Friends, artists remember renowned Navajo artist Baje Whitethorne Sr. | Local News

For a moment, Begay said, he was almost transfixed, looking at the vibrant colors, movement and flow of the watercolors laying on that table. The paintings were like very little that he had seen before, all the work of Navajo artist Baje Whitethorne Sr.

“It had colors, and motion. It was small, but then they all had a little story encapsulated. But I stopped just for a moment,” Begay said. “Then my buddy grabbed me and said, ‘Come on, let’s go! They’re going to catch us!’ We were being chased by the [‎Bureau of Indian Affairs] police for some small infraction. We were knucklehead teenagers. So that’s the first time I saw him, and his work stopped me, and I almost got caught. That’s burned into my mind.”

Whitethorne recently died at the age of 73. During his career that lasted over 40 years, he became an accomplished artist known for his paintings of radiant colors, tribal lands and the Navajo way of life. He also authored two children’s books and illustrated several more, in addition to starting two foundations.

Whitethorne Sr. started a foundation in honor of his son, Bahe “Buddy” Whitethorne Jr., who was also an artist and died in 2018. The Buddy Whitethorne Foundation and the Art of the People program both had the goal of encouraging and mentoring Native American art and culture, and young Indigenous artists.

“[Whitethorne Sr.] will be remembered and will stand out as a towering figure in Native American art. And he will not only be known for the beauty of his art, but for his generosity of spirit,” said Robert Breunig, former president of the Museum of Northern Arizona. “He really thought a lot about — and really worked with — the up-and-coming generation, and he was very sharing with his knowledge and his art.”

And Begay noted that in losing Whitethorne, the world is losing more than a great artist and giving person, but also another speaker of the Navajo language and practitioner of those traditions.

“We’re losing a library. […] I was just thinking about how much the rest of us have to raise our bar and emulate his professionalism, his sense of place,” Begay said. “The living spirit. The calm, gentle, wise voice. That is missed, he will be missed. There is an emptiness. You go to various Native shows and it’s always incomplete without Baje and even at the market the last two years, he was always right next to me. I will miss that.”

In speaking to friends and fellow artists, Whitethorne’s passion and dedication to encouraging young Native artists came up over and over again.

“You would always see young kids, young Native kids, who were there in Baje’s booth doing art,” said Mike Finney, a founding board member of the Buddy Whitethorne Foundation. “Here’s this master, and sometimes he would be working on a canvas or something like that, but to see the encouragement that he would be giving to really young people to do their own art, right there in that environment, it was a catalyst that really motivated so many young people to be involved in art.”

Johnson Yazzie, a Navajo artist from Pinon, worked with Whitethorne through the Art of the People program. He said that encouragement often meant simply working alongside children, rather than taking on the role of a traditional teacher.

“He would try to let them do their own art without him pressuring them too much to be an artist. He just allows them to paint and work with their own ideas and designs and say, ‘Let’s work together rather than teaching you, because teaching is somebody’s job,’” Yazzie said. “He practically would get down with the kindergarteners. He would almost sing with them. He would say in Navajo, ‘Slowly and beautifully,’ I think is what the interpretation was. And everybody, they would almost come to a rhythm with the words and they would sway together with the brush. That’s how I remember he would talk with the kids and he would demonstrate his art with them.”

Yazzie said he thinks a lot of Whitethorne’s passion came as much from a desire to preserve and promote Native American culture and tradition as from a love of art.

“I think it was just as important as the language,” Yazzie said. “He wanted to encourage a young generation to keep going with the culture, either the art or the medicine or language. It was about being persistent in his career as an individual who represents his surroundings, his environment, his home, his culture.”

Just one example of that mentorship is Ed Kabotie, a third-generation Hopi artist, and leader of the band Tha ‘Yoties.

“Baje was a natural mentor for me, a very natural father figure, you know,” Kabotie said.

Similar to Begay, Kabotie said he will never forget the moment when he was 14 and first laid eyes on a painting by Whitethorne Sr. at the Coconino Center for the Arts.

The piece, one of Whitethorne’s best known paintings, was “Eight is Enough,” which depicts eight dancing figures in Navajo ceremonial garb.

“It blew my mind,” Kabotie said. “I’m going like, ‘Wow, you can do that with watercolor?’ I mean it felt graceful, it felt gentle, it felt powerful, all at once. The movement of his figures, I was really taken with it. I was really touched by it.”

And the painting has certainly influenced Kabotie’s own work, he said.

“I’m here in Santa Clara Pueblo right now. And I pulled something down off the wall and showed it to my mom. I showed my mom that ‘Eight is Enough’ piece and I said, ‘Check this out, you can totally see the influence,’” Kabotie said.

