Yancey Katoney was the kind of kid who could lose himself for hours in the scratch of a pencil. In the quiet corners of Winslow with not much else to do, he drew animals in the margins of his schoolwork and doodled whenever he could. “Art was my go-to escape from reality,” he said.
It wasn’t just a pastime it was lineage. His brother, a painter and his uncle, a silversmith, opened his eyes to an Indigenous art world far removed from the “John Wayne Indian” portraits that hung in gift shops that he had known up until that point. Their work carried a depth and complexity that spoke to heritage as something alive, not trapped in nostalgia. His brother’s canvases showed him that Native art could be sharp, modern and deeply rooted all at once.
Teachers noticed, too. At Winslow Junior High School, Mrs. Trotter recognized something rare in the way Katoney worked a sketch into form, encouraging him to push further. In high school, Ms. St. Germaine nurtured his ambitions, guiding him toward sculptural work. To this day, she keeps a metal piece he made in her garden and it’s a reminder, Katoney says, of how belief in his talent has fueled him for years.
Tattooing entered his life in a less predictable way. As a teenager killing time at his mom’s job in the now-closed Bashas’ grocery store, he thumbed through tattoo magazines, at first drawn by the risqué images that catch a young man’s eye. But slowly, the art pulled him in. The store manager once rolled up a sleeve to show him fresh ink and suddenly tattooing wasn’t just a curiosity it was a craft worth pursuing.
But that pursuit had its share of road blocks. “I was always in front of Judge Kolomotitz,” he said, recalling a stretch of trouble that eventually culminated in prison time. But even in Navajo County Superior Court, waiting for sentencing, his hands kept moving, this time sketching the face of another man awaiting judgment. The man noticed and asked if he did tattoos. Katoney said that he did and he ended up tattooing him. “He scared me so much I had to do a great job,” Katoney said. He did, and the moment stuck: maybe he really could make tattooing a part of his life.
When he got out, he wanted to stay sober, stay out of trouble and build something. At AA and NA meetings, he met people willing to sit for tattoos. Word spread. Work flowed. Then, a turn: a job washing dishes at Bojo’s Gril & Sports Club on Second Street in historic downtown Winslow put him under the wing of owner John Jacobs, who handed him the side of the building as a canvas. “Paint something beautiful,” Jacobs told him. Katoney painted a few murals and then chose to paint one of Frida Kahlo.
One afternoon, a woman walked in asking who’d painted the mural. That woman was Jhane Myers, a Native artist and film producer. She commissioned a Kahlo portrait and the calls started coming. The Heard Museum in Phoenix. The Oakland Museum of Art. Galleries. Commissions. An auction at the Heard Museum saw a painting of his go for $3,000 and it filled him with a sense of pride and enriched his artistic purpose.
He opened his first tattoo shop above Bojo’s, a word-of-mouth operation. When it closed, he bounced between other shops, all while painting murals across town: Shorty’s Olde Town Grill, Captain Tony’s Pizza, the new RT Rentals building. Each job, each connection brought people like Andrew Payne at RT Rentals championing his work and pulled him closer to a dream: owning his own place again one not in some cramped closet but one with big windows where people passing by could see the work being done.
That dream became the Spotted Toad Tattoo Shop, named for the creature he sees as his personal emblem, a figure that’s hopped its way through his psyche for years. His landlord is John Suttman, a respected local artist whose encouragement has made the space feel less like a lease and more like an alliance.
And then came an unexpected full-circle moment: Randall and Cheri Sahmie, longtime friends and fellow Native artists, were searching for a space for their art workshop. Suttman mentioned he’d already rented to a tattoo artist, without naming names. They knew instantly it had to be Katoney. They called him. They had an idea: why not put it all under one roof?
That collaboration now has a name: Broken Focus Studio. Its doors will be open to the public from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., beginning Saturday, Aug. 23, at 200 W. Second St. in Winslow.
While Katoney’s path to this moment is remarkable in its own right, the Sahmies’ journey through the art world is every bit as winding and vivid. Their story will follow in next week’s Tribune, the second chapter of how three friends built a shared native-owned creative space in the heart of downtown Winslow.
