Melissa Cody

2020 Brandford/Elliott Award for Excellence in Fiber Art Recipient

Melissa Cody is a textile artist from the Navajo Nation of northern Arizona. Cody’s career spans over two decades and is recognized for fusing eclectic contemporary themes and traditional Navajo tapestry design. Her weaving style incorporates vivid color schemes and sharp geometric overlay to enhance the appearance of 3-dimensional planes.

Cody is a 4^th generation textile artist. In 1988, she was taught to weave at the age of 5 from her mother, Lola Cody. Cody began weaving wool tapestries on a traditional vertical/upright loom built by her carpenter father, Alfred Cody. Her early works were of well-recognized “regional” style patterns, which were named after reservation communities and their accompanying trading post, and traditional Navajo designs and symbols. 10 years into her weaving career, Cody began weaving “sampler” textiles which incorporate design and color elements from multiple traditional patterns into one composition. At this time, Cody was also introduced to the Germantown Revival Style; a traditional form of Navajo weaving which dates to the “Long Walk” era, a forced removal of the Navajo People from their homelands to Fort Sumner by the US Army in 1864. With the vibrant color palette of the Germantown style and her propensity for complexity and detail, her signature style emerged.

In 2007, Cody received a Fine Arts degree and BA degree in Museum Studies from the College of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico. While completing her undergraduate studies, Cody had the opportunity to intern with The International Folk Art Museum, Museums of New Mexico, Santa Fe, New Mexico and The National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, with an emphasis on textile conservation.

Since graduating from the CCNA, her recent bodies of work have focused on water and uranium mining issues of her Navajo reservation community of No Water Mesa, and the negative health effects suffered by her family members. This focus lead to the creation of textiles that dealt with the medical and physical symptomatic characteristics of Parkinson’s Disease, after her father was diagnosed with the condition in 2010. From this collection the piece titled, “Deep Brain Stimulation,” was accessioned into the permanent collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Cody’s work continues to push boundaries as she creates textiles with the intention of reclaiming traditional Navajo imagery such as the sacred Whirling Log symbol. Recent works also focus on the use of woven text and the integration and exploration of 3-dimensional planes in the form of optical illusion, “Op-Art.”

Recent career achievements include “First Place” at the 2013 Southwestern Association for Indian Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico, the 2012 Artist-in-Residence at the DeYoung Museum, San Francisco, California, “2011 Conrad House Award” at the Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona, and “2011 Emerging Indigenous Voices Artist Fellowship”, Kua’aina Associates, Berkeley, California. In 2007, Cody traveled to Southern Africa as an Artist Delegate and representative of the College of Contemporary Native Arts and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

Collections include: The Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; The Stark Museum, Orange, Texas; The Autry National Center, Los Angeles, California.