Frank Stella’s Navajo Textile Collection Goes on View in Full for the First Time
Frank Stella’s decades-long collection of Diné textiles is about to be seen as a single body of work. The late American artist assembled 55 Navajo weavings over many years, and the full group will now be exhibited publicly for the first time before it is offered for sale. Individual pieces are priced between $6,500 and $25,000.
The first presentation opens at Arader Galleries, 29 East 72nd Street on New York’s Upper East Side, from May 15 to June 10. The collection then travels to Peter Pap Rugs in Dublin, New Hampshire, where it will be on view from June 20 to July 7.
The textiles largely date from the late 19th and early 20th century, a period when Diné women were pushing weaving in new directions. Synthetic dyes derived from coal and oil entered the American Southwest in the late 1800s, and weavers began testing unfamiliar color combinations that produced optical effects and increasingly abstract designs. These works, often described as Transitional Era weavings, have long been overshadowed by earlier Classical period examples and later Trading Post pieces.
That relative neglect is part of what makes Stella’s collection notable. In research accompanying the exhibition, Jill Alhberg-Yohe, a Navajo weaving expert and curator at the Cafesjian Art Trust Museum in Minnesota, wrote that unusually individual textiles have often received less attention because scholarship has tended to favor broad cultural patterns over creative impulse. Stella, by contrast, seems to have responded directly to that individuality.
His collection shares a clear visual language with the weavings themselves: edge-to-edge color, graphic stripes, zig-zags that generate movement, and a particular attraction to horizontal bands. In some works, undyed white wool functions like a primed canvas, creating a kind of negative space that recalls the structure of Stella’s own paintings from the 1960s.
The article says Stella was introduced to Navajo art through Donald Judd and Tony Berlant. Berlant later co-organized “The Navajo Blanket,” the 1972 Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition that helped recast these textiles as artworks rather than ethnographic artifacts. Seen in that light, Stella’s collection reads less like a private accumulation than a sustained visual conversation across time, place, and medium.
The full presentation offers a rare chance to see how an artist known for hard-edged abstraction found kinship in a textile tradition built on experimentation, restraint, and formal invention.
