Members of the group Artist Hopid in 1977, from left to right: Terrance Talaswaima, Milland Lomakema, Delbridge Honanie, Neil David, Sr. and Michael Kabotie.
Michael Kabotie was a United States artist and writer, who belonged to the Hopi tribe of Arizona. By word and action, poetry and art, Kabotie pointed the way of life as a journey into the mystery of the universe and of one's self within it. His works seem to have emerged from some abstract, elemental dreamtime.
Background
Michael Kabotie was born on September 3, 1942, on the Hopi Indian Reservation in northeastern Arizona, United States. He grew up in the village of Shungopavi. He was a son of Fred Kabotie, an artist, and Alice Kabotie, a basketmaker. It was through his early travel with his father to art shows and museums around the country that Kabotie was inspired to pursue the creative arts for his own life's work.
Education
Michael Kabotie attended school on the reservation until the Hopi high school was closed. He was introduced to jewelry making early while at high school but was also taught and learn from his uncle Paul Saufkie, who trained Hopi silversmiths after the second World War, with Fred Kabotie, Michael's father. His father helped develop many of the overlay techniques that have come to typify quality Hopi silverwork, and Kabotie learned these techniques as a teenager. He graduated from Haskell Indian School (now Haskell Indian Nations University) in Lawrence, Kansas in 1961. While in his junior year there he was invited to spend the summer of 1960 at the Southwest Indian Art Project at the University of Arizona. Participants included Fritz Scholder, Helen Hardin, Charles Loloma, and Joe Hererra, who became his lifelong friend and his primary artist mentor. Later, he said the experience "planted a seed" that blossomed "in different ways." In 1964-1965, he studied engineering at the University of Arizona. After dropping out of college, he held a one-man show at the Heard Museum and his work was on the cover of Arizona Highways magazine.
Michael Kabotie made artworks for close to fifty years. He was introduced to silverwork by Wally Sekayumptewa of Hotevilla in 1958. He used the overlay technique developed by his father and friends in the 1940s and 1950s. His painting reflects his Hopi mentors, the pre-European Awatovi kiva mural painters, and the Sikyatki pottery painters with a contemporary interpretation. His paintings and silverwork have an organic graffiti-like quality with dynamic motion and symbolism, with a rich color palette on canvas and an added dimension when rendered in silver. He created many public works of art including the murals at Sunset Crater and the Museum of Northern Arizona (with Delbridge Honanie), as well as a gate he designed in the style of his jewelry at the Heard Museum in Phoenix. Michael Kabotie worked for Hopi Cultural Center Museum as a muralist in 1975, as a consultant in 1977, and as a task team chairman since 1978. In 1975, he became a member of the editorial advisory board of the American Indian Art Magazine. In 1979-1980, he was a consultant for the California Academy of Sciences.
Published in 1987, Kabotie's poetry book "Migration Tears" was an inward self-portrait in verse. This early published work, showed Kabotie's interest in both Eastern philosophy and Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who felt that the western world relied too much on science and logic to solve its problems and should incorporate the idea of "harmony and balance" into our lives, if we were to live productively, happily. The book contains Kabotie's original poetry, complemented by six plates of his graphic artwork. Contrary to what one may assume, the "tears" mentioned in the title is not a direct reference to the "trail of tears" associated with Native American people. The poet is more specifically referring to the transitions that his people have been forced to make in their lives since the Indian Wars, and their continuing struggle between destruction and renewal in contemporary times. In the poem Transistor Windows, the narrator is looking out the window at his village, Shungopavi, reflecting on nature and watching the sun sink into "the deep abyss of the Grand Canyon." At the same time, his relatives are seated in the next room, laughing over their burned supper and watching the news of the day on television.
Michael Kabotie lectured across America, in New Zealand, Germany, and Switzerland. He was a longtime instructor in the Idyllwild Arts Academy Summer Program. As a key member of the school's renowned Native American Arts faculty for 26 years, Kabotie taught Hopi silversmithing in 1983-2009 and served as a consultant to the Native American Arts Festival since its inception in 2001.
