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Exhibit: The Story Behind Filmer Kewanyama’s Hopi Spiritual Life Mural

  • Writer: MIP Author
    MIP Author
  • 2 days ago
  • 6 min read

A wall inside the Museum of Indigenous People has become a large canvas for Hopi artist Filmer “Fil” Kewanyama. Located in the museum’s HOOP Room, Hopi Spiritual Life fills much of the space with pueblo architecture, cultivated fields, corn, water, clouds, people, plants, and expansive areas of vivid color. HOOP stands for Hands On Observation and Play, making the room a fitting place for children and families to encounter Kewanyama’s art and begin asking questions about the relationships shown within it.


The mural is based on Kewanyama’s earlier painting Spiritual Life. Enlarging the composition across a museum wall changed the way viewers experience the work. Rather than encountering it as a framed painting from a distance, visitors can stand beside it, follow its pathways across the room, and notice how one part of the image connects with another. Its scale allows the painting to become part of the museum environment rather than simply another object displayed inside it.


In a museum conversation, Cindy Gresser speaks with Kewanyama about the mural and the Hopi experiences, teachings, and relationships that shape his work. The conversation gives visitors an opportunity to hear directly from the artist rather than relying entirely on an outside interpretation of Hopi imagery and spiritual life.





Filmer Kewanyama and the Stories Behind His Art


Filmer Kewanyama, whose artist name is Yoimasa, is a Hopi painter, sculptor, mixed media artist, graphic artist, and digital artist. He grew up in Shungopavi on Second Mesa, within the Hopi homelands of northern Arizona. His creative practice developed from what he learned through family, village life, stories, songs, ceremonies, observation, and his own experiences as a Hopi person living in the contemporary world.

Although oil and acrylic painting are his primary media, Kewanyama has continued to explore sculpture, watercolor, mixed media, graphic design, and digital art. His work has appeared in galleries, museums, studio tours, cultural exhibitions, and veterans’ art programs. Across those different settings and media, storytelling remains central to his practice. His paintings are not intended to function as isolated images. Each work carries an account of what it represents, where the imagery comes from, and why the subject matters.


“Each of my art has a story behind it. The best part is telling people what it means.” – Filmer Kewanyama

That emphasis on storytelling is important when viewing Hopi Spiritual Life. At first glance, the mural’s strong colors and large scale may command the most attention. A closer look reveals a connected visual landscape in which homes, crops, water, people, pathways, clouds, and the surrounding environment exist as parts of a larger whole. The composition does not separate spiritual life from the activities and responsibilities of daily life. Instead, it presents community, agriculture, land, water, and cultural continuity as deeply related.


The mural should not be approached as a puzzle in which every image must be decoded by an outside viewer. Kewanyama’s visual language comes from a living Hopi cultural context. Some meanings may be shared publicly, while others remain connected to knowledge, responsibilities, and experiences held within the community. What Kewanyama chooses to explain allows visitors to learn from a Hopi artist speaking through his own work, rather than treating Hopi culture as something that only exists in archaeology, historical photographs, or museum collections.


Water is one of the strongest recurring themes in Kewanyama’s work. In the dry environment of the Hopi homelands, water cannot be separated from farming, food, community survival, prayer, ceremony, and responsibility. Rain and water are not simply background features within a landscape. They are part of the relationships that make life possible.


“Basically everything I paint that represents an aspect of Hopi culture has to do with the sacredness of water.” – Filmer Kewanyama

Within Hopi Spiritual Life, water appears as part of a much larger visual system. It exists alongside corn, cultivated land, pueblo homes, plants, clouds, figures, and the forces of the natural world. No single element stands completely alone. The mural asks viewers to consider how communities depend on water, how agriculture depends on environmental balance, and how cultural knowledge develops from sustained relationships with place.


This is one reason the mural works particularly well inside a museum. Museums often separate art, history, spirituality, agriculture, architecture, and the environment into different galleries or academic subjects. Kewanyama’s mural brings those ideas back together. It encourages visitors to see Hopi life not as a set of disconnected categories, but as a network of relationships that continue into the present.


