Jimmy Abeita
Navajo
Jim Abeita is a traditional painter of the Navajo people and the reservation landscape. Jim was born in Crownpoint, Arizona in 1947. Before Abeita could write his name, he was drawing objects that were familiar. While still in grade school, he would stand a horse against a flat rock and trace the horse's shadow on the rock, then fill in the details.
He lived in Salt Lake City with a Mormon foster family during high school. They gave him his first set of paints and brushes. While there, he met Hannah, another Navajo living with a foster family. She was to become the love of his life and the one who got his career off of the ground.
In high school in Gallup, New Mexico, and Salt Lake City, he won student art honors and later attended the American Academy of Art in Chicago, completing a two year course in nine months. In 1972, when he had been in Chicago for five years, he decided that he wanted to come home to the reservation for the uncomplicated ways.
He was impressed when his wife fished them out of the garbage and sold them. Having been born and raised on the Navajo Reservation, he was exposed all his young life to the ways of Navajo families living and raising sheep in Canyon de Chelly, that beautiful canyon, sometimes called the Little Grand Canyon. His treatments of the landscape and the people of the canyon are unmistakably accurate. Abeita's art is distinctly distinguished by accurate and meticulous rendering of detail. He paints everything exactly as he sees it. He paints the world of the Diné, their ways and places with a true sense of their identity. No other Indian artist paints the Diné people, horses, and action like Jim Abeita.
Abeita has won major awards in Indian art shows and no longer enters many competitions.
