Frank Stella’s Navajo Textile Collection Exhibited for the First Time
For the first time, the private collection of Navajo textiles belonging to the late minimalist icon Frank Stella is being exhibited and offered for sale. The complete trove of 55 weavings, acquired over decades, reveals the profound visual dialogue between Stella’s own abstract investigations and the work of 19th-century Diné weavers. The collection focuses on the experimental “Transitional Era,” a period of bold innovation in color and pattern. The graphic stripes, geometric forms, and edge-to-edge color that Stella prized in these works echo the core tenets of his own celebrated paintings, illustrating a shared language of abstraction across cultures and time.
The stark abstractions of Frank Stella find an unexpected dialogue in the vibrant geometries of 19th-century Navajo weaving. For the first time, the late artist’s private collection of these textiles, amassed over decades but kept out of public view, is being exhibited in its entirety and offered for sale. Numbering 55 pieces, the collection reveals a profound aesthetic affinity between one of Minimalism’s titans and the anonymous Diné women who created these works.
Stella’s engagement with Navajo art began in the mid-to-late 1960s, initiated by his fellow artist Donald Judd. It was Judd who introduced Stella to Tony Berlant, a Los Angeles-based artist and passionate collector of Navajo blankets. A trade was made—one of Stella's own works for a weaving—and a lifelong fascination began. Berlant would become a key conduit, supplying textiles to artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and co-organizing the seminal 1972 exhibition “The Navajo Blanket” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which decisively positioned these works as fine art rather than ethnographic artifacts.
The majority of Stella’s textiles date from the late 19th and early 20th century, a period known as the Transitional Era. This was a time of dynamic experimentation, as the arrival of synthetic dyes from coal and oil byproducts in the American Southwest gave Diné weavers access to a radical new palette. They embraced it with immense creative freedom, producing unusual color combinations and abstract designs that resulted in powerful optical effects.
This very originality, however, led mainstream textile scholarship to largely overlook the Transitional Era in favor of the more codified preceding Classical period or the later Trading Post era. Yet for Stella, this individualism was magnetic. The visual vocabulary shared with his own practice is unmistakable: edge-to-edge color, bold graphic stripes, and zig-zag patterns that generate a sense of potent movement. The horizontal bands in many of the weavings directly echo the monumental stripe paintings he was creating in the 1960s. Furthermore, the weavers' use of undyed white wool as negative space functions much like a primed canvas, a concept deeply familiar to a painter's sensibility.
As Jill Ahlberg Yohe, a curator and leading expert on Navajo weaving, writes in research accompanying the exhibition, “Frank Stella’s collection of Diné (Navajo) textiles is an artist’s collection.” It is defined not by academic criteria but by an eye for boundless creativity and formal invention. The collection, Yohe adds, reveals a “visual conversation happening between artists across time and place.”
The full collection, with prices ranging from $6,500 to $25,000, will be on view at Arader Galleries in New York from May 15 to June 10. It will then travel to Peter Pap Rugs in Dublin, New Hampshire, for a showing from June 20 to July 7. The presentation offers a rare glimpse into the private aesthetic world of an artist who saw the power of abstraction in its purest forms.
Source: Artnet News