Margaret Wood

Margaret Wood (born 1950) is a Navajo-Seminole fiber artist, fashion designer, and quilt maker. Though she began her career as a teacher and librarian, Wood switched to fiber arts to allow her to express her creativity. She published Native American Fashion: Modern Adaptations of Traditional Designs, which for four decades was the only book focused on traditional native clothing and how it was modified in contemporary design. From 1990, Wood primarily became a quilter, displaying her works at numerous featured exhibitions throughout the United States, including such venues as the American Craft Museum in Manhattan; the Heard Museum of Phoenix, Arizona; the Riverside Metropolitan Museum of Riverside, California and the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian of Santa Fe, New Mexico, among many others.

Margaret Wood was born in 1950 in Parker, Arizona to Helen Mae (née Watchman) and Charlie Wood. Her mother was a Navajo and her father had Seminole heritage. Her mother was raised at Fort Defiance in the Navajo Nation, and became a teacher in Poston and later in Tuba City. Her father grew up in Oklahoma as part of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and was a carpenter. Wood was the couple's second child following Ronald Cully and preceding Charles, Jr. Wood attended public school in Tuba City and Flagstaff and learned to sew from her mother when she was about nine years old. After suffering a stroke brought about from surgery, Wood's mother died in 1964. Completing her secondary schooling, Wood attended Arizona State University on a full scholarship from the Navajo Nation. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in education in 1971.

Wood began her career as a teacher immediately upon earning her degree, but after a year continued with graduate studies at the University of Denver. She earned a master's degree in library science with a thesis A Survey of Library Services Available to Navajo People on the Navajo Reservation in 1973 and that year began working as the librarian of the Navajo Community College in Tsaile, Arizona. She then worked Phoenix Public Library for two years, married Thomas Galbraith, an attorney, and began writing Native American Fashion: Modern Adaptations of Traditional Designs.

At that time, the American Indian Movement which had been influenced by the Civil Rights Movement, had an impact on popular culture. Native women like Wood, realized that they could express their pride of identity through the fashion that they wore and simultaneously by designing fashion could act as role models for other indigenous women. As she was researching clothing in the Denver Art Museum for inclusion in her book, she compiled information on traditional garments and gave examples for how those could be refashioned as contemporary designs, using photographs of traditional dress and drawings illustrating the modifications. The book was organized into geographic regions and she included a broad sampling of styles, which included for example, blouses and skirts featuring Seminole patchwork and fringe and ribbonwork of the Plains Indians, camp dresses of the Western Apache, kilts of the Pueblo and Hopi, pant suits of the Navajo,skirts of the Iroquois, and a variety of garments from tribes in the Great Lakes and Pacific Coast regions. She also explored how contemporary fashion could be modified to reflect the current trend to celebrate Native pride.

In 1978 after five years of working as a librarian, Wood decided to change direction and focus her attention on fiber arts and finding a publisher for her book. She decided to remain at home, when her son Charlie was born in 1979 and began sewing. When she won the Best Needlework Design for her quilted work featuring Seminole patchwork in a fashion show at the Heard Museum that year, she was discovered by Zia a local retail store in Phoenix, who began to carry her work. The book was finally published in 1981 and for over four decades was the only work to focus exclusively on contemporary Native American fashion. That same year, she launched Native American Fashions, Inc. and spent the next decade focused on fashion. She participated in over 40 fashion shows and exhibitions that highlighted her work, such as the fashion show hosted at the Santa Fe Indian Market (Santa Fe, New Mexico), the Annual Festival of Native American Arts (Sedona, Arizona), and shows at the Heard Museum (Phoenix) and the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian (Santa Fe, New Mexico).

In 1984, while attending the Annual Heard show, Wood was uninspired by the quilts entered and decided to try to design one. She entered her first attempt in the 1985 show, earning an honorable mention. She was not happy with the result and began studying the art of quiltmaking, including the fabrics to use and various techniques, like applique, mola and trapunto. Inspiration for her color palette came from the limited gold, hunter green, red, and turquoise colors of trade beads and her designs were often inspired by Native American artifacts. Until 1990, Wood considered herself to be a fashion designer who quilted, but that year, she began to focus on quilting, as it allowed her more freedom for creative expression.

Wood works in series, designing four quilts or quilted wall-hangings to each group to represent the four directions. Her first designs were geometric patterns found of basketry, beadwork, and in Navajo weaving. She later expanded her work to include more personal stories, interpreting the difficulty experienced by Native Americans of having to live in two cultures and biographical works focused on her family members. The quilts she designed for her father and mother, featured maze designs and different iconography to represent significant moments in each of their histories as they journeyed through their lives. Some of her groups, like The Bag Series are more like fabric sculptures. This series focused on various types of containers used by Native Americans and featured bags of varying sizes.

Woods work has been widely exhibited in various museums. She has been an invited participant to Expressions of Spirit: Contemporary American Indian Art at the Wheelwright (1995); Native American Quilts from the Southwest: Tradition, Creativity, and Inspiration at the Institute of American Indian Arts (1998–1999); Head, Heart and Hands: Native American Craft Traditions in a Contemporary World at the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft of Louisville and the Museum of Art in DeLand, Florida (1998); Changing Hands: Art without Reservation at the American Craft Museum in Manhattan (2002) and the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe (2003); Native Quilters of the Southwest at the Navajo Nation Museum (2005); and Quilt Stories at the Riverside Metropolitan Museum of Riverside, California (2008–2009), among many others.