Harrison Begay

The following video is an interview with Harrison Begay at the Albuquerque Museum in Albuquerque, NM on September 8th, 2000.

The interview was done by Kathy Flynn, who is the Executive Director of the National New Deal Preservation Association and the New Mexico Chapter of the NNDPA.

Harrison Begay was born circa 15 November 1914, in Whitecone, Arizona. His parents were Black Rock and Zonnie/Ah-Hin Nil-bah and he had eight siblings. His mother belonged to the Red Forehead Clan, and his father was from the Zuñi Deer Clan. He grew up in a hogan, where he was raised tending goats and sheep.

In 1934, he entered the Santa Fe Indian School to study art at the "Studio School" under Dorothy Dunn. His classmates included Gerald Nailor, Quincy Tahoma, and Andrew Tsihnahjinnie. Begay learned Dunn's characteristic "Studio Style" painting, a type of "Flatstyle". In her book American Indian Painting of the Southwest and Plains Areas, Dunn described Begay's work as "at once decorative and lifelike, his color clear in hue and even in value, his figures placid yet inwardly animated.... He seemed to be inexhaustibly resourceful in a quiet reticent way." Begay was one of the Studio School’s star students.

Begay served in the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project during the Great Depression era between 1933–1943, painting murals. His Federal Art Project work was once housed in the Gallup Arts Center (a WPA Arts Center), which was demolished and the collection was moved to the Octavia Fellin Public Library in Gallup, New Mexico.

During his career, Begay worked in gouache, watercolor, sandpainting, silkscreen painting, and commercial illustration. Most of his works represent genre scenes of Diné (Navajo) life and of natural imagery.

Harrison Begay died on 18 August 2012 in Gilbert, Arizona at the age of 95. He was buried in the Fort Defiance Veterans Cemetery in Arizona.

Begay’s work has been included in a large number of public museum collections, including the Montclair Art Museum,[19] 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.