The Diné Weaver Transforming Microchips into Works of Art

Weaving Modernity: Marilou Schultz’s Microchip Tapestries and the Evolution of Diné Textile Art

In the narrative of American art and technology, few voices weave tradition and innovation as profoundly as Marilou Schultz. A fourth-generation Diné (Navajo) weaver and mathematics educator, Schultz has spent the past three decades challenging the conventions of Native American textile art by integrating digital and technological imagery into her ancestral weaving practices. Her work pushes the boundaries of how technology intersects with Indigenous identity, storytelling, and craft.

From Circuit Boards to Textiles: A Cultural Continuum

Schultz’s career-defining body of work began in 1994 when Intel, the American chip manufacturing giant, commissioned her to create a unique textile based on their Pentium microchip. As an homage to the confluence of weaving and technology, the result was not just a physical artifact but an artistic dialogue between the ancient and the modern.

While Diné weavers have long relied on oral traditions and memory rather than drawings to guide their artistry, Schultz faced the novel challenge of replicating a highly intricate and abstract image—a microchip—on the loom. Her approach was mathematical, breaking the source image into 64 sections and weaving each segment with precision, echoing both microscopic detail and geometric tradition. The result stunned scientists and art lovers alike.

In interviews, Schultz reveals that her background as a math teacher deeply informs this process. She sees geometry in warp and weft, symmetry in dye patterns, and systems in structure. She blends the educational and the creative in each piece, cultivating a body of work that is not only art but a testament to Indigenous coexistence with evolving technology.

Fairchild’s Legacy and Cultural Subversion

The roots of Schultz’s journey are deeply intertwined with the economic and social landscape of Navajo Nation in the 1960s and 70s. Beginning in 1964, Fairchild Semiconductor established a manufacturing plant on the Navajo Reservation, hiring thousands of Diné women to assemble microchips. The rationale? Their “nimble fingers” and “intricate weaving heritage”—a racialized justification for exploiting Indigenous labor under the guise of cultural compatibility.

While Fairchild’s operations shuttered by the end of the decade, their cultural footprint remained. Enter Schultz, whose later use of microchip imagery repurposed the very aesthetics and tools once used to categorize Indigenous workers as subservient techno-labor. Her work reclaims these circuits and chips not as commodities of global capital but as sacred objects embedded with personal and collective memory.

Innovation Rooted in Hózhó

At the heart of Schultz’s artistic innovation is the Diné philosophy of Hózhó—a complex and holistic worldview that emphasizes balance, beauty, harmony, and well-being. Schultz describes Hózhó not just as inspiration but as a guiding principle for creating textile artworks that honor the old while inviting the new.

In a notable example, Schultz reimagined a traditional third-phase chief blanket by splitting it into three art panels in the late ’90s. It was the first time she consciously created a piece solely for artistic display rather than functional use. The work, which could be rearranged or displayed akin to a triptych, reflected both the heritage of Diné weavers and a modern abstraction fit for gallery walls. Through innovations like metallic threads and “special effects,” she blurs the line between wearable art and visual spectacle.

Schultz has also experimented with wedge weave techniques, whose zigzag motifs dramatically play with illusion and depth. Her recent works include QR codes, schematic chips, and even artificial intelligence-inspired patterns—a weaving practice as comfortable with ancestral stories as it is with algorithms.

Weaving as Resistance and Reclamation

Marilou Schultz’s artistry doesn’t exist in isolation. It belongs to a broader lineage of Diné women whose creative labor sustained their communities, whether in traditional textiles or modern factories, often under conditions of exploitation. Schultz elevates their experiences into artworks of agency and contemplation. Her pieces have been included in prestigious exhibitions like Documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens, and most recently in MoMA’s Woven Histories, yet she continues to be a mainstay in Native art markets across the American Southwest.

Her studio is not just a workshop but an archive and sanctuary for decades of experimentation. Among her peers are family members like her late mother Martha Gorman Schultz, her sister Lola Cody, and niece Melissa Cody, another contemporary force in avant-garde Diné weaving. This intergenerational collaboration affirms community as both a cultural inheritance and an artistic imperative.

Tradition Evolves, But Endures

As Schultz observes, the basic tools of Diné weaving—a vertical loom, wool yarn, batten, and weaving fork—have remained unchanged for centuries. What evolves, she insists, is the vision. Materials like aluminum-thread and aniline dyes, influenced by circuit designs or global textile techniques, are layered thoughtfully into weavings that maintain their structural