Whitehorse, Emmi

Faust Gallery

Emmi Whitehorse

Diné Painter & Printmaker

b. 1957, Crownpoint, New Mexico  ·  Diné (Navajo Nation)

Emmi Whitehorse is a Diné (Navajo) painter and printmaker whose luminous, atmospheric abstractions have placed her among the most significant Native American artists of her generation. Born in 1957 in Crownpoint, New Mexico, she grew up on the open land northeast of Gallup—near Chaco Canyon—in a Navajo-speaking household whose livelihood centered on herding sheep. She lives and works in Santa Fe.

Whitehorse credits her grandmother, a traditional Navajo weaver, as her earliest and most influential artistic mentor—shaping both her sense of composition and her grounding in Hózhó, the Navajo philosophy of balance and harmony. She earned a BA in painting from the University of New Mexico in 1980 and an MA in printmaking in 1982. As a student in the late 1970s, she joined the groundbreaking Grey Canyon group, who used modernist abstraction to express Indigenous worldviews.

Working in oil, chalk, graphite, and pastel on paper mounted to canvas, Whitehorse builds layered fields of blended color inhabited by a personal lexicon of botanical and biomorphic forms. Her paintings are deliberately meditative—landscapes glimpsed from within rather than observed from a distance. In 2024, her work was featured in the central exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere, bringing renewed international attention to a career spanning more than four decades.

"My paintings tell the story of knowing land over time—of being completely, micro-cosmically within a place."

— Emmi Whitehorse

Education & Exhibitions

Education

  • MA, Printmaking (major) and Art History (minor), University of New Mexico (1982)
  • BA, Painting, University of New Mexico (1980)

Selected Solo Exhibitions

  • Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Colorado (2006)
  • Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska (2001)
  • Tucson Museum of Art, Arizona (1997)
  • The Wheelwright Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico (1991)

Selected Group Exhibitions

  • La Biennale di Venezia: Stranieri Ovunque – Strangers Everywhere (2024)
  • The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2023–2024)
  • Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2019–2022)
  • Celebrating Diversities in Art, Springfield Art Museum, Massachusetts (2012)
  • Modern Times – Kunst der Indianischen Moderne und Postmoderne, Galerieverein Leonberg, Germany (2011)
  • Into the Void: Abstract Art, Autry Museum of the American West, Los Angeles, California (2010)
  • Unlimited Boundaries: Dichotomy of Place in Contemporary Native American Art, Albuquerque Museum of Art, New Mexico (2007)
  • Off the Map, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, New York (2007)
  • Contemporary Art in New Mexico, SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico (1996)
Selected Public Collections
  • Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York
  • Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas
  • Denver Art Museum, Colorado
  • Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, Indiana
  • Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona
  • Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey
  • Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico
  • Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts
  • Tucson Museum of Art, Arizona
  • Westfälisches Museum, Münster, Germany
  • The Wheelwright Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico
  • Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York

… among many others.