Jihan Gearon

Bio: Jihan Gearon is a Diné (Navajo) painter and multidisciplinary artist based in Flagstaff, Arizona, originally from Old Sawmill on the Navajo Nation. Working primarily in acrylic, she creates vibrant, symbol-rich paintings that explore spirituality, transformation, and Indigenous relationships to land, cosmology, and responsibility.Her artistic practice emerged alongside a long career in Indigenous environmental justice and has deepened through experiences of healing and renewal, including a cancer diagnosis in 2020 that led painting to become a central spiritual and creative practice. Her work foregrounds feminine power, nonhuman kinship, and threshold spaces—sites of protection, danger, and transformation—often featuring animals, sacred landscapes, and archetypal figures.

Gearon’s work has been exhibited across Northern Arizona, including solo exhibitions at Coconino Center for the Arts and group exhibitions with the Museum of Contemporary Art Flagstaff. She holds a B.S. in Earth Systems from Stanford University and is a recipient of the NDN Changemaker Fellowship and the Black Women Green Future Award.

Artist Statement: My painting practice is grounded in Diné cosmology and engages spirituality as a site of knowledge production rather than belief. Working primarily in acrylic, I create symbol-rich compositions that investigate liminality, transformation, and Indigenous relationships to land, nonhuman kin, and futurity. The work operates within threshold spaces—between intuition and structure, the sacred and the material—where inherited knowledge is activated in contemporary form.

I approach painting as a relational and ceremonial process. Guided by dreams, meditation, and communication with spiritual and ancestral presences, I understand each work as co-created rather than authored in isolation. This methodology challenges Western frameworks that privilege individual genius, foregrounding accountability, reciprocity, and collective presence. The resulting images function as visual propositions—records of encounter that invite slowed perception and attunement.

A central concern of my work is the examination of boundaries: geographic borders, spiritual thresholds, and moments of personal and collective transition. Figures such as coyote and raven, along with sacred landscapes like Dook’o’osłííd, recur as agents of movement across worlds. Within dominant colonial imaginaries, these spaces are often framed as chaotic or dangerous; in my work, they become sites of instruction, where fear catalyzes transformation rather than serving as an endpoint.

Formally, my paintings balance controlled linework with intuitive, gestural mark-making and saturated color. This tension mirrors Indigenous epistemologies that hold multiplicity, contradiction, and interdependence as strengths. Precision and chaos coexist, creating visual systems that resist closure and invite sustained engagement.

Shaped by experiences of illness, healing, and renewal, my practice understands artmaking as a mode of survival, reclamation, and futurity. While informed by my background in environmental justice and Indigenous advocacy, my paintings resist didacticism. Instead, they create spaces of reflection where Indigenous presence is articulated beyond extraction or resistance, toward abundance, protection, and continuity. Ultimately, my work asks how art can function as a living technology: one that transmits spiritual knowledge, challenges colonized ways of seeing, and supports the capacity to imagine and inhabit more reciprocal futures.