User:ArtistWeaver

Kori Guy is a Native American potter and painter (watercolor, oil, and acrylic.) Kori is Navajo mixed-blood of the To'aheed'lii'nii Clan (Waters Flow Together People), and is also Cherokee and Mohawk. Her grandparents were from the Canyon Dechelly and Lukachukai areas within what is now known as the Navajo Reservation. Her art name, Dine Woolchoo'n, means Navajo Quilt.

Raised with Navajo traditions stories and language from her great-grandmother, Kori uses nontraditional techniques to express her deep love of these traditions through her artwork. Traditional stories go along with all of her art pieces. Kori calls them 'story pots' and 'story paintings. Kori creates the artwork in her head first, often dreaming of it before the pottery or painting comes to physical form. Many of her pieces share themes which fit in a series to meet the full expression Kori's dreams. Her three primary art media are pottery, watercolor painting, and oil painting. For Kori, each media has a different energy which provides a greater overal format share the concepts she strives to express. She strongly believes that the Native American philosophy of total relationship between earth, human, and animals can help heal the bringing the current imbalance into balance.

Kori Guy is currently a Professor of Political Science, teaching Native American Studies and Art at the Metropolitan State College of Denver in Colorado. She began teaching in public schools in 1981 as a substitute teacher. Her first full time contract began in August, 1985 at Wagonwheel elementary in Gillette, Wyoming where she taught kindergarten through sixth grade art.

In August, 1989 Kori moved her family to Denver, Colorado where she began her contract as a high school art teacher and councilor at Colorado's Finest Alternative High School. She joked lovingly of her new teaching assignment that at least if they put the paintbrush up their nose they knew, at least, that it really did not belong there.

Growing up in an artistic family, Kori began drawing and painting at an earlier age than many of her friends. Her great-grandmother was a weaver. Her aunt was an fine artist working in watercolor and pastel. Kori's mother was a music teacher with the skill level of a concert pianist. It was viewed women should not be on stage, so she did not ever market her playing. It is this family background that has both challenged and supported Kori's progression as an artist.

Kori began her formal art training in 1969 at Graceland College, Lamoni, Iowa under the esteemed Professor White and Mel(Kaihela) Clark as an art major with an emphasis in pottery. Professor White studied under Shoji Hamada, esteemed Japanese potter.