Keri Ataumbi was born on 1971 and is a Kiowa artist, who paints and sculpts, but is most known as a jewelry maker.
16 Facts About Keri Ataumbi
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Keri Ataumbi's works have been featured in exhibits and permanent collections of various museums including the Heard Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Peabody Essex Museum, Philbrook Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.
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Keri Ataumbi's father was an artist and sculptor of Italian-American heritage.
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Keri Ataumbi learned both rebellion and an appreciation for the technical skill required for art from her father, and later said that she and her sister, "owe our careers to him".
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Keri Ataumbi saw her mother market Native American goods to try to bring them to a wider audience and learned to identify the characteristics of quality work.
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Homeschooled until high school, Keri Ataumbi graduated from The Cambridge School of Weston, near Boston.
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That year, she legally changed her name to Keri Sue Ataumbi, appending the surname of her grandmother Carrie Susie Ataumbi, after whom she had been named.
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Keri Ataumbi briefly worked in retail and then opened a landscaping business with a friend.
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When her business partner decided to go to medical school, they dissolved the partnership and Keri Ataumbi returned to school.
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Keri Ataumbi was strongly influenced by her instructor Linda Swanson, who taught her to find her own vision and face critique of her work.
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Keri Ataumbi's paintings are mixed-media abstracts which often are focused on the opposing beauty and irony of her environment.
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Keri Ataumbi utilizes materials from both cultural perspectives in her work.
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Keri Ataumbi's approach is artistic; rather than meticulous attention to stone setting, she combines textures like rose-cut and brilliant-cut diamonds for their artistic effect.
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In 2014, with beader Jamie Okuma, Keri Ataumbi worked on another earrings-ring-necklace set based on historic likenesses of Pocahontas.
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Keri Ataumbi has been an artist in residence at UCROSS two times.
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In 2024 Keri Ataumbi did a week long residency in North Carolina as part of her work being shown at the North Carolina Museum of Art in "To Take Shape and Meeting" and for a talk at the Ackland Museum of Art at the UNC.