Frank Stella’s Personal Collection of Navajo Textiles Goes on View for the First Time

A selection of Navajo textiles from the collection of minimalist icon Frank Stella is being made available to collectors.

After gatecrashing the art world with his Black Paintings as a young 20-something, Stella began building his personal collection in the mid-to-late 1960s. He was introduced to the world of Navajo art through Donald Judd, who had taken him to meet Tony Berlant, a Los Angeles-based artist with a growing collection of blankets and weavings. There, they traded a work of their own for a blanket.

Berlant would duly supply the likes of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Tony Smith as well as co-organize “The Navajo Blanket,” a seminal 1972 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that offered the textiles as art works rather than mere ethnographic artifacts.

One of the works that Stella lent for the touring exhibition—a large, loosely woven 19th-century blanket—will be on show at Arader Galleries on New York’s Upper East Side later this month, as the late artist’s collection, which he lived with and amassed over the course of decades, is put up for sale. All 55 textiles in Stella’s trove will be on view, marking the first time his collection is shown in full. Priced at between $6,500 and $25,000 each, the works will later travel to Peter Pap Rugs in Dublin, New Hampshire, for a showing in June.

Stella’s textiles largely date from the late 19th and early 20th century. The period saw the Diné women responsible for Navajo weaving express individual artistic freedom through new colors and untested design combinations. By the late 1800s, new synthetic dyes made from the byproducts of coal and oil were pouring into the American southwest and the weavers began experimenting with new color combinations that led to optical illusions and abstract designs. Known as Transitional Era weavings, they have generally been overlooked by academics in favor of earlier Classical period work (1800 to 1885), and later Trading Post work (c. 1895 to 1940).

“This originality has confounded Navajo weaving scholars for more than a century as Diné textile scholarship looks for cultural generalization over creative impulse,” Jill Alhberg-Yohe, a Navajo weaving expert and curator at the Cafesjian Art Trust Museum in Minnesota, wrote in research accompanying the exhibition. “The more unusual and individualistic a textile is, the less attention it gets paid.”

Stella, however, was anything but confounded. A single glance and it’s easy to see why. They share a visual vocabulary with edge-to-edge color, graphic stripes, and the use of zig-zags to create a sense of movement. He had a particular affinity for textiles boasting horizontal bands, which echo his monumental paintings from the 1960s. Elsewhere, the use of undyed white woolen yarn often acts like a primed white canvas, the weavers’ very own negative space.

“Frank Stella’s collection of Diné (Navajo) textiles is an artist’s collection,” Alhberg-Yohe added. “Filled with textiles of boundless experimentation and creativity, the Navajo weavings Stella collected reveal a visual conversation happening between artists across time and place.”