Featured Artist: Landis Bahe
- MIP Author
- Aug 7
- 3 min read
A tattoo artist creates work that rarely hangs on a gallery wall. The finished image leaves the studio on another person, moving and changing with the body that carries it.
Landis Bahe is a Diné artist and tattooist based in Flagstaff, Arizona. His creative practice moves among tattooing, painting, music, apparel, and writing, bringing together his experiences growing up on the Navajo Nation with the contemporary world around him.
In April 2019, Bahe, Diné Artist and Tattooist, joined the Museum of Indigenous People as the featured artist for its inaugural Contemporary Native Arts Festival. Bahe worked at Tat Fu Tattoo in Flagstaff. He now works at Near the Mountain Tattoo.
Landis Bahe: Art Created Through Trust
The photograph preserved by MIP shows Bahe concentrating on a client’s arm, holding the skin steady as he works. It captures the trust at the center of tattooing. The artist listens to what the client wants, interprets the idea, and makes permanent decisions on a living surface.
Bahe has resisted being defined by one recognizable tattoo style. “I don’t have a style.” He has explained that his ability to work in different styles allows the finished tattoo to reflect the person receiving it. A client might arrive with a memory, a person they want to honor, or an idea they have carried for years. Bahe contributes the drawing ability, technical control, and visual judgment needed to give it form.
Tattooing requires many of the same decisions found in painting and drawing, including proportion, line, color, contrast, and negative space. Skin introduces movement, texture, healing, and change. The artist must consider how the design follows the body and how it will settle over time.
“I don’t have a style.” “When I tattoo, I’m like a vessel.”— Landis Bahe
Beyond the Tattoo Studio
Bahe’s work is not limited to skin. His paintings include Ancient Ones, The Gifts, The Path, The Search for Water, For Life, Walking in Beauty, and Winds of Change. These works move among human figures, birds, water, landscapes, geometric forms, and imagery that appears to emerge from dreams or memory.
Bahe also helped create PIVOT: Skateboard Deck Art, an exhibition that opened at the Museum of Northern Arizona in 2018. Bahe and Hopi artist Duane Koyawena invited artists from across the Southwest to transform blank skateboard decks into original works of art.
The exhibition brought together traditional imagery, painting, carving, graffiti-influenced art, and contemporary graphic design. It reflected the movement many Native people make between ancestral communities and modern life.
“You’re going to see something very contemporary and very old school. Native art will probably not be the same.” — Landis Bahe
That idea also describes Bahe’s larger practice. Whether he works on skin, canvas, clothing, or a skateboard deck, the surface changes, but the artist’s experience remains present.
Looking Ahead to Sacred Canvas
Bahe’s 2019 appearance at MIP has taken on new relevance as the museum prepares Sacred Canvas, an exhibition coming in fall 2026.
The exhibition will explore traditional and contemporary body art and body modification throughout the Indigenous Americas. Tattooing will be part of a wider story that includes piercing, adornment, identity, beauty, status, memory, and cultural belonging.
Bahe’s photograph offers an early glimpse into that conversation. It shows a Diné artist working in a contemporary studio, using a modern machine to create an image another person will carry into the world.
Additional information about Sacred Canvas will be announced as exhibition details are confirmed.
