— Ceremonial —
Jimmy Abeita: Navajo artist made history
by changing genre’s style

Viewers and vendors gather Wednesday for preview night for the 87th Annual Gallup Inter-tribal Indian Ceremonial at Red Rock State Park. [photo by Jeffery Jones- Special for the Independent]

By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — One of the joys of going to the 87th Inter-tribal Indian Ceremonial is that you meet such interesting people in the exhibit hall.

People like Jimmy Abeita.

Back in 1972, Abeita and the Ceremonial made history.

That was the year the Ceremonial bestowed on Abeita its Grand Prize Award for his painting “Navajo Peyotism,” which showed the weathered hand of a Navajo medicine man holding a peyote fan.

Abeita is one of the vendors at this year’s Ceremonial with a booth in the main exhibit hall. Visitors and collectors of fine Navajo art can stop by and visit an artist who not only has won a cart load of Ceremonial ribbons over the years but in 2006 was chosen as a “Living Treasure” by the Ceremonial Association.

He said when he submitted that painting he had no idea what kind of response it would receive because it wasn’t in the mold of the Beatien Yazz-type flat traditional painting that had dominated the awards in past years. Instead, Abeita went for Navajo realism and changed the way a lot of Americans view Navajo art.

If you stop by the booth, he’ll show you a book with a photo of that 1972 award-winning painting in it. The painting that year sold for $900; today, he said, it would probably be worth between $8,000 to $10,000, assuming you could get the owner to part with it.

That happens a lot, he said. Paintings he did 20 or 30 years ago and sold to people for a few hundred dollars are now fetching prices 10 times that amount or more.

His paintings from that era also started a trend among young Navajo artists who began submitting their own paintings in the Abeita style, showing portraits of wrinkled Navajo elders or majestic landscapes of Monument Valley.

He said he doesn’t mind that. What he does mind and what he comes across every now and then are people who do something in his style and then sign his name.

“People come up to me and show me a painting with my name on it and I have to tell them that it wasn’t one of mine,” he said.

On the other side of the exhibit hall is the booth for Clear Light Publishing, where Harmon Houghton, the company’s founder, is surrounded by Native American books his company has published.

He’s been coming to the Ceremonial now, off and on, for the past several years and said it’s a wonderful place just to “meet and greet” people and make them aware of what his company has been doing to fill the Native American art niche since its founding in 1981.

At its peak, Clear Light published between 24 and 30 books annually, but today he averages about 10. While the publishing market as a whole has suffered in recent years because of the Internet and the growing popularity of video games among the young, he said niche companies like his still do well.

Business has been somewhat slow so far, Houghton said Friday afternoon, but he expects it to pick up considerably on Saturday when the tourists flock to Red Rock Park looking for some good buys.

“What I like about the Ceremonial,” he said, “is that it’s not a frantic show.”

Instead of masses of people crowded together in a frenzy of buying, the Ceremonial show is more laid back.

“You have an opportunity to meet people and talk to them and take your time,” he said.