In Conversation with Marilou Schultz

Last Friday morning, I spoke with acclaimed Diné (Navajo) weaver and mathematics educator Marilou Schultz. On June 27th, Marilou’s first survey exhibition, Replica of a Chip: The Weaving Technology of Marilou Schultz, curated by Candice Hopkins, will open at the Hessel Museum of Art, CCS Bard, in Annandale-On-Hudson, New York.

Schultz grew up in Leupp, Arizona, on Navajo Nation, in a family of weavers. She remembers always seeing her mother’s loom at home, and first experimenting with it when she was about five or six. By eight or nine she had woven her first piece with her younger sister Lola. From then on, prepping and carding the wool for her mother became one of her year-round chores, and Schultz wove every chance she could get.

She moved to Mesa, Arizona, in 1990 to begin teaching mathematics in the Mesa Public Schools — a career she pursued alongside her weaving practice, in a city she still resides in.

Schultz has spent her career innovating — experimenting with patterns, traditions, colors, wool dyeing, and with older techniques reapplied and modified. She’s always challenged herself to do something different, thinking: “Okay, I’ve done that, let’s see what else can I do with the weaving.”

That’s how Marilou found herself commissioned by the Intel Corporation to create a woven replica of its Pentium chip for their 1994 conference “Weaving in Technology” held in San Jose, California. In March of that year, Schultz was approached at the Heard Indian Market by Louis Baca, who was Pueblo and worked at Intel in Chandler, Arizona. Baca was going around to different artisans and weavers, asking if they would be interested in taking on a project for Intel. While others seemed hesitant, Schultz said she didn’t mind trying. 

Marilou Schultz: “It was pretty amazing just to be asked, you know, which is an honor for me. But I didn’t realize that the image was going to look so complicated. [Laughs] 

“At the time, I’d agreed to do it, but when I got the image later that week I said, ‘Oh my gosh —what did I get myself into? Is this possible?’

“The colors weren't the problem. It was the technique and the image, which was just to me an abstract design. There was no symmetry. 

“And then I asked my mom, ‘Do you know how to do design using a raised outline technique?’ Because I knew she knew the technique, but she would use diagonals to design in her weaving. So when I asked her to see if she knew how to interlock — to make straight lines going up and down — she said she didn’t know. 

“So I said, ‘Oh my gosh, I don’t know anyone who can do that in my family.’”

***

Faced with an unfamiliar design, Schultz began experimenting.

“I set up a small loom and started playing around with how I was going to do it. And I figured out a way to do it, and then started my project.”

When she felt pressed for time, Schultz asked her mother to come help her in Mesa.

“I checked on her during lunch time and said, ‘How far have you done? What did you do?’ [Laughs] 

“That morning I left and said, ‘Here’s the picture,’ I said. ‘You just weave and I’m right here and you can just look at it and do it the way you think it is.’ 

“At lunch time I checked on her and she was just laying down on the couch. I said, ‘Oh, how much have you done?’ 

“She said, ‘Oh, I only did maybe one line, I couldn’t — I didn’t know what to do… I don’t know how to do it.’ [Laughs]

“She was just so used to doing the traditional designs that it was hard for her to switch to an abstract design.”

***

Schultz returned her mother home that weekend, and later asked her sister how their mother described the experience.

“I asked my sister, ‘So what did mom say when she got home because she said she couldn’t do it?’

“She said that mom had said, ‘Oh it wasn’t no rug that she was weaving’ — talking about me. My sister said, ‘So what was she working on?’ Mom said, ‘Oh, something that goes into a radio that you don’t see.’ [Laughs] 

“It was a computer chip, but to her the only thing that she could associate it with was a radio, and that you couldn’t see — she had no visual. 

“So that was her interpretation. I always like to share that story — that she said it wasn’t a Navajo rug that I was weaving, that I was weaving something else.”

***

To translate the chip’s intricate, asymmetrical design into weaving, Schultz relied on mathematics.

“The way that I approached it was going back to math again.

“Okay, so if my warp is this long, my warp half — I took the halves, fourths, eighths. So I did that with my warp — I didn’t write on my warp but just on the side, on paper.

“With the photo that I had from Intel, I marked it up into sixty-four sections lengthwise, so I matched them proportionally — the warp length to the photo. I just looked at it and that is how I was able to do it. 

“And then going up and down I did the same thing — halves, fourths, eighths, up to probably eighths or sixteenths. 

“But there were so many panels of different colors that were so close together across width wise, I labeled them, ‘A, B, and C.’ [Laughs] 

“So I [also] labeled my yarn in that order — A, B, C — so that when I wove at night I didn’t get the colors mixed up. That’s how I did that one. I started labeling wool because at night they would look the same.”

In October 1994, Marilou flew to San Jose with the resulting work, Replica of a Chip.

“At the conference when it was unveiled, later you could go up and look at it closer. I heard the kids from behind me — the college students — who were naming the parts of that chip, you know, the parts of that computer chip. 

“And then I was thinking to myself, ‘Oh wow, to me it’s just a rug with an image.’

“I didn’t know that parts of it had names. I mean that was just really vague. I didn’t even know who knew the parts of that chip.”

***

Reflecting on her decades of experimentation and innovation, Schultz spoke about balancing tradition with exploration, and technological technicalities with what you can see in front of you. 

“I still stay rooted in my culture, I still practice certain things that I cannot do with tools, and still respect and honor my ancestors’ tradition. 

“But on the other hand, I also see [weaving] as a technique — the stories, [and] the techniques, you can combine both. 

“I think I can be progressive with it, showing the stories, sharing the stories, sharing my culture, my story, through my tapestries, while approaching it from the technical side of weaving. 

“For me, I see it as the warp is so confined. I’m confined by that space, but what can I do with that space as an artist? 

“And I think that’s an approach I’ve always taken. If I alter the space, somehow through the frame, through the shape — I can do a lot more with it. And what is it going to do? 

“That’s the experimental part that has brought me this far with my weavings. Basically the techniques and everything else are the same, the tools. It just has a different story at this point in time.”

***

In June, visitors to the Hessel Museum of Art will have the opportunity to interact with and see how Schultz’s decades of experimentation continue to expand what weaving can hold — traditionally, culturally, technically, and innovatively. The exhibition will be on view June 27 through November 29, 2026.