09.26.26 Sheldon Harvey

Spirits in Wood and Feather

The Ye’i Sculptures of Navajo Artist
Sheldon Harvey

Chimayo Trading Staff Report | September 2026

In the high desert of the Navajo Nation, where the red rock cliffs of Lukachukai meet the wide Arizona sky, Sheldon Harvey carves stories that have traveled through four worlds. His Ye’i sculptures, tall, angular figures of wood, paint, fabric, and feathers do not simply illustrate Navajo cosmology. They inhabit it, standing as contemporary embodiments of the Air-Spirit Beings that once moved through the pitch-black First World.

Wood, Linen Canvas, 2026
45.75″ x 13.5″ x 9″

This new Ye’i sculpture from Sheldon he recently brought us, is made in the original style that first gained him attention for his sculptures. Made from linen canvas, and shaped as a worn blanket draped over the head of the Ye’i.

Harvey, born in 1978 of the Taa’chii’nii and A’shii’hi’ (or Red Running Into Water) lineages and raised near Window Rock and Lukachukai, comes from a family steeped in both ceremony and craft. Grandfathers who were medicine men, a silversmith grandfather taught him patience and precision; an uncle introduced him to painting.

Wood, Mixed Media
25.25″ x 14.5″ x 7.5″
$2800

He later studied at Diné College in Tsaile, yet he describes himself as largely self-taught. He is currently an art teacher at Diné College teaching the next generation, giving back to the community that encouraged him to pursue a career in art. Construction work in his younger years gave his hands the strength and familiarity with tools that sculpture would later demand. Drawing came first, then painting; nearly three decades ago, carving felt instinctive.

“With chisels, saws and sculpting tools,
I find myself in that mode,” he says.

Wood, Mixed Media
30″ x 15″ x 8″
$2600

Sculpture, for Harvey, is the place where two-dimensional ideas push into three-dimensional space… where concepts that evolve in the mind can be tested against gravity, texture, and light.

Wood, Mixed Media, 2025
24.5″ x 13″ x 6″
$2200

The Ye’i (also rendered Ye’ii or Yei) at the heart of these works are spirit beings drawn from Diné creation stories. In the First World, Nihodilhil, the beings were insect-like, dark, and airy Air-Spirit Beings who inhabited a realm of blackness before the emergence into successive worlds of increasing light and complexity. Traditional Ye’i appear in sandpaintings, weavings, and the healing ceremonies of the Nightway (Yeibichai), where masked dancers embody the Holy People.

Wood, Mixed Media, 2025
32″ x 18.5″ x 7″
$2800

Harvey’s versions are neither literal replicas nor ethnographic illustrations. They are personal translations: elongated, faceted bodies that echo Cubist planes and Expressionist energy while remaining unmistakably rooted in Navajo form. Wings or radiating headdresses suggest flight or power; faces are often mask-like or abstracted; surfaces are layered with stains, acrylics or oils, fabric, macaw feathers, horsehair, yucca, and sometimes metal.

Wood, Mixed Media, 2025
42″ x 10″ x 8″
$2950

Each sculpture is unique. Harvey does not repeat a carving. A typical figure might rise three to four feet, mounted on a simple base, its wood stained and painted in vivid contrasts—deep blacks and ochres against turquoise, rust, or bright primaries. Feathers catch light and movement; fabric softens hard edges or adds ceremonial color.

Wood, Mixed Media, 2025
42″ x 15″ x 10″
$2950

The result is at once monumental and intimate, sentinel-like yet alive with the suggestion of breath and motion. Collectors and galleries describe them as standing “like sentinels, protecting the knowledge of the past,” while projecting a quiet, stoic presence into the future.

Wood, Mixed Media
20″ Height x 14.5″ x 7″
$1500

Harvey’s approach is deliberately non-literal. He has spoken of working with the flow of mood, energy, and atmosphere, beginning with line and primary colors before moving into black, white, ocher, and umber.

Wood, Mixed Media, 2024
20″ x 31″ x 8″ base
$2250

Cubism’s fractured planes and Expressionism’s emotional intensity give him a visual language that can hold the tension and balance central to Navajo thought, ideas of duality, harmony, and the continuous unfolding of the worlds. The sculptures therefore feel both ancient and modern: the insect-like forms of the First World rendered in a vocabulary shaped by twentieth-century European modernism and by the living practice of a Navajo-Diné artist working in the twenty-first century.

Wood, Mixed Media, 2024
20″ x 16″ x 8″ base
$2800

$2800Recognition has followed the work. Harvey has earned multiple first-place awards and Best of Show honors at the Santa Fe Indian Market, including a rare double category win in 2008. His pieces reside in major private and institutional collections across the United States, Europe, and Asia.

Wood, Mixed Media, 2024
20″ Height x 28″ x 8″ base
$2250

Yet he measures success differently. Family, closeness to creation, and the quiet continuation of story matter more than ribbons or market prices.

Wood, Mixed Media, 2021
28″ x 12″
$1980

What distinguishes Harvey’s Ye’i sculptures is their refusal to treat tradition as a closed archive. They do not merely preserve; they expand. By allowing the Air-Spirit Beings of the First World to speak through wood, feather, and contemporary form, Harvey keeps the old stories in motion.

Wood, Mixed Media, 2021
29″ x 12″
$1980

Standing before one of these figures, a viewer encounters neither pure ethnography nor pure abstraction, but a living translation… proof that the beings who once inhabited darkness can still move, with dignity and power, through the light of the present world.

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