The Collection

Melissa Cody is a fourth-generation Navajo textile artist and enrolled member of the Navajo Nation. Born in 1983 in No Water Mesa, Arizona, she began weaving at age five, learning from her mother, Lola Cody, and her grandmother, Martha Gorman Schultz. She received her BA in Studio Arts and Museum Studies from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2007.

Cody's tapestries are closely tied to the Germantown Revival style, named for the government-issued wool distributed to Navajo weavers during the era of the Long Walk. Working on both a traditional loom built by her father and a mechanized jacquard machine, she recombines traditional Navajo patterns and symbols into bold, geometric compositions that draw as much from pop culture and video games as from craft history. "I'm a child of '80s video game culture: Pac-Man, Frogger, Nintendo," Cody has said.

Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions including Melissa Cody: Webbed Skies at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo and MoMA PS1 (2023–2024) and Melissa Cody: Power Up at Garth Greenan Gallery, New York (2024), and is held in the collections of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Heard Museum, and the Stark Museum of Art, among others. She lives and works in Los Angeles, California.