{"id":25781,"date":"2014-06-04T22:27:44","date_gmt":"2014-06-05T04:27:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=25781"},"modified":"2025-10-24T12:39:26","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T19:39:26","slug":"walking-in-beauty-denae-shanidiin-at-mestizo-arts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/walking-in-beauty-denae-shanidiin-at-mestizo-arts\/","title":{"rendered":"Walking in Beauty: Denae Shanidiin at Mestizo Arts"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"denaeblog\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Emerging artist Denae Shanidiin, 21, wishes the emphasis wasn\u2019t so much on \u201cNavajo\u201d for her show currently at Mestizo Gallery. \u201cBecause you call someone a Navajo artist and people expect traditional. I wish I were traditional, but I\u2019m not,\u201d she says with a smile. \u201cI just don\u2019t think that\u2019s realistic in this day and age.\u201d Tribal elders, she adds, urge traditional ways, \u201cbut if I were a traditional artist I wouldn\u2019t be able to make these photographs.\u00a0 . . . I don\u2019t do traditional pottery. I want to be myself first.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, observes Hikmet Sidney Loe, who taught Shanidiin in several art history classes at Westminster College where the artist is currently a student, \u201cDenae showed a deep interest in the materials of art and their historical use (particularly in photography and ceramics) and developed creative projects rooted in her great compassion towards people and their unique origins.\u201d
\nThis small but engaging exhibition contains 19 photographs, a group of superb hand-built and smoke-fired sculptures and a mixed-media board describing the healing peyote ceremony that was conducted for her beloved grandfather following a heart attack and stroke.\u00a0 It may be many viewers\u2019 first opportunity to see a rare eagle feather, a ritual fan, photos of the teepee and the \u201cbefore and after\u201d of an all-night Good Way Ceremony, though images of the actual Native American Church meeting are, of course, not presented.<\/p>\n

The artist has five siblings, all sisters. Only one, Priscilla, will willingly model and the most compelling photographs in the exhibition are a series in color of her in her various perceived roles as a woman warrior, as herself and as a sister. Shanidiin used a TLR, Yashica Mat medium format camera, an artist\u2019s eye and a photojournalist\u2019s straightforward composition for these and many of the other images presented. (Her other camera is a Voightlander Bessa-R3A Rangefinder.) \u201cI really like the classic photo,\u201d says Shanidiin. \u201cA lot of my photographs are classically composed: there is the subject right in front of you, there\u2019s hardly any abstractness to the composition. It\u2019s just very literal, very readable.\u201d Besides working digitally, she prints traditionally in the darkroom on silver gelatin and the majority of the photographs in the show are black and white portraiture of family members (her grandparents, taken in front of the hogan; her sister curled up in the pickup bed with a load of cedar).<\/p>\n

She based her exhibition, titled\u00a0Ho\u2019zho\u2019ogo naasha\u2019a doo<\/em>\u00a0(I Will Walk in Beauty), around a Navajo prayer, that she made a few changes to, asking one to do all things in beauty.<\/p>\n

\n

On the trail blessed with pollen may I walk;
\nWith grasshoppers about my feet may I walk;
\nWith dew around my feet may I walk.
\nWith beauty before me may I walk
\nWith beauty behind me may I walk
\nWith beauty above me may I walk
\nWith beauty all around me,
\nmay I walk.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

She points out that while there\u2019s a lot of context behind her images, \u201cI like to take photos for the actual beauty of the photo.\u201d<\/p>\n

Born in Fort Defiance near the Navajo Nation capital of Window Rock, AZ, Shanidiin (who is also a quarter Korean and a quarter white) moved with her mother to Sandy as a small child but frequently visits her grandparents on the reservation. She attended Jordan High School where she studied art under Leah Smith and ceramics with Jared Ward.<\/p>\n

Her hand-built sculpture here is a showstopper. Five elegant, abstracted women, some adorned with jewelry created by the artist and all with traditional Navajo buns, accompany a photo of a puberty ceremony. After these pieces were bisque fired, the artist put them in a barrel outside with \u201call this debris: wood chips, weeds, anything\u201d \u2013 and then \u201cjust torched it,\u201d creating wonderful patterns on the figures.<\/p>\n

It was when she started college that Shanidiin began to resent not knowing Navajo or much about her culture. \u201cMy mother lost the language when she went to college, so I never learned it,\u201d she says, and that is something she is trying to remedy, though finding it very difficult. (She says her generation, for the most part, never learned Navajo, but that the generation growing up now is being taught the language.) She is studying her clans and learning all the many stories that make up her heritage and that is what her artwork has been about: \u201cYou have such a connection to home, such a connection to land. I\u2019m learning new things that I never even knew about the Navajo. And it\u2019s just clicked. It\u2019s already in me. So I think making art is my way of processing all of that, my way of fulfilling that need \u2013 that little part of me that\u2019s missing,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Shanidiin works as the artist for Harmon\u2019s in Draper and does a lot of sign painting and chalk art. She enjoys her job, but sometimes thinks about her traditional great grandmother, who wove beautiful rugs. \u201cI wish I had that as a Navajo woman. Maybe a little bit later in life,\u201d she says. \u00a0\u201cThere\u2019s time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n
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\n\"Teepee,
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\n\"Priscilla,
\n<\/a><\/dt>\n<\/dl>\n
\n

\n\"Denae
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\n\"Denae
\n<\/a><\/dt>\n<\/dl>\n
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\n\"Denae
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\n\"Denae
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\n\"Denae
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\n\"Denae
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\n\"Denae
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\n\"Denae
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\n\"Shima
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\n\"Hooghan,
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\n\"Labor
\n<\/a><\/dt>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n

Denae Shanidiin<\/span>\u2018s\u00a0Ho\u2019zho\u2019ogo naasha\u2019a doo<\/em>\u00a0is at\u00a0Mestizo Institute of Culture and Arts | MICA<\/span><\/strong>in Salt Lake City through June 14.<\/p>\n

\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Emerging artist Denae Shanidiin, 21, wishes the emphasis wasn\u2019t so much on \u201cNavajo\u201d for her show currently at Mestizo Gallery. \u201cBecause you call someone a Navajo artist and people expect traditional. I wish I were traditional, but I\u2019m not,\u201d she says with a smile. \u201cI just don\u2019t think […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":844,"featured_media":25852,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,14],"tags":[1970,4362,1385,4361],"class_list":["post-25781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exhibition_reviews","category-visual_arts","tag-danae-shanadiin","tag-mestizo","tag-mestizo-institute-of-culture-and-arts","tag-mica"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/denaeblog.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-07 02:15:06","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/844"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25781"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25781\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97425,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25781\/revisions\/97425"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}