Marlowe Katoney

Based in Winslow, Arizona, Katoney trained as a painter at the University of Arizona before turning to the fiber arts. Largely self-taught as a weaver, Katoney’s textiles underscore his knowledge of composition, color relationships and value. His works borrow from his classical education as well as a multitude of cultural influences. Katoney regularly employs traditional Navajo iconography and makes allusions to both Navajo culture and history and popular culture, with references to Japanese anime, street art, and Western modernist abstraction. His work bridges weaving and contemporary art, but also acknowledges that Navajo abstraction predates that of modern Western art. Weaving is a meditative activity for the artist. Each textile is created with a single warp, which is not cut until the tapestry is complete. As Katoney weaves the threads up and down, creating the textile often through trial and error, he contemplates what each symbol, icon or figure means—not only in its historic and contemporary contexts, but to him as an individual as well. These textiles thus are his interpretations of many different inherited visual languages, woven into new, more personal narratives.