In his recent years, Michael Kabotie moved into the exploration and production of limited edition prints in lithography, serigraphy, etching, and embossings. He began a series of collaborative paintings with Celtic artist Jack Dauben. Kabotie was actively engaged in cross-cultural and cross-discipline projects and collaborations. He also participated in archaeological and art historical research and conferences. He was a mentor and guide, making presentations and working with tribal AA groups around the country. At the time of his death, Kabotie was working on an exhibit and a book for the museum, called "Siitala: Life in Balance, World in Bloom."
Michael Kabotie's art is fashioned from an intuitive facility for simple resonant images, ambiguously stated, that connect people deeply and intricately with the infinite regions of the unknown and unnamed. His gifts reach back into the ancient arts of the imagination, leading the viewer to examine one's unique and universal experiences. Like other artists who have avoided the neutral objective quality of much of current art and its artifacts, Kabotie searched in his artworks for its warmly transformative qualities and metaphors - those expressive instruments of both the ephemeral and the eternal. By exploring spiritual areas of ritual and ceremonial representation, Kabotie signified all life as part of the grandeur and sacredness of nature and of its infinite aspects of birth, destruction, and rebirth. These magical icons of Michael Kabotie suggest one way to self-discovery, reconciliation, and acceptance, and ultimately are personifications of never-ending joy. Kabotie was deeply intrigued by Carl Jung and latched onto his ideas, seeing the parallel of Jungian and Hopi philosophy. He was inspired by the Swiss doctor to use his own Hopi dreams, religion, and myth in his own artwork.
Quotations:
"Jewelry is my job. Art and painting is my journey."
"My paintings speak a lot louder than me."
Membership
Wuwuchim (Hopi Men's Society)
,
United States
Artist Hopid
,
United States
1973 - 1980
Hopi Arts & Crafts Co-Op Guild
,
United States
1970 - 1978
Indian Arts & Crafts Association
,
United States
1975 - 1980
Personality
Michael Kabotie was an avid reader and student of both archaeology and other religious philosophies. He often compared them to his own Hopi culture, which would sometimes inspire biting political or completely humorous life observations in his artwork. It was Kabotie's own personal search for a sense of harmony and balance that left the greatest impression on people who knew him well.
Quotes from others about the person
Shelby Tisdale, a director of the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture, said: "His wide range of work, from silver jewelry and kachina carvings to his large-scale colorful paintings, draw on the Hopi traditions he grew up with. I will always remember his warm smile, his subtle way of teasing, his contagious sense of humor, and his gentle way of teaching the world about Hopi art and culture."
Frank H. Goodyear Jr., a director of Heard Museum said: "Michael was a quiet man, with a deep respect for the traditions of his Hopi culture. He made powerful images drawn from Hopi artistic traditions that are testimonies to his own creative excellence. His death leaves us deeply saddened."
William Lowman, a president of Idyllwild Arts (IA), said: "Michael Kabotie was an extraordinary artist of the Hopi tradition, but also an extraordinary artist in any culture. We marveled at his jewelry design and craft. We were inspired by his paintings and prints. And we were moved by his poetry. Most of all, his alter ego as a trickster amused and confounded us all. He was a great artist."
Heather Companiott, a director of the Native American Arts Program at IA, said: "Michael was an extraordinary human being, full of humor, humility, talent, curiosity, and compassion. To know or work with Michael was to be forced to think more broadly, to see and find connections between people, concepts, and ideas, and to come to know the world - and yourself - a little differently and a little better than you had before. This is a loss not only for his friends, colleagues, and students at Idyllwild Arts but for the many people whose lives he touched across the country and around the world. He will be sorely missed."
Kelley Hays-Gilpin, Michael Kabotie's friend and exhibit curator, MNA's Edward Bridge Danson Jr. Chair of Anthropology, said: "Artist, poet, "mythical archaeologist," ritual clown, and trickster-Michael Kabotie explored the journeys of humankind by playfully meshing his own Hopi traditions with myth and imagery from around the world."
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Carl Jung
Connections
Michael Kabotie's partner was Ruth Ann Border. He had six children: Paul Kabotie, Wendell Sakiestewa, Claire Chavarria, Ed Kabotie, Meg Adakai, and Max Kabotie. At the time of his death, he had 14 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.