The Three Rivers, 2021

Wool and aniline dye
© Melissa Cody; courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York. Photo courtesy of Garth Greenan Gallery.

Melissa Cody is a fourth-generation Diné (Navajo) textile artist who began weaving at the age of five. As a child, she watched her mother, Lola Cody, and her grandmother Martha Schultz work at the loom. Cody specializes in the Germantown Revival style, based on a traditional Diné manner of weaving that dates to the period of the so-called Long Walk—the United States government’s attempted ethnic cleansing of the Diné people between 1864 and 1866, in which the Diné were deported from their land in present-day Arizona to an internment camp in Bosque Redondo, New Mexico. Supplied with medium-weight yarn that had been commercially milled in Germantown, Pennsylvania—significantly, in a range of colors previously unavailable to them through natural dyeing processes—Diné weavers created brightly colored textiles in their own styles. In The Three Rivers, Cody reinterprets established Germantown styles with geometric overlays and plays with scale, asymmetry, and curvature to enhance the dimensionality of the design, incorporating patterns reminiscent of the pixelated design of from video games she played growing up in the 1980s, such as Pac-Man and Pong. Melding tradition with ingenious remappings of digital pop culture, Cody’s dazzling tapestries transform visual experience into a playful melange of past and present.