Betty Manygoats (born 1945) is a Navajo artist known for her ceramic work. She lives and works at Cow Springs on the

Navajo Nation The Navajo Nation (), also known as Navajoland, is an Indian reservation of Navajo people in the United States. It occupies portions of northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southeastern Utah. The seat of government is located in ...

Arizona Arizona is a U.S. state, state in the Southwestern United States, Southwestern region of the United States, sharing the Four Corners region of the western United States with Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. It also borders Nevada to the nort ...

in the

American Southwest The Southwestern United States, also known as the American Southwest or simply the Southwest, is a geographic and cultural list of regions of the United States, region of the United States that includes Arizona and New Mexico, along with adjacen ...

Biography

Manygoats was born at Shoto/Cow Springs, on the

. She was born into the Tàchiiʼnii clan. She and her husband William Manygoats, whom she married in 1963, have ten children. Many of her grown children are also potters. She is also known as Betty Barlow.

Art work

Manygoats learned the art of

silversmithing A silversmith is a metalworker who crafts objects from silver. The terms ''silversmith'' and ''goldsmith'' are not exact synonyms, as the techniques, training, history, and guilds are (or were, at least) largely the same but differed in that t ...

, weaving and

beadwork Beadwork is the art or craft of attaching beads to one another by stringing them onto a thread or thin wire with a sewing or beading needle or sewing them to cloth. Beads are produced in a diverse range of materials, shapes, and sizes, and vary ...

when she was growing up. When she was in her twenties, she learned to make traditional functional pottery from her grandmother, Grace Barlow. As her work progressed, she developed a style that exaggerated the surface decoration, motifs, and shapes of traditional Navajo pottery. In the 1970s, Manygoats developed a style of working that incorporated the application of hand-built clay horned toads which became her trademark.

Collections

Manygoats' work is included in the collection of the

Renwick Gallery The Renwick Gallery is a branch of the Smithsonian American Art Museum located in Washington, D.C. that displays American craft and decorative arts from the 19th to 21st century. The gallery is housed in a National Historic Landmark building that ...

of the

Smithsonian American Art Museum The Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM; formerly the National Museum of American Art) is a museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Together with its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, SAAM holds one of the world's lar ...

. She is also represented in the collections of the

National Museum of the American Indian The National Museum of the American Indian is a museum in the United States devoted to the culture of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. It is part of the Smithsonian Institution group of museums and research centers. The museum has three ...

. and the William C. and Evelyn M. Davies Gallery of Southwest Indian Art at the

Museum of Texas Tech University The Museum of Texas Tech University is part of Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. It is made up of the main museum building, the Moody Planetarium, the Natural Science Research Laboratory, the research and educational elements of the Lubbo ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Manygoats, Betty Navajo potters 1945 births American women potters Living people American potters 20th-century American ceramists 21st-century American ceramists 20th-century American artists 20th-century American women artists 21st-century American artists 21st-century American women artists Native American women potters Native American potters Navajo women artists Navajo artists 20th-century Native American artists 21st-century Native American artists 20th-century Native American women 21st-century Native American women Native American people from Arizona