Kewanyama’s work also challenges a familiar problem in the way Indigenous peoples have historically been represented. Too often, Native cultures are discussed as if they belong only to the past. Hopi Spiritual Life is the work of a contemporary Hopi artist interpreting his own history, community, experiences, and responsibilities. The mural is grounded in cultural continuity, but it is not frozen in time. It was created by an artist who works across traditional painting, digital design, sculpture, public art, and contemporary exhibition spaces.


“My goal is to bring awareness to non Hopi on who we are.” – Filmer Kewanyama

That goal gives the mural a clear educational purpose. Kewanyama is not simply decorating the HOOP Room. He is using the wall to create a space where visitors can encounter a Hopi perspective through color, scale, story, and place. Children may first notice the bright fields of color, the ladders, the buildings, the plants, the corn, or the movement of water through the scene. Those observations can lead to larger conversations about why water is sacred, how people are connected to the land, why corn is central to Hopi life, and how one artwork can carry history, memory, spirituality, and contemporary experience at the same time.


The mural does not need to provide an easy answer to every question. Its strength is that it creates a place to begin looking and learning. It shows younger visitors that art can be more than an image on a wall. Art can hold personal memory, community knowledge, environmental responsibility, identity, and stories that continue from one generation to another.



From Military Service to Art


Before establishing himself professionally as an artist, Kewanyama served for 21 years in the United States Army and retired as a first sergeant. His transition from military service into civilian life was difficult, and art eventually became part of his healing, education, and reconnection with Hopi culture. He later studied graphic design at Yavapai College and continued developing the visual practice that now includes painting, sculpture, public murals, and digital work.


Kewanyama has also used art to connect with fellow veterans and bring attention to Indigenous military service. His work includes a painting honoring the Hopi Code Talkers, whose language was used by the United States military during World War II. This part of his story is explored more fully in another Museum of Indigenous People article.



Continue Filmer Kewanyama’s Story The article examines Kewanyama’s military service, his transition into civilian life, his experiences with art therapy, and the ways he has used art to support healing and recognition for fellow veterans. Linking the two stories allows this article to remain focused on his artistic practice and the museum mural while giving readers a clear path to learn more about another important part of his life. Using Art to Heal Fellow Veterans: Hopi Artist Filmer Kewanyama’s Journey


See Hopi Spiritual Life at the Museum


The photographs accompanying this article show both the mural and examples of Kewanyama’s wider body of work. His paintings, sculptural pieces, exhibition installations, and public projects demonstrate the range of his practice and the consistency of the ideas running through it. Figures, landscapes, water, cultural memory, color, and layered symbolism appear across different forms, but the work remains grounded in Kewanyama’s commitment to telling stories about Hopi identity and experience.


Photographs cannot fully communicate the scale of Hopi Spiritual Life or the way it changes the atmosphere of the HOOP Room. In person, visitors can follow the mural across the wall, see how its forms connect, and discover details that may disappear when the work is reduced to a small screen. The mural becomes part of the architecture, surrounding visitors rather than asking them to view it from a distance.


Through Hopi Spiritual Life, Filmer Kewanyama offers museum visitors a contemporary Hopi perspective shaped by culture, memory, water, land, community, and personal experience. The mural gives families a place to look closely, ask questions, and understand that Indigenous art is not only a record of what came before. It is also a living form of communication created by Indigenous artists working, teaching, experimenting, and speaking for themselves today.


Visitors can see Hopi Spiritual Life inside the HOOP Room at the Museum of Indigenous People, located at 147 North Arizona Avenue in Prescott, Arizona.



About the Artist


Filmer “Fil” Kewanyama creates work under the artist name Yoimasa. His primary media are oil and acrylic painting, with additional work in sculpture, mixed media, watercolor, graphic design, and digital art. His studio is located at Little Gallery on 6th Street, 697 6th Street, Unit 600, in Prescott.


Kewanyama can be contacted by email at yoimasa@gmail.com. More of his work can be viewed through his Prescott Area Artist Studio Tour profile, his Fine Art America gallery, his Instagram profile, and the Yoimasa: Art of Fil Kewanyama Facebook page.


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