On December 6, 2004, Navajo pictorial weaver Isabel John and her husband Frank were driving from their home at Many Farms, Arizona, to Farmington, New Mexico, to deliver some paperwork for a new truck they had purchased the day before.
They would have mailed the papers normally, but it was a nice day. Isabel had sold a rug for a record amount the day before, and they decided to drive and enjoy the trip.
A drunk driver hit their truck that day, and Frank and Isabel were killed.
Isabel John is synonymous with quality pictorial weaving. She was a woman who wove fewer Navajo rugs in her lifetime than a skilled watercolor artist can produce in six months, yet had achieved unique fame as a Navajo weaver.
Anyone who knew much about Navajo weaving could recognize one of her pieces from across a room. I bought and sold most of Isabel's weavings during the last years of her life.
She had pieces in the Denver Art Museum, the Birmingham Museum of Art, and the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian. She was honored as the guest artist at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe opening, and had won blue ribbons at the Gallup Intertribal Ceremonial. One of her pictorials was featured in the Lost and Found Traditions exhibit, which toured the United States and Europe. She is the only contemporary artist to have her work featured on the cover of a Sotheby's catalog.
Top collectors purchased her works, including Western author Louis L'Amour.
Isabel spoke very little English, but every dealer knew she was a formidable negotiator. When she was killed in her early 70s, Isabel knew the value of her work and was proud of what she was accomplishing.
The first major pictorial weaving that Isabel completed was finished in 1973. She took the beautiful pastoral scene to Dennehotso Trading Post in Arizona, near where she lived, to show it to the trader, Walter Kennedy.
Kennedy was gone that day, which was a rarity, according to his son Ivan, who had just started working at the trading post.
"I bought that rug for $3000.00, which was a lot of money back then. My dad came home and got really upset. He told me there wasn't a rug in the world worth $3,000! He was mad," said Ivan.
"But that rug was one of the only ones he kept until he died. He put it in his private museum!" he said. "Later on, I bought another one from her for the same amount, and he didn't get quite so upset."
From there, she created a career that few Navajo weavers can match."She got to where all she had to do was call a trading post or a gallery and ask if they wanted her rug, and they always said yes," said Ivan, who is retired and now lives in Kirtland, New Mexico.
She and her daughter-in-law, Geanita, were the subjects of a film made by the Denver Museum of Natural History on Navajo weaving. Isabel's work was featured in a major show at the Wheelwright Museum in Santa Fe.
Geanita's life was upended when her husband died in a car accident just the year before Isabel and Frank died. She stepped away from weaving for nearly a decade. Her accomplishments have been widely recognized with commissions from the Music in the Mountains Festival and inclusion in the Durango Collection at the Center of Southwest Studies.
When she returned to weaving, Geanita committed herself to continuing Isabel's legacy of telling the story of traditional Navajo life. You will never see a pickup or anything modern in her work. Still, her efforts to differentiate herself from Isabel's style while staying true to this theme allow her to incorporate borders with blanket designs and symbols from the Yei weavings that her mother used to make.
She also uses hand-spun wool from her mother's flock, leaving it with a slightly rough texture that contrasts with the smooth look of her earlier work.
"It feels good to be weaving again,"
she says. "I want people to enjoy my work as much as I enjoy weaving."
