Linda Lomahaftewa

Linda Lomahaftewa
Linda Lomahaftewa, 2009
Born	1947 Phoenix, Arizona, United States
Nationality	Hopi Tribe of Arizona-Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma
Education	BFA and MFA San Francisco Art Institute, Institute of American Indian Arts
Known for	painting, printmaking
Awards	Robert Rauschenberg Foundation's Power of Art Award (2001)
Website	http://www.lindalomahaftewa.com

Linda Lomahaftewa (born 1947) is a Hopi and Choctaw printmaker, painter, and educator living in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Linda J. Lomahaftewa was born July 3, 1947 in Phoenix, Arizona. Her parents had met at an Indian boarding school. Her late father was Hopi, her mother, who lives in Arizona, is Choctaw from Oklahoma. She and her family lived in Phoenix and Los Angeles, California.

She attended a strict mission boarding school in 1961 but transferred to Phoenix Indian School, then the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1962, the year the school opened. Upon graduation from IAIA, Linda earned a scholarship to attend the San Francisco Art Institute in San Francisco, California, along with fellow artists, T.C. Cannon, Kevin Red Star, and Bill Prokopiof. Of the four, only Linda graduated from SFAI. After earning her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, she went on to earn her Master of Fine Arts degrees at SFAI in 1971.

Dawn Reno writes of Linda's work that, "She unites the ancient Indian world with the contemporary in her modernistic paintings and has done a series of abstract landscapes which are considered the most powerful in her body of work." Of her own art, she writes that her "imagery comes from being Hopi and remembering shapes and colors from ceremonies and from landscape. I associate a special power and respect, a sacredness, with these colors and shapes, and this carries over into my work."

Although best known for her printmaking, Ribbon Shirt, her contribution to the major traveling exhibit, Indian Humor, is a typical contemporary ribbon shirt bedecked with an array of medals, buttons, and award ribbons from various Native American art shows.

She has participated in innumerable group and solo exhibits including those at the American Indian Contemporary Art gallery in San Francisco; the Heard Museum in Phoenix; the American Indian Community House in New York City; and the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe.