New Mexico Magazine spotlights Gallup Diné artist Eric-Paul Riege's rise

Gallup’s own Eric-Paul Riege is carrying a McKinley County story onto the national stage, and the connection runs right back to the same block where he grew up. Born in 1994 in Na’nízhoozhí, the Diné weaver and fiber artist still lives and works in Gallup, where his practice is shaped by family, local life and the Diné weaving traditions that surround him.

Riege’s work does not sit quietly on a wall. His collage, durational performance, installation, woven sculpture, wearable art and mixed media pieces are built to be handled, moved through and seen in motion. He has said, “My work is activated by human interaction, by touch,” a fitting description for an artist whose pieces draw on hózhó, the Diné idea of beauty, balance and goodness in physical and spiritual life.

That approach has taken him from Gallup to major institutions. His first solo museum exhibition, Hólǫ́ -it xistz, opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, in 2019. Hammer Projects: Eric-Paul Riege followed at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles from Nov. 13, 2022, to Feb. 19, 2023. His major exhibition ojo|-|ólǫ́ opened at Brown’s Bell Gallery on Sept. 3, 2025, and is scheduled to travel to the Henry Art Gallery from March 14 to Oct. 25, 2026.

The Brown exhibition frames his work as more than art objects, saying the pieces invite viewers’ touch while also raising questions about how Indigenous art, culture and labor are valued. That project was developed with research from Navajo collections at Brown’s Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology and the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Washington, linking his contemporary practice to archives and institutions that have long held Indigenous material.

For Gallup, that visibility matters. The city had 21,899 residents in the 2020 census and an estimated 20,339 in 2024, with American Indian residents making up 53.8 percent of the population in the Census Bureau’s 2020 to 2024 estimates. Riege’s rise gives that majority-Indigenous community a vivid example of what can come from its own streets: a career rooted in local knowledge, family memory and Diné creativity, now recognized in collections at the National Gallery of Art, the Hammer Museum, ICA Miami, LACMA, the Denver Art Museum, the Montclair Art Museum and Forge Project.

His 2026 United States Artists Fellowship, supported by the Ford Foundation, adds another marker to a career that reflects back on Gallup itself. For young artists in McKinley County, Riege’s path shows that work made here can travel far without losing the place that shaped it.