SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Jessica Silverman announced the representation of Marilou Schultz, a fourth-generation weaver from the Diné nation (also known as Navajo), whose experimental textiles bridge ancestral traditions with computation and contemporary technology. Celebrated for intricate weavings of microchips, QR codes, and digital systems, Schultz redefines weaving as a foundational technology rooted not in automation but in the intelligence of the hand.
Schultz was immersed in weaving from an early age. Raised on the Navajo Nation reservation, she grew up watching her mother and grandmother rear sheep, prepare wool, and weave textiles. At seven, she began learning traditional Diné weaving techniques defined by symmetry and sacred geometries. Schultz continued weaving while pursuing degrees in education, eventually becoming a mathematics teacher. Ever curious, Schultz came to see the loom as a site of inquiry rather than a set of conventions to be followed. “When you set up a warp, you’re confined to a structure,” Schultz explains. “But I’m always asking: what else can this warp do?”
Working on an upright vertical loom with centuries-old wooden tools, Schultz embraces improvisation and experimentation, expanding Navajo weaving through asymmetry, relief-like forms, and complex color systems. Every work begins with color. Looking to abstract painting for inspiration, she challenges herself to achieve the same chromatic depth as pigment on canvas. She dyes her yarns by hand, often using natural pigments that shift with the season and climate, rendering certain hues irreproducible.
This sensitivity to color is especially vivid in Bold Fire (2026), a wedge weave tapestry that will be featured in Jessica Silverman’s booth at Art Basel in Switzerland in June. Woven from hand-dyed wool in radiant reds, ember oranges, and deep charcoals, the work evokes fire. Using a historic wedge weave technique, Schultz subtly shifts the warp to produce asymmetrical forms that rise and recede, transforming the textile into a 3D composition. Her weavings occupy a unique position—at once sculptural object, chromatic field, and philosophical provocation—registering Sheila Hicks's liberation of textile from decoration, Rothko's understanding of color as atmosphere, and Nam June Paik's insistence that technology invariably questions what it means to be human.
A pivotal moment in Schultz’s career came in 1994, when Intel commissioned her to create Replica of a Chip, a woven interpretation of the company’s Pentium processor. Translating the microscopic architecture of a computer chip into wool required her to invent new weaving strategies, which drew on complex arithmetic, intuition, and tribal knowledge. The project initiated a decades-long inquiry into the relationship between weaving and digital technology, one that also illuminates the relationship between Navajo women and the semiconductor industry.
“Even digital technology involves human hands and human thought,” she says. “Someone designs it. Someone assembles it. The hands are always present.” In recent years, Schultz has incorporated metallic threads into her textiles, evoking the glint of aluminum and copper circuitry and collapsing the distance between depicting machines and embodying them. For Schultz, weaving is not a precursor to technology but one of its most sophisticated expressions.
Schultz’s work is currently on view at the New Museum, New York and San José Museum of Art, California, and will be included in a group exhibition at Museum Tinguely, Basel, opening June 10.Her first survey exhibition, curated by Candice Hopkins, opens at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, upstate New York, on June 27, 2026. Schultz will present her first solo exhibition at Jessica Silverman, San Francisco, in 2028.
Marilou Schultz (b. 1954, Safford, AZ) is the subject of a forthcoming survey exhibition at the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College. Her work has been included in recent group exhibitions at the New Museum, New York; San Jose Museum of Art, CA; SITE Santa Fe, NM; MoMA, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ; and documenta 14, among others. Her work is held in the collections of the Heard Museum; Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; School of Advanced Research, Santa Fe, NM; Thoma Foundation; and American Indian Science and Engineering Society, Albuquerque, NM. She is the recipient of numerous awards and commissions including a Peter S. Reed Foundation Fellowship Grant and the inaugural Conrad House Award for Innovative Art from the Heard Museum. Schultz received a BA and MA from Arizona State University. She lives and works in Mesa, AZ. She is represented by Jessica Silverman and her debut solo with the gallery will be presented in San Francisco in 2028.
