Alum Highlight: Eric-Paul Riege Receives 2025 Trellis Art Fund Grant

Recently, Eric-Paul Riege, who graduated with his BFA in Studio Art and Ecology with a minor in Navajo Language and Linguistics, was acknowledged as a 2025 Stepping Stone Grantee with the Trellis Art Fund. The Trellis Art Fund’s mission is to “support the creative work of individual artists through unrestricted grants, professional support, and community.” Eric-Paul Riege (Diné) lives and works in Na’nízhoozhí, Gallup, NM. He is a weaver and fiber artist working in collage, duration performance, installation, woven sculpture, and wearable art. Using weaving as both means and metaphor to tell hybrid stories that interlace narratives from Diné spirituality with his own interpretations and cosmology, he understands his artworks as animate and mobile. His practice pays homage and links him to generations of weavers in his family who aid him in generating spaces of sanctuary.

With regards to his work, Eric-Paul Riege said the following: ““I am a maker and artist working in woven sculpture, installation, wearable art, collage, and performance. I honor the Diné (Navajo) worldview of hózhó which encompasses the values of beauty, balance, and goodness in all things physical and spiritual and its bearing on everyday experience. My work is a celebration of ancestral knowledge passed down by my mothers family. I am a descendant of weavers and fiber artists extending back to Na’ashjé’ii Asdzáá (Spider Woman); a Holy Person who protects Diné peoples and taught us how to weave. I consider all that I do a form of weaving. When there is a warp there is a weft and a cross (+) happens.

I was told by one of my grandmothers that we adorn our body with jewelry so our Holy People can find and follow us and that our jewelry is listening and feeling with us. I began making large textile earrings as totems of memory called jaatloh4Ye’iitsoh meaning “ear rope for the big gods/monsters” which mimics and embellish the traditional looped form of stacked beads. My jewelry and weaving pieces also deal with economies and cultures of the marketplace, especially as related to authenticity and what is perceived as authentic. The expectations around value and spectatorship particularly in materiality and presentation allows me to play with the precious and non-precious and the high and low.”

Congratulations Eric-Paul. We at the department can’t wait to see what else is to come!

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
EXPLORE the work of Eric-Paul Riege on their website https://ericpaulriege.com/about
LEARN more at https://www.trellisartfund.org/