Darby Raymond-Overstreet is an award winning digital artist and printmaker. Born in Tuba City Arizona, and raised in Flagstaff Arizona, she is a proud member of the Navajo Nation. She received her B.A.s in Psychology and Studio Art and graduated with Honors from Dartmouth College in 2016. She currently resides in Chimayó, NM and through her work she studies, works with and creates Navajo/Diné pattern designs that materialize through portraits, landscapes, and abstract forms. Her work is heavily inspired by and derived from Traditional Diné/Navajo textiles, with particular interest in pieces woven in the late 1800’s-1950’s.

As a Diné artist I find that working with patterns is the most illuminating way for me to explore and expand my understanding of the world. Much of my work is about identity. I’m interested in how cultural practices of art influence and inform collective identity, and additionally, how our relationships to our ancestries, our contemporaries, and our descendants culminate to define personal identities and perspectives.

I navigate my ponderings in two main creative outlets. 

Through my portraiture, I create cultural portraits that describe modern day Diné in the visual language of our heritage. I merge the artistry of traditional woven rugs into the format and medium of digital art, and suspend the works into traditional looms. These works emulate the duality of Indigenous traditionalism and the adaptation to western society that shapes much of today’s Diné experience. I use woven patterns in my portraits as a way of both reclaiming and celebrating our visual cultural aesthetic.  Prompted by rampant cultural appropriation by corporate industries, I find it an apt response to show who these designs come from and for whom they were made. The works also serve as an homage to weavers and the practice of weaving. Inherent to our culture and integral to our identity as Diné, weaving has always been a major facet in the success and longevity of our people. It has also seen us through times of immense hardship and adversity. Were it not for weavers, their adaptability, and their practice of the artform in the times of imprisonment at Fort Sumner and afterwards upon their return home, those whom I base my portraits on may not have been woven into the fabric of Navajo culture at all.

In my studies of Navajo weaving for my portraiture I looked through numerous documentations of rug collections whose weavings spanned from the 1880s through 1950s. As an aid to my study I began drawing pattern designs that were inspired by what I had seen. It started as a free-flowing approach to interpret the abstracted design elements that I was captivated by. But that practice has since evolved into an exploration of the theoretical understanding of what it means to be a part of something and how we form identity. Coming from a mixed racial background, much of my own identity has been explained and understood by others in terms of parts. Part Navajo, part Black, part White. These parts have sufficed as answers to curious questions about my “exotic” look, but I don’t experience my identity in parts. I experience the wholeness of myself through the relationships that I have to my kin. So to examine this feeling of wholeness I create arrangements of pattern designs, cut them apart, and splice them together in a variety of compositions that through the process become something different yet whole again. Though rooted in this process, the individual works do take on their own particular meanings and representations, usually, relating to place, emotion, and memory.”

DARBY RAYMOND-OVERSTREET, ARTIST STATEMENT