Ingmars Lindbergs
Director
Lot 15
A Charlie Willeto wood sculpture
9 December 2025, 12:00 PST
Los AngelesUS$1,500 - US$2,000
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Kim Jarand
Specialist, Head of Sale
Charlie Willeto
Diné (Navajo), (1897-1964), untitled, repurposed lumber and pigmented sculpture, carved to depict a figure wearing feathers or a headdress, with ridged arms raised upwards, the body decorated front and back with geometric motifs.
height 16 1/4, width 5 1/2in
height 16 1/4, width 5 1/2in
Footnotes
Provenance
William "Greg" LaChapelle Collection, Santa Fe. NM, catalog #129-79
John C. Hill Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ
The Stanley Miller Collection of Native American Art, acquired from the above circa 1999
Illustrated
Smither, John & Stephanie, et. al., Collective Willeto: The Visionary Carvings of a Navajo Artist, 2002, Museum of New Mexico Press, Santa Fe, NM, p. 96
For additional perspective on the artist and his work, see "The World According to Charlie Willeto" by Susan Brown McGreevy, American Indian Art Magazine, Spring 2010, Volume 35, No. 2, pp. 62-70. "While Willeto's work undeniably defies mainstream Euro-American artistic convention, it defies mainstream Navajo artistic convention at the same time. Original and iconoclastic, it nonetheless emerges from the deep interstices of Navajo culture, to be forged within the crucible of Willeto's audacious imagination. Unlike sandpaintings or yé'ii bicheii masks, Willeto's art is not explicitly sacred; rather, his creativity embraces a less literal and more intuitive connection to a secret and sacred world, a world implicitly charged with mysterious energy. Thus, Charlie Willeto's world of art is spiritually evocative, artistically potent and above all, visually compelling." Ibid. p. 69