According to a contemporary newspaper report, in July 1939 “state art directors . . . made provision for selection of a young Navajo painter to aid with the murals for the new McKinley county [sic] courthouse”,1 which was a New Deal building that opened that same year. The unidentified artist created a series of sixteen Diné (Navajo) sandpainting-style wall paintings.
This is one of the “buffalo people” paintings—the figure has the body of a buffalo and the head, arms, and hands of a human—that was painted as part of a pair flanking vault doors. Originally, the courthouse’s two vault doors each had a yellow figure (as seen here) painted on one side and a blue figure painted on the other, though one of the blue figures has since been covered over (only three of the four buffalo people paintings remain visible).
