Power Up

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to announce Melissa Cody: Power Up, an exhibition of 14 intricate weavings by the fourth-generation Navajo weaver Melissa Cody. Opening Thursday, April 25, 2024, Power Up is the artist’s first solo exhibition at the New York gallery. The exhibition will coincide with the solo exhibition Melissa Cody: Webbed Skies at MoMA PS1, on view through September 9, 2024.

Cody’s work is often associated with Germantown Revival, a stylistic movement named after the government wool from Germantown, Pennsylvania, that was supplied to the Navajo during the time of the Long Walk. The weaving style was characterized by a complex interaction of traditional and historical contingencies: vivid commercial dyes and new economic pressures prompted enterprising Navajo weavers to adapt, creating bold new textiles. The commercial viability of the craft became a means of continuance, even as it altered it. In Germantown Sampler (2009), Cody pushes vivid commercial dyes to their limit.

In Good Luck (2014), Cody employs a classic Navajo motif: the Whirling Log, a symbol of good fortune. Recognizable today as a swastika, the artist reclaims the traditional symbol in a defiantly exuberant palette, encircling it in another Navajo motif: the Rainbow Person, a protective figure. As if to underscore the playful, good-natured quality of the work, Cody’s rendering of the Rainbow Person resembles an extension cord—her face takes the form of the socket, her two legs the plug. The tight weave of the textile creates sharply defined borders around the pixelated lettering, reading “Good Luck.” “I’m a child of ’80s video game culture: Pac-Man, Frogger, Nintendo,” says Cody. “I grew up with this world of pixelation.” The artist approaches weaving as an ever-evolving craft tradition and art form.

In her recent works, Cody deepens the resonance between digital pixelation and imagery rendered in warp and weft. Cody, who typically uses a traditional Navajo loom, has begun using a Jacquard machine, adding a layer of digital mediation to her practice. In Dopamine Dream (2023) Cody recombines Navajo patterns into increasingly sophisticated geometric overlays and haptic color schemes. Visual planes are stacked like browser windows on a computer screen. A calming bilateral symmetry brings much needed order to the otherwise fragmented composition. The work recently featured in the Hammer Museum’s biennial exhibition Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living.

Melissa Cody’s work has been featured in many museums and galleries, including the Stark Museum of Art (2014, Orange, Texas); Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Institute of American Indian Arts (2017–2018, Santa Fe); Ingham Chapman Gallery, University of New Mexico (2018, Albuquerque); Navajo Nation Museum (2018); SITE (2018–2019, Santa Fe); MASS Gallery (2019, Austin); Heard Museum (2019, Phoenix); Exploratorium (2019, San Francisco); Museum of Northern Arizona (2019, Flagstaff); Rebecca Camacho Presents (2019, San Francisco); National Gallery of Canada (2019–2020, Ottawa); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (2021, Bentonville); Barnes Foundation (2022, Philadelphia); and National Gallery of Art (2023, Washington, D.C.). Her works feature in a number of museum collections, including those of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Museu de Arte de São Paulo, and the Stark Museum of Art, Orange, Texas.