Hózhǫ́ is a foundational concept in the Navajo world, encompassing ideas of beauty, harmony, balance, order, grace, health, and happiness. It is a state of being, thinking, and acting. Navajo artists embody hózhǫ́ as they weave, and textiles are imbued with and become works of hózhǫ́.

These Navajo textiles, created between 1850 and the early 1900s, are a small representation of an extraordinary gift of North and South American textiles from Paul and Elissa Cahn. The Cahns developed their collection with the conviction that the finest textiles of the Americas are equal to or surpass, in both aesthetic and technical brilliance, those from elsewhere in the world, and that indigenous women should be recognized as master artists in their own right.