When we think of street art, urban alleyways and subway cars tagged with spray paint come to mind.
But for nearly two decades, Chip Thomas has been putting up public art installations in rural places across the Navajo Nation. In September, the MacArthur Foundation awarded Thomas one of its "genius" awards for the social impact of his artwork.
His public art features outsized black and white images depicting daily life on the rez: men on horseback, grandmothers herding sheep, the delighted faces of children playing.
His materials are paper, black and white ink, and adhesive, and his canvas might be any building within view of the highway, from deserted gas stations, to old trailers, to water tanks.
"Structures that are close enough to the road, that are big enough, where I can put an interesting, hopefully engaging piece," Thomas said, "that will draw some attention, but not too much, because I don't want to cause any accidents."
Against the array of earth tones, scenic mesas and curious sandstone forms, each installation materializes like a spectral window into another dimension. Some travelers are so surprised, and overcome, that they turn around to come back for a closer look.
Ephemeral Artwork For Navajo People
On a morning last Spring, Thomas and I drove north out of Flagstaff in his hatchback to check out some of the work.
Clusters of ponderosa pine forests gave way to open desert. Ahead of us, the ribbon of highway disappeared into a sea of sagebrush and yellow grasses. Then we reached a cluster of derelict buildings, some of them covered with spraypainted artwork.
Thomas veered off the road, coasting to a stop in front of an abandoned cinderblock structure.
Lean, bearded, dreadlocks tucked inside a canvas cap, Thomas approached the tiny structure, which might have been a storage shed at one time, but the roof and door were gone now.
"This is the natural evolution of a piece in the desert. It's breaking down," he said.
We stepped inside.
"This is part of a sight and sound installation," Thomas said, scanning the walls. "Looks like the sound may have stopped."
A 10-foot wide, black and white image covered the back wall, part of an art piece spotlighting the devastating health effects of uranium mining among Navajo workers during the cold war.
"My image is of Kee John," Thomas said. "Who died at a young age from cancer related to his work in a uranium mine."
In the photo, a young Navajo man wears a hardhat with a headlamp, and operates uranium mining equipment. But the image was fading, pieces of the installation were peeling off the walls.
The wind howled, sunlight blared in from overhead, through the wooden, skeletal remains of the ceiling.
Then suddenly a solar powered speaker kicked on, and we heard the tinny, garbled sounds of a Geiger counter. This was what was left of the installation's audio. Thomas chuckled.
"Yeah this is on its last leg," he said, nodding to a speaker tucked in between the ceiling joists. "But it's impressive. It's been running three and half years now, non-stop."
All of Thomas' work is conceptual in this way: the physical materials are no match for the unrelenting wind and sand.
"The work is ephemeral," Thomas said. "It's paper against the elements, and the elements … Mother Nature always wins."
Down the highway 25 minutes, we stopped at a roadside stand where vendors were selling table-loads of turquoise and silver jewelry.
Torrey Charley was working at one of the stands. She's 29, and first started seeing Thomas' artwork as a teenager.
"I was like, 'oh wow, you know, there's somebody that's interested in the community,'" she said. "You know, livestock and kids or the elders within the community."
Charley is Navajo, or Diné, as Navajo people call themselves.
"I think as a teenager, I was like, 'dang I wonder who this is?' you know? And I probably assumed that it was a young Diné artist, doing photography," Charley said, laughing. "Finding out he was a doctor, that was interesting."
From Outlaw Artist To Community Engagement
Born and raised in North Carolina, Chip Thomas moved to the Navajo Nation in 1987 to work as a family physician in a remote, underserved region.
"I had thought that because of the isolation I would be there initially for two years," Thomas said. "But my two years turned into 36."
He spent time with patients outside of the clinic, helping haul water, stack firewood, and shear sheep. As he grew closer to Navajo people, Thomas started photographing them.
"There was, you know, a degree of trust," Thomas said. "I could stick a camera, not literally in someone's face, but I could get closer physically than a stranger could, and tell more intimate stories.
Thomas did not consider himself an artist until 2009. That was the year a friend showed him the work of the French street artist JR, who covered the walls of urban buildings with giant images. Thomas was 52 at the time.
"It was like oh my god this is it," Thomas recalled. "This person has figured out how to take a documentary black and white photograph, blow it up to scale and use it as street art. My mind was blown!"
This was the era of Banksy, Shepherd Fairey and countless masked, anonymous street artists who put up work in public spaces without permission. Documentaries like Exit Through the Giftshop, celebrated the social impact of outlaw artists.
At first, Thomas worked in secret too. He adopted the street artist name Jetsonorama, a moniker drawn from his given name James Edward Thomas, Jr., i.e. "son of JET".
"Sneaking around, getting artwork up, usually at night, is a rush," Thomas said. "I was living the life of my street art heroes."
Then one time, he returned to photograph a piece he'd pasted on a dilapidated roadside stand near Bitter Springs, Arizona. It was an image of a Code Talker, one of the Navajo Marines who used their native language to transmit messages among US allies during World War II.
When Thomas returned to the installation, he found several men working on the building.
"I said, 'hey do you mind if I take a picture of this wall?'" Thomas recalled. "And they said, 'yeah, you may as well, everybody else has been.'"
So many tourists were stopping to take photos, that the owners had decided to repair the stand to start using it again.
It was the first time Thomas revealed himself as an artist
"So I said to them, 'yeah I put that picture up,'" Thomas said. "And they were excited. They thanked me and said, 'before you go would you be interested in putting something on the other side, to stop traffic coming from the other direction?'"
Thomas still works in secret sometimes, putting up work at night, without permission. But over time, he's decided that community trust and dialogue adds a depth and meaning to his work.
"On the spectrum between outlaw and community engaged artist, I am definitely on the community engagement end of things at this point," Thomas said.
A Landscape of Disorienting Scale
As a public artist, Thomas works in a landscape of disorienting scale and inscrutable distances. The Navajo Nation is a 27,000 square mile territory that covers portions of Arizona, New Mexico and southern Utah.
For outsiders, this is a geography containing points of interest, like Monument Valley, Lake Powell, and the Grand Canyon.
Thomas is concerned with the spaces in between and the community life that's often invisible to tourists passing through.
"People tend to look at a landscape like that as just kind of bleak and empty and worthless," said art historian Keven Moore, who curated a retrospective of Thomas' work at FotoFocus in Cincinnati a few years ago.
"To drive across the desert and see a photograph, black and white photograph, pasted to a building of a smiling girl or an old couple. It's striking, it's surreal, it's actually haunting," Moore said, noting that Thomas' artwork is not for sale and free to everyone.
"It feels mysterious," Moore added. "It's sort of like: who did this? Why did they do this? You see something like this and you … expect it to try to go to work on you, in a way. But as you sit with it, and contemplate it, you realize you don't understand what it's trying to do to you. And then you understand that maybe it's just trying to exist. Maybe it's trying to get you to exist with it. Maybe that's a good place to be, with art."
Every photograph is a window, every camera, a mirror. Chip Thomas uses his lens, his work, to reflect the beauty and resilience of the people who live on this land.
He's put up work outside of his home ground, with commissions in Cincinnati, North Carolina, Oakland and Philadelphia. Now he's a MacArthur fellow. But at 69, he says he's not done yet.
"It's still a passion play for me," Thomas said. "To create new work, tell new stories and I like to do it in a way that engages people. My primary audience for the work on the Navajo Nation is Navajo people. And I'd like to think that there will be continued growth in the work that I create."
That work will almost certainly be big and bold, like the land itself–visions that materialize for a short while, and then gradually dissolve again, into the desert.
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