Craft Around the Country

Marilou Schultz Weaves Technological Motifs into Vivid Wool Tapestries

A new survey of the Diné artist’s woven works opens June 27 at the Hessel Museum of Art in Upstate New York.

By Kate Schuler
June 26, 2026

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Photo by Thatcher Keats

Marilou Schultz's 2022 wool rug Water, Tó, 41 x 27 in.

Navajo (Diné) weaving has always been a dynamic practice, with artists historically incorporating the changing world around them into their designs. For Marilou Schultz, continuing this cultural legacy has meant embracing computer technology as a subject and inspiration for her art.

When Intel commissioned Schultz to weave a replica of their Pentium microchip in 1994, she began a decades-long exploration of computer architecture, translating the geometry of circuitry onto the loom. Replica of a Chip: The Weaving Technology of Marilou Schultz, the first major survey of her work, opens June 27 at the Hessel Museum of Art in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, highlighting how she artfully brings these worlds together.

Schultz, a fourth-generation Diné weaver based in Mesa, Arizona, absorbed the culture and traditions of weaving growing up in Leupp on the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona. She helped with spinning and carding the yarn and experimented with her mother and grandmother’s looms as a five-year-old. That attention and curiosity came to define her as an innovative leader in Navajo weaving.

Photo courtesy of the Hessel Museum of Art

Landscape, 2020, woven variegated yarn with natural dyed yarn and natural Navajo-Churro wool yarn, 18 x 17 1/2 in. (diameter).

Alongside a lifetime of weaving, Schultz taught math to middle school students until retiring this year. She draws on that background to execute complex, asymmetrical designs, mathematically dividing source images and her loom’s warp into proportional fractions down to sixty-fourths. This grid system allows her to scale up the fine details of computer architecture and weave by sight, without drawing on the warp.

The Intel commission, Replica of a Chip, accurately captures the complex circuitry of the microchip using plant-dyed yarns and wool from Navajo-Churro sheep. The weaving, which necessitated modifying a traditional “raised outline” technique to achieve an asymmetrical design and vertical lines, remains a striking centerpiece of Schultz’s body of work—and the exhibition at the Hessel.

“Her practice is one that’s always been rooted in technological innovation,” says Candice Hopkins, curator of the exhibition. “It’s overdue to have this focus on her work.”

While the 1994 piece aimed to replicate the Pentium chip, in recent work Schultz has integrated traditional symbols with the maze-like lines of chip design. Spiders woven into the border of her 2024 work Integrated Circuit Chip & AI Diné Weaving represent Spider Woman, a mythological figure who gave the Navajo people the gift of weaving; Schultz’s inclusion of the spider motif conceptually connects ancestral forms of communication with modern modes of data transfer.

Photo by Maximilian Geuter, courtesy of the artist and Kunstverein Munchen

Integrated Circuit Chip & AI Diné Weaving, 2024, aniline-dyed and shades of indigo and natural hand spun Navajo-Churro wool yarns, 62 x 45 in.

Hand-spun Churro wool in varied shades of blue make up the chip’s pathways, giving a sense of pulsing movement and energy and guiding the eye to the outer edges of the weaving to contemplate the traditional designs there. She designed the weaving to honor the women who assembled circuit boards at the Fairchild Industries plant in Shiprock, New Mexico, in the Navajo Nation in the 1960s and 1970s.

Replica of a Chip positions Schultz as an innovator while rooting her work in a multi-generational weaving practice. The show draws a generational throughline of Schultz’s influences—and her influence—by including the highly skilled traditional weavings of her grandmother, Mary Jasbah Clay, and her mother, Martha Gorman Schultz, as well as the contemporary work of her niece, Melissa Cody, who is known for her innovations with the traditional non-linear wedge weave.

The materials and methods Schultz was raised with remain the foundation of her art even as she pushes boundaries by experimenting with dyes, using metallic threads, and creating new designs and forms. “She innovates within a set vernacular,” says Hopkins.

Photo courtesy of the Hessel Museum of Art

Popular Chip, 2025, respun wool, aniline and natural dyes, 50 x 40 in.

Kate Schuler is a potter, writer, and editor based in Washington, DC.

Learn more about Replica of a Chip online.

Website

This article was made possible with support from the Windgate Foundation.

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