Book - Weaving the Dance, Navajo Yeibichai Textiles (1910-1950) [SOLD]

WEAVING THE DANCE—Navajo Yeibichai Textiles (1910-1950)

Rebecca M. Valette and Jean-Paul Valette

Publishers: Adobe Gallery in association with University of Washington Press

Softcover, first edition, 2000. Autographed by both authors and assistance acknowledged to Al Anthony

72 pages with over 40 color illustrations

Weaving The Dance is the first book to focus exclusively on the early development of a special category of twentieth-century Navajo textiles known as Yeibichai weavings.  These weavings are artistic interpretations of the Yeibichai dance, a sacred rite that provides a spectacular conclusion to the nine-day Navajo ceremony known as the Nightway.  Yeibichai textiles were never intended for ceremonial use, but were produced exclusively for sale to an Anglo clientele willing to pay premium prices for them.  Like other textiles featuring ceremonial figures, their appearance in the first decade of the twentieth century nevertheless created controversy among Navajos since traditional beliefs strongly prohibit the reproduction of sacred figures outside a ceremonial context.  By the 1930s, scholars were dismissing these novel weavings as bad examples of tourist art and writing them off as a “passing fad.”  Despite this dire prediction, weavings with ceremonial figures continued to be produced and now constitute a recognized and well-established category of Navajo textiles.

Because of their rarity and their intriguing theme, the first Navajo weavings to feature stylized ceremonial figures in their designs captured the imagination of wealthy collectors.  William Randolph Hearst, for example, purchased two such rugs to complement his extensive collection of classic (pre-1870) Navajo blankets. Collectors of Yeibichai weavings include personalities as diverse as Marjorie Meriwether Post, the cereal businesswoman and philanthropist, and Chee Dodge, the Navajo leader who became the first chairman of the Tribal Council in 1923.

Today, early Yeibichai weavings are appreciated not for their ceremonial themes, but for their originality, beauty and relative scarcity.  This book traces the stylistic evolution of the genre from the highly original and complex designs created in the 1910-1935 period, to the more standardized patterns which emerged in the late 1930s and 1940s.