Legendary Linda Lomahaftewa At Fresno Art Museum

Linda Lomahaftewa.

Legend.

The Hopi-Choctaw artist born in 1947 has been at the vanguard of contemporary Native American art since enrolling as a member of the first class of 140 students at the Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe, NM in 1962. IAIA was a high school then. Lomahaftewa was coming from Phoenix. Her mother had heard about the school opening and encouraged young Linda to apply.

IAIA was founded on the radical idea of teaching budding Native American artists from across the country a combination of contemporary art trends and techniques, art history, and tribal cultural histories. Students were encouraged to incorporate their specific cultural practices and heritage into artworks, but push that artwork away from what had traditionally been marginalized as “Indian Art”–palatable for sale to Anglo tourists and collectors–toward the avant-garde of contemporary art.

“The future of Indian art lies in the future, not in the past,” IAIA founder Lloyd Kiva New (1916–2002; Cherokee) said.

Did it ever.

Even a visionary the stature of New was likely surprised at the success his school’s students would go on to achieve. Joining Lomahaftewa in that first class of IAIA students were fellow future legends of Native American and American art: T.C. Cannon, Earl Biss, Kevin Red Star.

Artists who’d put work in museums. Artists who’d sell millions of dollars of art in galleries. Artists who’d redefined “Indian Art” and American art. Artists upon whose shoulders the current generation of Native American contemporary art superstars like Jeffrey Gibson, Rose B. Simpson, Wendy Red Star, and Cara Romero stand.

After leaving IAIA, Lomahaftewa and many of her classmates would head to San Francisco. The San Francisco Art Institute was then offering promising Native students full scholarships. Lomahaftewa, Cannon, Red Star, Earl Eder, Henry Gobin and others took their chances.

“It was a whole new experience for me,” Lomahaftewa told Forbes.com. “Even though I grew up in Phoenix, I wasn’t used to a big city; 18 years old, first time away from home kind of thing. It was scary.”

Her IAIA friends helped her stick it out.

“There were no dorms or anything, we had to find our own housing, but knowing that once I got to campus I was going to run into those guys and it would be okay–we all shared the same experience,” Lomahaftewa remembers.

Lomahaftewa would graduate from SFAI with both her undergraduate and graduate degrees. That was a rarity. She can only recall Jim St. Martin and Eder as fellow IAIA classmates to graduate from SFAI. College in the big city wasn’t a fit for most. Many, like Cannon, went to Vietnam.

Lomahaftewa spent 11 years in San Francisco, from 1965 through 1976. After earning her degrees, she taught at SFAI and then the University of California, Berkeley. Making art the whole time.

The artwork she made in San Francisco is the focus of an exhibition on view through January 11, 2026, at the Fresno Art Museum. Also featured are recent paintings.

Linda Lomahaftewa In San Francisco

Lomahaftewa’s time in San Francisco coincided with a remarkable era in Bay Area history. This was the era of activism. Anti-war. Counter culture. Black Panthers. The Chicano Movement. The American Indian Movement and its famous occupation of Alcatraz from 1969 through 1971. Lomahaftewa attended a powwow on Alcatraz during the occupation and contributed artwork to AIM shows, but remained primarily focused on her studies.

It was also a remarkable time in San Francisco art history.

“At the time of Lomahaftewa’s move, West Coast art became established, giving the New York art scene a run for its money for the first time,” Michele Ellis Pracy, exhibition curator, Fresno Art Museum Executive Director and Chief Curator, writes in her curatorial statement for the exhibition. “The Bay Area Figurative and Funk Art Movements dominated West Coast artistic expression in the 1960s and 1970s.”

The Chicano Movement shared its message through vibrant murals across the Bay Area. Psychedelic gig posters for Joplin, Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, and the Grateful Dead would create an indelible aesthetic for the time.

The diverse student makeup she found at SFAI reminded her of IAIA.

“The variety of students that were at the Art Institute, they came from all over, just like at IAIA. Students came from tribes all over and we all learned from each other. At the Art Institute, it was the same thing,” Lomahaftewa said. “Not everyone was from California, some people came from other countries; learning about other people, other cultures as well.”

Lomahaftewa absorbed all of this, as well as the dominant Euro-American academic techniques and styles she was learning in class, while remaining honest to her roots in her artmaking.

“In the paintings on view… Lomahaftewa expresses her love for her native land, its vegetation, and its color,” Ellis Pracy continues in her curatorial statement. “She weaves her imagery on the picture plane with compositions placed flat on the foreground and composed of overlapping Indigenous iconography. These works could not be more different from the West Coast movements that dominated the Bay Area art scene. Her paintings and prints sing to us with shapes, colors, and symbolism intrinsic to her People. Her work is a celebration and an homage honoring her native ancestry.”

Back Home

Lomahaftewa made the most of her time in San Francisco, but it would never be her forever home. Wanting to raise her two young children closer to their Hopi heritage, she moved back to the Southwest.

The inaugural class member at IAIA would go on to teach at the school, which had since become a college, from 1976 to 2017, influencing generations of Native artists.

The incubator of Native talent was in the news for all the wrong reasons this summer when Donald Trump, as part of his regime’s war on higher education, proposed eliminating all federal funding for the school, the only institution of its kind dedicated to the study of contemporary Native American and Alaska Native arts.

“No, that can’t happen. That absolutely cannot happen,” Lomahaftewa thought when she heard the news. “We’ll find a way to fight this.”

Fight it they did. A Congressional appropriations bill appears to secure most, but not nearly all, of the federal funding IAIA was seeking for 2026.

IAIA students take what they learn in Santa Fe and bring that knowledge and awareness to all of America, not just Native America. The entire world, in fact, through their artwork.

“The students that come to IAIA, when they learn about themselves, and can express (that) through their art, can go out and teach that as well, through their art, about their culture,” Lomahaftewa said. “That’s what I say too about doing the (Indian) markets. Go to any artist at any booth or any show and when you ask them what their artwork is about, they can tell you their history, which is their culture.”

Native artists, unlike other contemporary artists, are required to be more than simple artist, they are required to be cultural historian and tribal historian. They are constantly questioned about the intention and meaning of their artwork in ways other artists are not.

Indigenous people have been questioned–and much worse–since European colonizers first stepped foot on what is now called North America. Their artworks and artists, like Lomahaftewa, have always provided answers, and strength. Strength again needed now in tremendous measure.

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