Marilou Schultz’s Loom Has Been Thinking About Computers for Decades
At the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College in upstate New York, a first retrospective is making a clear case for Diné weaver Marilou Schultz as an artist whose work has long moved between inherited technique and technological imagination. Curator Candice Hopkins has assembled about 55 works, along with archival materials, to trace a practice that began in childhood and eventually found an unexpected point of contact with computer chips.
Schultz grew up in Leupp on the Navajo Nation and started weaving at age five. The craft was part of family life: her mother and grandmothers were weavers, and the loom was a familiar presence at home. That lineage remains central to the exhibition, which includes works by four generations of weavers in her family. Among them is the final weaving by her mother, Martha Gorman Schultz, who died last year at 93. The piece was made with wool gifted by Melissa Cody, Schultz’s cousin and a prominent contemporary weaver.
The retrospective also shows how Schultz has repeatedly tested the boundaries of form. An untitled work from the late 1990s breaks apart a third-phase wearing blanket, a Navajo design style from 1860 to 1868, into a triptych. In later works, she pushed further, inventing a new loom for a 2016–17 series that allowed her to build three-dimensional shapes from wedge-weave patterns. The square loom, transformed into a cylinder, draws on the spinning of the globe and the cycles of the seasons.
The exhibition’s most revealing thread may be Schultz’s long engagement with computer chips. In 1995, Louis Baca, a Pueblo man working for Intel, approached her at the Heard Indian Market with a commission tied to the company’s annual conference, which that year celebrated the success of its 1993 Pentium chip. Schultz responded with Replica of a Chip, a weaving based on the microchip. Engineering students later identified chip components in the work, and Intel eventually presented it to the American Indian Science and Engineering Society in Albuquerque. A second chip commission followed in 2008. Both works were later shown at Documenta 14 in 2017.
Schultz’s retrospective suggests that weaving and computing are not distant systems, but parallel ones: both depend on structure, repetition, and the translation of information into pattern. In her hands, that connection becomes less a metaphor than a method.
