Diné - Navajo Cutout Female and Brown Horse [SOLD]

The traditional perception of Navajo folk art is weavings and silver and turquoise jewelry, but the contemporary artists of the Navajo Nation produce wood carvings, sun-dried mud toys, fired pottery, pictorial weavings and cardboard cutout figurines.  It is the latter category that is of interest to us here.

Mamie Deschillie, an older Navajo woman, born in 1920, created a new folk art style in the 1980s that has made her one of the “superstars” of Navajo folk art.  Using found materials, she created cardboard cutouts of people and animals, painted the cardboard, dressed the figures in scraps of material lying around, and used paints left over from other purposes.  She was an innovator and true folk art artist. 

Her entry into the folk are market was a result of a trip to the trading post to pawn some of her jewelry for needed funds.  The trader asked her if she had any items from her childhood to bring in to pawn.  She did not, but remembered playing with mud toys so she made some mud toys and took them to the trader and a new endeavor blossomed for her.

From mud toys, she created cardboard cutouts which brings us to this posting.  One of Mamie’s cardboard cutouts features a Navajo female, dressed in a velvet blouse and prairie skirt and embellished with Navajo-like jewelry, perched on a brown horse, all made from a piece of corrugated cardboard and decorated with materials and paint.  She made these cardboard cutouts famous and they made her famous.

Condition:  very good condition.

Provenance: from the extensive collection of a Santa Fe resident who is unfortunately moving to another city and found it necessary to greatly reduce her collection.

Recommended Reading:  The People Speak: Navajo Folk Art by Chuck and Jan Rosenak