CLITSO DEDMAN, NAVAJO CARVER His Art and His World

CLITSO DEDMAN, NAVAJO CARVER His Art and His World

by Rebecca M. Valett

University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln

Hardback, first edition 2023. 262 pages, profusely illustrated in black-and-white and color.

Rebecca M. Valette is a professor emerita of Romance languages at Boston College and an internationally recognized expert in language methodology, testing, and applied linguistics. She and her husband, Jean-Paul Valette, have curated several exhibitions of Navajo textiles.

They are co-authors of Weaving the Dance: Navajo Yeibichai Textiles (1910-1950) and Navajo Weavings with Ceremonial Themes: A Historical Overview of a Secular Art Form.

From the flyleaf

Rebecca Valette's Clitso Dedman, Navajo Carver is the first biography of artist Clitso Dedman (1876-1953), one of the most important but overlooked Diné (Navajo) artists of his generation. Dedman was born to a traditional Navajo family in Chinle, Arizona, and herded sheep as a child. He was educated in the late 1880s and early 1890s at the Fort Defiance Indian School, then at the Teller Institute in Grand Junction, Colorado. After graduation Dedman moved to Gallup, New Mexico, where he worked in the machine shop of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway before opening his first of three Navajo trading posts in Rough Rock, Arizona. After tragedy struck his life in 1915, he moved back to Chinle and abruptly changed careers to become a blacksmith and builder.

At age sixty, suffering from arthritis, Dedman turned his creative talent to wood carving, thus initiating a new Navajo art form. Although the neighboring Hopis had been carving Kachina dolls for generations, the Navajos traditionally avoided any permanent reproductions of their Holy People, and even of human figures. Dedman was the first to ignore this proscription, and for the rest of his life he focused on creating wooden sculptures of the various participants in the Yeibichai dance, which closed the Navajo Nightway ceremony. These secular carvings were immediately purchased and sold to tourists by regional Indian traders. Today Dedman's distinctive and highly regarded work can be found in private collections, galleries, and museums, such as the Navajo Nation Museum at Window Rock, the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, and the Arizona State Museum in Tucson. Clitso Dedman, Navajo Carver, with its extensive illustrations, is the story of a remarkable and underrecognized figure of twentieth-century Navajo artistic creation and innovation.