Frank Stella’s Navajo Weavings Go Public in New York for the First Time
A collection assembled over four decades is stepping into view. From May 15 to June 10, Peter Pap Rugs at Arader Galleries in New York City will present the first public exhibition of Frank Stella’s Navajo rugs and blankets, bringing 55 weavings from the 19th and early 20th centuries into a commercial setting for the first time.
The show was organized by New Hampshire-based dealer Peter Pap, who specializes in textiles and worked with Stella’s widow, Harriet McGurk, to catalogue the collection and conserve the works as needed. Pap describes the group as “highly personal” rather than encyclopedic, arguing that Stella’s interest was driven less by ethnographic study than by the visual force of the objects themselves.
That emphasis helps explain why the collection sits so naturally beside Stella’s own geometric practice. Most of the textiles were acquired from dealer and curator Tony Berlant, and Stella’s eye for woven form extended well beyond Navajo material. Pap says he also collected Turkish kilims, Tibetan tiger rugs, Indian textiles and nomadic weavings from Afghanistan, drawn to what he sees as a shared language of geometry and color across village and nomadic traditions.
The exhibition also places Stella within a broader art-historical lineage. He lent one documented 19th-century blanket to The Navajo Blanket at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1972, the landmark exhibition that also included works from the collections of Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, Georgia O’Keeffe, Kenneth Noland and Jasper Johns. Pap believes additional Stella pieces may have traveled when the show later appeared at the Brooklyn Museum and other venues, and ongoing research is trying to identify them.
Alongside the textiles, the New York presentation includes geometric drawings Stella made in the 1960s, around the same period he became interested in Navajo weaving. The textiles are for sale, while the drawings are on loan from Frank Stella Estate.
The result is less a conventional collector’s display than a portrait of Stella’s visual thinking: a sustained fascination with pattern, structure and the charged space between abstraction and craft.
