Shonto Begay

Navajo Blue Highway

Shonto Begay (Navajo/Diné) renders a quotidian, contemporary scene from the Four Corners region—an area inhabited by Indigenous people for thousands of years that overlaps the modern boundary between Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico—through a highly dynamic swirl of multicolored brushstrokes. While it might seem reminiscent of late 19th-century French Post-Impressionism, Begay's distinctive brushwork has an Indigenous origin and is regarded by the artist as the visual manifestation of a language connecting him to the spiritual world. In this canvas, hitchhikers sit in the bed of a truck that features stickers for Navajo Nation elections, riding into a sunlit sky surrounded by the towering sandstone peaks of the region that Begay calls home.