Chief's Blanket

Chief's Blanket of 1971 takes its title from the Navajo (Diné) weaving tradition in which broad horizontal bands of indigo, white, and red define a category of textile classified by Western collectors into First, Second, and Third Phase types. Summers's print translates the geometry of those textiles into the woodcut idiom he had spent two decades refining: blocks inked separately, paper laid face-down, pigment pressed through from behind so that the bands of color exhale outward into the surrounding sheet rather than terminate at the cut line. The motif marked the beginning of an extended engagement with Native American subjects that would run through the rest of the 1970s — Plains and Southwestern themes, ledger drawings, named historical figures. Where his earlier landscapes used color to evoke atmosphere, the textile-based prints of this period use color to invoke a culturally specific design language, while the soft bleed of his technique guards against any merely decorative reading. It sits at the hinge between his landscape practice and his ethnographic subjects.