Gregory Lomayesva

Gregory Lomayesva was born in 1971. His mother, Marie Romero Cash, is Hispanic and a santera, while his father, William "Bill" Lomayesva (Hopi) was a jeweler, painter, and woodcarver.^[1][2] According to Lomayesva, he doesn't identify closely with either culture. but embraces each as a part of his upbringing.^[3]

A painter since his mid-teens, Lomayesva's career began when he combined his woodworking skills with the Hopi imagery into fusion sculptures. Beginning with the masks and dolls that are staples of his historical folk-craft tradition, Lomayesva quickly built a recognizable visual lexicon all his own that he was eventually able to bring to large-scale works of wood, bronze, and steel.

Expanding his output to include large-scale painting, Lomayesva began dipping into the contemporary zeitgeist of sampling and appropriation and took his audiences along on a journey to understand the totality of his influences, from Hopi imagery to popular culture icons to the works of the Renaissance masters.

Exploring past painting styles, he appropriated classical images from art history, scanning images from art books then finding a section to explore further in his own work. Using an innovative photo-emulsion process, Lomayesva would capture the projection of the chosen image on canvas, then begin the process of layering meaning into his canvasses by juxtaposing silver-gelatin images with abstract brush strokes, silk-screened pop culture logos, and Hopi iconography from his own visual vocabulary. Lomayesva created hundreds of works on canvas, most of which are in museum or private collections throughout the US and abroad.