starting to weave—until the opportunity presented itself at the museum.

Before coming to the museum as a Mellon Fellow, I understood weaving as a repeated intersection of aligned material. There were horizontal components that, when collectively built upon, constructed an image whose ultimate verticality extended the creative hand of its maker. However, in that perspective there is a lack of understanding, because, as an artist, I recognize that process and personal history hold meaning when creating. Getting to know that process as a whole was what I was missing.

When I first went through the textiles from the Valette Collection with everyone, each unrolling presented an individual process from a weaver, or multiple weavers. Because most of them are pictorial weavings, they hold an array of uses of color; quick, subtle transitions from one to the next to fill a plane; and strands of detail that require a proximity to the textile to see how they play a part in the entirety of the image. When we began to take a closer look at these textiles to determine condition and possible repairs, that interconnectedness of material that I mentioned before rose to the forefront.

It was not until I took a Diné weaving workshop at the Heard Museum this past spring that I was able to deepen my knowledge, past the surface level, on the making of these weavings, their structure, and the personal work of the weavers. Organized by Marcus Monenerkit and Samantha Toledo and led by Gerard Begay, this workshop covered everything from the construction of an upright loom to the practice of different design techniques. Progressing through each week of this month-long workshop, I developed a better understanding on technicality, like how the winding of the warp sets up a foundation for the weaving, how those fields of color and transitions were made, how each component of the process—from batten to tension bar—contributes to the finishing of these textiles, and much more. Now, when unrolling a textile from the collection, I found myself following a weft from right to left and back again until meeting another section, picturing the movement of the weaver as they passed each warp.

By taking a participatory approach to learning more about the medium of weaving, I began to understand the manner in which these textiles were physically made. A weaving was not a simple plane of intersecting material, as I once believed, but rather a carefully constructed system of image-making technology.

Beyond the technical properties of weaving, Gerard’s workshop emphasized an important aspect of the entire process I had not considered before: the connection the maker has with the process and their work. He stressed the importance for a weaver to be in a positive headspace and environment, because that energy radiates and translates onto a work. With that, it is important to recognize not only the results of the process, which is the weaving itself, but also the weavers themselves and the emotional labor this work stems from. This is especially important to acknowledge because most textiles in the collection are attributed to an unidentified artist. Let us not forget who they are and consider the weaver, the artist and their process when meeting these textiles.