Pictured here is a Diné (Navajo) sandpainting-style wall painting depicting a “ripener” (sometimes referred to as a “cornbeetle”). This and an identical wall painting flank the interior door of the main entrance1 to the historic McKinley County Courthouse. Reportedly painted by “a young Navajo painter”2 in 1939, the same year the New Deal building opened, these murals depict an insect that derives from Diné cosmology and is associated with blessings. All of the sixteen sandpainting-style wall paintings decorating the lobby of the courthouse have similar associations with blessings and guardianship, and they are all arranged in pairs that flank entrances, lobbies, and passageways in order to protect and grace the space.
