For a little background, Cheyenne Jim is a Navajo, despite her name, who was raised on the Navajo Nation reservation following her birth in 1957. With a rich Navajo cultural tradition, reportedly going back to her childhood, when she is said to have been deeply impressed by a Yei Be Chei ceremony she attended with her Grandmother, a Navajo medicine woman.
Her choice of clay (often mica), her choice of subject matter (variations on the storyteller tradition) and her style of representation to be quintessentially Native American.
Her years as an art student at Bacone College in Muskogee, OK, appear to have influenced her artistic perspectives without seriously changing her original Navajo artistic sensibilities.
As these other Cheyenne Jim creations in our collection demonstrate, she has a style that is both very easy to empathize with and very distinctly hers.
