A selection of Navajo textiles from the collection of minimalist icon Frank Stella is being made available to collectors.

After gatecrashing the art world with his Black Paintings as a young 20-something, Stella began building his personal collection in the mid-to-late 1960s. He was introduced to the world of Navajo art through Donald Judd , who had taken him to meet Tony Berlant , a Los Angeles-based artist with a growing collection of blankets and weavings. There, they traded a work of their own for a blanket.

Berlant would duly supply the likes of Jasper Johns , Robert Rauschenberg , and Tony Smith as well as co-organize “The Navajo Blanket,” a seminal 1972 exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that offered the textiles as art works rather than mere ethnographic artifacts.

A Navajo weaving from around 1885.…