Kabotie is by no means the only native artist whose work has been influenced by that of Whitethorne, Begay said.

“I think you can see shades of Baje in everybody’s work,” he said.

Kabotie said he felt deeply supported and encouraged by Whitethorne, who, like with so many other artists, mentored him as he came into his own as an artist.

“When I actually met him, I remember being at an art show, and he came by my booth for whatever reason and saw my artwork and complimented me, and, you know, I mean, that was a big deal to me,” Kabotie said. “He also encouraged me to enter it into the competition, he asked me if I was going to enter it. I said, ‘No.’ And he said, ‘You should enter it.’ And I made up an excuse about why I wasn’t going to enter it.”

In the end, Kabotie decided he would enter the piece in the competition.

“I ended up getting the first-place ribbon for the piece. And he came by and said, ‘See?’ So that was the immediate encouraging nature of Baje,” he said.

Last year, an exhibit showing Whitethorne Sr.’s work showed at the Museum of Northern Arizona for nearly a year.

Although it was not billed as a retrospective on his work and career, it exhibited work from throughout Whitethorne’s life, from pieces he had produced as a student to work made during the pandemic.

“The first thing you would notice is the color. Baje was very much a colorist, he was a great draftsman, and he was a great colorist. The gallery was just radiant,” said Alan Peterson, fine arts curator at the museum. “So, while the color might draw you in, it was the narrative aspect that I think really established the relationship with the viewer. And, of course, people who were familiar with his work could readily access that, and people who are familiar with Native American or Navajo culture.”

Peterson said through that time, Whitethorne would often come and sit in the gallery.

The museum had purchased several turquoise blue metal folding chairs, a nod to a motif that has appeared in many of his paintings. And Peterson said Whitethorne would sit and chat with visitors to the exhibition.

“He would sit there at the table and talk to people when they would come in. And it was clear that he loved doing that. And, of course, the visitors just absolutely loved it. I think that reveals one of the most important things about Baje: that he was incredibly generous with his time and with his spirit,” Peterson said.

Begay, who was born and raised in Shonto, where Whitethorne was also from, said the sense of place in his paintings is always powerful.

“It was the beautiful sense of place that we both know. And so that was what resonated with me,” Begay said. “And I can see how Baje got a lot of his inspiration. A domestic home tied to the landscape with the wild, the beautiful rain cloud, and the folding metal chair. Because, [growing up,] outside my horizon nothing else existed.”

The blue, metal folding chair became a motif running through many of Whitethorne’s paintings.

The blue chair was part of a six-chair set his mother brought back from Flagstaff when he was a boy.

“I was fascinated by how the sun hit the metallic blue,” Whitethorne said in a 2022 article in the Arizona Daily Sun promoting the exhibition.

And Whitethorne remembered as a boy having put his cheek against the cold metal of the chair on hot summer days.

“He didn’t include it in all paintings,” Peterson said. “I love how he explained the fact that, if the chair is not there, it’s somewhere else. Which seems really obvious on the one hand, but on the other hand, the chair is somewhere else. It’s still there, you just don’t see it. He had a great sense of humor, and I think that that reflects that to some degree.”

Yazzie said he and Whitethorn would often talk about art and life, discussing their thought process, and past Native American and European artists.

“That is always important for an artist. So there’s the combination of actually working with the medium and then talking about it. They go hand in hand. We have our culture, we have our story about art, the Navajo people. And the Europeans, they also have art about their history. And so when you combine the two, you get an interesting effect, interesting ideas and designs that you can invent,” Yazzie said. “Art is abstract, even when it looks real in a painting.”

Because so much of his own and Whitethorne’s art surrounds their own lives and deeply held cultural traditions, Yazzie said Whitethorne would remind him to keep some for himself.

“Baje would say, ‘Don’t give it all the way, keep some for yourself. Some of what makes you, what makes you tick. Your art, keep some of it private. And some you can share.’ So it’s not all about just paintings of hogans and monuments. But there is more to it,” Yazzie said. “And he was always exploring, venturing with his ideas. And when it happens, you can see it in the colors that he had created in the paintings, and it was fascinating.”

Whitethorne Sr. may be gone. But his impact on friends, fellow artists, culture and northern Arizona will remain long after his death, said Kabotie.

“I think many of us feel like we’ve lost a mentor. And I think many of us feel like we’ve lost a friend. And I think we all recognize that there’s an amazing person and talent and very giving and loving human being that’s no longer here with us,” Kabotie said. “But again, I mean, he is here with us. The words that he shared with us, the meals that he bought us, the encouragement and the mentorship that he offered us, that’s something that we’ll all carry with us.”

Baje Whitethorne Sr. is survived by his wife Priscilla Whitethorne, who he met when they were students at Tuba City High School, and his three children and four grandchildren.