Penelope Joe has a lot of big plans: go to a prestigious art school, open an art gallery in downtown Gallup, start a wild horse rescue…but first she has to finish her degree in Navajo Studies at Diné College. And in the meantime, she’s still hauling water at home.
That hasn’t stopped her from earning accolades and a reputation as an artist and winning the honor of creating this year’s Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial poster, Navajo Praying Woman.
Joe looks to her elders for inspiration, and the poster is a way to pass on their traditions.
“If you are an early riser and driving through the Rez before the sunrise, you see a lot of the Navajo elderly, they are outside praying and facing toward the east,” Joe explained. “We’re told you’ve got to get out before the sunrise, you’ve got to pray, you’ve got to run. That’s the only way the Holy People will bless you. This whole painting is a teaching to tell the young ones to carry on the tradition.”
That’s very important to Joe, who won her first award at the Ceremonial when she was 12, with Storytelling of the Creation of Horses and hasn’t stopped since. She became the youngest artist to show at the Santa Fe Indian Market at 18 and won the youth category of the ceremonial art competition in 2019.
“When I first entered the Ceremonial I was 12 and I came in with a painting – the canvas was even bigger than my body. People asked, ‘how did you even do this?’” Joe said.
Part of the secret is that she comes from a line of weavers and silversmiths who always kept an eye on fashion trends while doing their traditional art. Back then, she and her mother and grandfather ogled issues of Cowboys & Indians to see what other artists were doing.
In December, Joe was looking out from those pages in an article about her deal with lifestyle fashion brand Double D Ranch that saw her art turned into fabric prints and embellishments for the Chili Patine collection, which debuted last October. She’d approached the company about modeling, then dazzled the brass with her art and her passion.
When COVID came around, she wasn’t going to let a little thing like a deadly international pandemic stop her. But it did slow her down a bit.
In 2019, she was busy winning awards at Cermonial, the Navajo Nation show and the Pueblo Cultures show in Albuquerque.
Then her school went remote due to the pandemic. She never got to go to a prom and her graduation was a drive-up affair. That dashed her dreams of going to art school in Chicago or San Francisco.
“The pandemic came and that was it, it was over…I worked my butt off and that pandemic literally blew holes in my dreams,” Joe said.
That changed her course – for now. She has two years left to finish her studies at Diné College, a path she took because of the pandemic, and hopes to go to art school later. For now, preserving her culture is the top priority.
“I took Navajo Studies because the pandemic gave us an eye-opening about our culture, that things happen. A lot of our Navajo medicine men and women passed away. Our Navajo leadership, people died because of this pandemic,” she said.
