Centered in his culture and at times reflecting his sexuality and lifestyle, Ryan Hopper’s art tells a story of reverence and community. The 37-year-old printmaker and painter incorporates elements from his childhood on the Diné (Navajo) reservation in Arizona.

“I grew up very close to my paternal grandmother, she was a Navajo rug Weaver, she comes from our family of shepherds. She’s like, the sole reason I would say, for my creativity,” he said.

He and his husband, Elias, moved to Salem in December 2021 and opened Hopper Gallery, which is currently an online gallery, as a way to showcase and sell his work. It is their hope that one day the gallery will have a brick-and-mortar location and will be a local hub for Indigenous art work.

“Growing up watching her weave rugs and me being there all the time next to her,” Hopper recollected. “I would be playing with my little Tonka trucks playing, sitting next to her, while she was weaving her rugs. Helping her when she would spindle the wool and help card the wool, too, and then she would go collect plants to dye the wool, like the colors for the rug, and just how creative that was.

“Then also seeing my uncles, who were like painters as well, and they would create their paintings and sell their paintings outside (the reservation) at the local trading posts or pawn shops or something like that. They would be standing outside waiting for people to look at their painting and sell it that way.”

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HOPPER’S WORK IS IDIOMATIC. The images are emotional and symbolic. Longer contemplation reveals allegorical stories that take on deeper contextual meanings, a narrative of his history and culture.

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“I grew up on a sheep camp and I was around sheep pretty much every day growing up,” he said. “We were herding the sheep to like their different corrals and stuff like that. We would haul in wood or like haul hay for the cows, sheep and horses.

“But there were also cattle, horses, rez dogs.” His grandmother also had cats, “and we grew up in a hogan type setting too. It’s a hexagon type structure. It’s built out of wood structure and mud or cement or something like that. She had one that was like the summer home, and then a winter one. We had no running water or electricity or anything like that.”

His way of life and continued exposure to art and those who created it coalesced into a need to express, to tell a story, to turn feelings into pictures and the need to share emerged.

“I don’t know, expressing ourselves was very much the thing,” he said, “because I grew up in very, how should I say that? It’s very passionate, very emotional and expressive, that’s how compassionate it is.

“When I was growing up, I was actually drawing in the sand like a stick, because we didn’t have much art materials or couldn’t afford it, and coming from that, it was everything, that was my imagination, drawing in the sand with the stick.

“We would be out herding sheep, and I would just be drawing the stuff I would think of. I would draw the animals. I have a fondness for animals and land in the arts.

“I just grew up around the Diné language, speaking it, and that actually was my first language growing up.”

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Language can define us as much as our cultural experiences. We see the world through context and images formed by the language we speak. Touchstones such as language and culture help us understand and identify the world around us. It gives us a solid foundation and teaches us how to tackle problems and experience joy as well as change. But, more often than not, those of us with a colonial background forget that our experiences are not those shared by Indigenous First Nation Peoples; and even if we do remember, we do not understand the impact our culture can have on others.

“I went to school on the rez through elementary, middle school to, like, high school, but it’s like, when you come from a place, that’s literally on the rez, it was kind of a culture shock moving to the city. You kind of learn things that you’re not comfortable with. I don’t know. It’s just kind of like learning everything,” he said of the experience of adapting to such a different culture and way of thinking.

These experiences and themes continue to dominate Hopper’s approach to his art: as an insider looking out and an outsider looking in. His subject matter provides the viewer a look at the way Hopper processes, understands, or deals with new experiences, events or ideas by taking these disparate ideas and merging them.

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AFTER COMING TO TERMS with life off the reservation, Hopper attended Arizona State University, earning a fine arts degree specializing in screen printing. Later, he added block printing to his repertoire.

“I’m very hands on; I always have to do everything by hand, even in screen printing, too. For the first one I actually just drew on the block, and then I started from there, carving it out, using the tool. The process of it was actually calming for me as well,” Hopper said of block carving.

His prints often are minimalist, with clean simple lines. Others are heavily detailed, depicting texture and grain. The colors are most often yellow, blue, black and white. These four colors are sacred to the Diné, as is the number four, and they depict the cardinal directions and natural elements.

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You can read Hopper’s life in everything he creates. He draws on his heritage using cultural references and style for many of his pieces. This is apparent of his use of a cow, in his print Posey, to pay tribute to his paternal grandmother. His print Gah, Diné for “jackrabbit,” is inspired by memories of the many jackrabbits he saw as a child while at the sheep camp.

Much of his other work takes its inspiration from his everyday life. Prints of a burning heart are visual examples of a physical ailment, while prints of the words “Queer,” “Stud,” “Smut,” and “Love” are reflective of his sexuality. He also has images of large herbivorous dinosaurs, because they, too, were vegetarians.

Hopper refers to his work as neither realism nor abstraction. He has channeled this directness and all these emotions and all the experience into his art.

“I don’t try to get close (to realism). Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t,” he said. “It’s just in the moment, but maybe more expressive.”

Each piece is also reflective of his emotional state at the time, and an extension of what interests him in the moment. His paintings range from realistic to representative or at times whimsical, but each piece is always deeply tied to his Diné roots, to his vegetarianism, or to his sexuality.

“There are things that I have in my artwork; there’s the eternal heart and there’s heartburn,” Hopper said, using this piece of art as an example of how his work is created and how it embodies how he is feeling.

“I guess it’s the juxtaposition between heartburn, the hopeless romantic, where your heart’s always on fire, but you never forget love, the eternal love, where you find endless love, and where it’s been always with you the entire time.”

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“It’s what I’m thinking of in the moment, and that’s what comes out of me, comes out on paper or my paintings or photographs, but the thing is that’s how I express it, and my feelings with different things, too.

“That’s kind of like how I do my art search sometimes. How do I express what I’m feeling about this? And then I’ll just start drawing ,and I want to share more of it as I keep going along.

“I mean, the minute I end up finding out what horror movies were and the things associated with it like horror imagery” and using that to create art “in a cutesy type way sometimes. Then I don’t think, oh it’s that bad.”

Hopper moved to Oregon in 2021 and has been a full-time studio artist since 2022. In the past he has supported himself and his art by working as an art teacher at a senior care facility, in a position at Indian Health Services in Salem, and in a print shop.

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HOPPER’S RESIDENCY AT THE BUSH BARN ANNEX runs throughout the month of January, after which his art will be shown in the Annex gallery.

The Salem Art Association residency encourages the artist to engage and interact with the public. This component of the program helps forge a connection between individuals and the arts. He will be teaching printmaking as part of his residency to help strengthen this bond. An exact date for the class and details have yet to be released.

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“I’ll be instructing printmaking processes and techniques utilizing various techniques in it to help with the art making process,” he said. “We are still working out the details. However, once in motion it should be posted on the Salem Art Association website and in their newsletter.”

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At present Ryan Hopper’s art can be seen seen at Pacific North Wild in Dallas, Oregon; Ice Age Candy Company in Independence; and Peach Rock Market Cave Junction. In February the Ike Box Cafe in Salem will have an installation of his Rez Dogs painting series. It can also be seen on the gallery website at www.hoppergallery.com.