Quick Facts
VirgoBiography
Dextra Quotskuyva Nampeyo (born September 7, 1928, Polacca, Arizona) is a Native American potter and artist. She is in the fifth generation ofa distinguished ancestral line of Hopi potters.
In 1994 Dextra Quotskuyva was proclaimed an “Arizona Living Treasure,” and in 1998 she received the first Arizona State Museum Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2001, the Wheelwright Museum organized a 30-year retrospective exhibition of Quotskuyva's pottery, and in 2004, she received theSouthwestern Association for Indian Arts Lifetime Achievement award.
Family
She is the great-granddaughter of Hopi-Tewa potter Nampeyo of Hano, who revived Sikyátki style pottery, descending through her eldest daughter, Annie Healing. Dextra is the daughter of Rachel Namingha (1903–1985), another notable Hopi-Tewa potter. Her daughter, Hisi Nampeyo is also a potter, and her son, Dan Namingha, is painter and sculptor. Her husband, Edwin Quotskuyva, was a veteran and a Hopi tribal leader.
Work
Dextra began her artistic career in 1967, following Nampeyo’s rich heritage rooted in Sikyatki decorations. At first, following the advice of her mother to stay true to the old styles, Dextra’s design repertoire was limited to traditional Nampeyo migration and bird designs. After her mother died in 1985, Dextra felt at greater liberty to express her personal creativity. She was the first Nampeyo potter to produce a commodity for public consumption.
Quotskuyva experiments with the traditional materials usually used for pottery, gathering clay from different sources from her reservation and creating variations on the characteristic orange, tan, and brown hues of Hopi bonfire pots. For the decorations, she uses bee-weed plant for the black and native clay slips for the red.
In describing her way of creating pottery, she said: "One day my pottery calls for me, and then I know this is the day I must do it".
Selected public collections
- Lowell D. Holmes Museum of Anthropology, Wichita State University
- Minneapolis Institute of Art
- Nelson Atkins Museum of Art
- National Museum of the American Indian