New Acquisition: Steven Yazzie’s Erupter Now on View at the CAT

One of the best parts about being a curator is to follow an artist’s journey over the course of their career. I love seeing when artists challenge themselves to move outside their comfort zones, especially when they’ve achieved success with a particular style.  I’ve been following Steven Yazzie’s work for many years, and I happen to think he’s one of the most exciting painters working today, in part because he’s constantly evolving and fearlessly embracing the new.  

Yazzie recently moved from a successful painting career of figurative painting—including trickster coyote figures in art museums or in living rooms—to abstracting landscapes in the American Southwest. This shift in Yazzie’s painting style began after spending months on long bicycle rides and hiking, where he would chronicle his journeys in sketches and film. (Yazzie is also a successful filmmaker). In the mountains and along the old two-lane highways of Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, Yazzie understood a landscape brimming with activity, holding the same energy it has contained for hundreds of thousands of years. Landscapes—depicted in late 19th and early 20th century American paintings as barren, desolate, and dead—are places filled with life, activity and motion.   

Steven J. Yazzie (Navajo Nation, born 1970). Erupter, 2024. Oil on canvas. Cafesjian Art Trust Museum, 2025.429 

He shared with us that: 

When people stand before these paintings, I hope they sense that presence, the vibration, the physical and the spiritual, the seen and unseen, because for me, that’s where the landscape truly lives…When I think about landscape, I’m not just thinking about what I see. I’m thinking about what I feel the land holds, memory, story, and transformation. It holds beauty, but also complexity. My landscape series began as a way to understand that relationship, how we experience place, not as something fixed, but as something constantly shifting alive and responsive….Mountains, canyons and flora emerge as indiscernible, yet resonant shapes creating landscapes that blur the boundary between the tangible and the imagined. Abstraction for me is not about obscuring the land, it’s about listening to it in another way. It’s a space where emotion, rhythm, and presence take form.

Come see Erupter, now on view at the CAT in our lobby, and discover your own personal responses to Yazzie’s work and what abstract landscapes may mean (and feel) for you.