Harrison Begay
Hashkay Yanehyah
"Warrior Who Walked Up to His Enemy" / "Wandering Boy"
Artist Bio
Harrison Begay, born Nov. 13, 1915 was a Navajo artist whose work started and influenced what was considered a mainstream Native American style of art starting in the 1930's. His pastel colors and fine line work reflected the colors of the American Southwest landscape and the beauty that he found in the land and his Navajo culture. His work was renown around the world as collectors sought his originals and signed prints. He died August 18, 2012. Hashkay Yaneyah never married or had children. He was survived at the time of death by his sister, Alice Clah, her children and grandchildren.
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Harrison Begay (Hashkay Yaneyah) is often mistaken for another artist who has the same name of Harrison Begay, whose work includes gouche and silkscreen printing. Their styles are similar but Harrison was specific and consistent in his use of acryclic paint colors that he used.
More About Harrison Begay
Background
Harrison Begay was a student of Dorothy Dunn and Geronimo C. Montoya at Santa Fe Indian School during the 1930's. Afterwards, he attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina to study architecture and drafting.
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Harrison joined the military during World War II and served until he was shot down in France. His fall down a telephone pole and a 300 foot cliff was broken by a tree, which in turn, broke many of his bones. After 8 months in a London hospital, he was discharged. Throughout the rest of his life, he coped with the pain by self-medicating with alcohol, and preferred not to speak of his experiences during the war. His service took him to Normandy, France, Okinawa and Japan.
Harrison's Begay Impact
Although Harrison helped to establish what was later considered the "traditional" style of "Indian art", some critics dismissed his work as "Disney art". Such naysayers focused on the style of work and did not consider the degree of cultural preservation that he managed to realize through the content of his work. Harrison's work depicting daily, ceremonial and cultural life was proliferate.
In 2021, Justin Jones, a Navajo lawyer and medicine man apprentice/helper spent 45 minutes explaining one painting to his surviving niece, Faye Gorman, and Colleen Gorman, and the details of the portion of a ceremony which Harrison accurately depicted in one original piece of the few original and print works that they had brought into his legal offices.
The Northern Arizona Museum Special Collections has a series of large pieces from 1935 that documents the sacred mountains of the Navajo, along with the associated holy people, sacred stones, plants, and animals for each mountain. In his work, Harrison also documented ceremonies that no longer exist.
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Begay’s work has been included in a large number of public museum collections, including the Montclair Art Museum, National Museum of the American Indian, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Northern Arizona, the Heard Museum, the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, the Wheelwright Museum, the Southwest Museum of the American Indian, the Philbrook Museum, the Gilcrease Museum, the De Young Museum of San Francisco, and many more.
Posthumous
Notes on the legacy of Harrison Begay
As of 2022 Harrison Begay's remaining living descendants are his nieces and nephew, Faye Gorman, Sally Henry and Bruce Begay, and all their children. Since his art agent has been incommunicado and non-responsive to requests for information, Harrison's family members are currently in the process of claiming rights to his work through the Navajo Nation courts in the hopes of establishing or working with a foundation to honor his legacy, establish an arts scholarship, and to support any requests for rights to use of his work in future projects.
A little about Skip Maisel's Trading Post murals
In the mural shown at the top of the page, Harrison Begay's work, along with Pabilita Velarde and other artists, was funded by the CCC. His mural is located on the store front of Skip Maisel's Trading Post, which has been designated as a site in the national registry of historic places. It's located in downtown Albuquerque on 510 Central SE. Since the closure of Skip Maisel's trading post, Jim Garcia of the Garcia family (owner of Garcia cars in Albuquerque and owner of the largest collection of RC Gorman original prints) informed Colleen Gorman that the Garcia family will conserve the murals on the building.