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Michael Chiago Sr. Meet the Artist and Book Signing

April 25 @ 10:30 am - 2:20 pm MST

Michael Chiago was born in 1943 in Kohatik Village on the Tohono O’odham reservation, roughly 65 miles west of Tucson. His early life traced a distinctly American arc: performing as an Indian fancy dancer at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, training as a barber, and then enlisting in the Marines in the late 1960s, where he completed a tour of duty in Vietnam. After returning home, he used the G.I. Bill to study Commercial Art at Maricopa Community College, drawing inspiration from Native artists who had built careers selling their work.
He left school before completing his degree to take a job, but he never put down his brushes. Steady and self-directed, he kept painting, kept refining his craft, and eventually landed a piece in Arizona Highways Magazine – the kind of quiet validation that turns a pursuit into a vocation. From there, his watercolors began finding their way into collections across the country and around the world.
That was just the beginning of a career now spanning six decades. Chiago’s output reaches well beyond watercolor on paper. He has designed large-scale murals for the Gila River Indian Community’s Huhugam Heritage Center, Kitt Peak National Observatory, and the Heard Museum, where a mural anchors the permanent collection as part of the exhibition “Home: Native People of the Southwest.” He has created graphic posters for O’odham Tash in Casa Grande, the Heard Museum Indian Fair and Market in Phoenix, and the S’edav Va’aki Museum, also in Phoenix. In 1997, he illustrated the children’s book Singing Down the Rain, a portrait of Tohono O’odham desert culture, and in 2003, Tohono Chul commissioned him to produce a cycle of works on the sacred role of the Saguaro in Tohono O’odham life for the park’s Saguaro Discovery Trail.
The honors have followed the work. Chiago has received awards from SWAIA’s Indian Market, the S’edav Va’aki Museum, and the Heard Museum Indian Fair and Market, among others. In 2006, he was named an Arizona Living Treasure – a recognition he has described as one of the great honors of his life.
Michael Chiago Sr. is currently the focus of Gathering, the Main Gallery’s featured exhibition. He will be present in the gallery from 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. to discuss his artwork and his book O’odham Lifeways Through Art.