STEVEN J. YAZZIE

Steven J. Yazzie, Erupter, 2024, Oil on canvas. Collection of Cafesjian Art Trust Museum. 2025.429.1. 

Multimedia artist Steven J. Yazzie’s journey into abstract painting began after spending months on long bicycle rides and hikes across the American Southwest, chronicling his journeys in sketches and film. In the mountains and along the old two-lane highways of Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, Yazzie understood a landscape brimming with activity, holding the same energy it has contained for hundreds of thousands of years. Landscapes— depicted in late 19th- and early 20th-century American paintings as barren, desolate, and dead—are places filled with life, activity and motion. Yazzie animates jagged rocks, green vegetation, and pink and purple skies as if they are moving alongside him. The living rock formations erupt and explode with lava, revealing a vibrant geological past and present.