A selection of Navajo textiles from the personal collection of minimalist artist Frank Stella is being exhibited and sold for the first time. The 55 textiles, dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, will be on view at Arader Galleries in New York from May 15 to June 10, then travel to Peter Pap Rugs in New Hampshire in June. Priced between $6,500 and $25,000, the collection includes a large 19th-century blanket that Stella lent to a seminal 1972 exhibition at LACMA. Stella began collecting these works in the mid-1960s after being introduced to Navajo art by Donald Judd and Tony Berlant.
The exhibition matters because it reveals a direct visual dialogue between Stella's own abstract, geometric paintings and the experimental Navajo weavings of the Transitional Era (c. 1885–1895). These textiles, often overlooked by scholars for their individuality, share with Stella's work a vocabulary of edge-to-edge color, graphic stripes, and zig-zag patterns. Curator Jill Alhberg-Yohe notes that Stella's collection highlights the creative freedom of Diné women weavers, positioning their work as fine art rather than ethnographic artifacts. The sale also offers a rare opportunity to acquire pieces from a major artist's personal trove.