Emmi Whitehorse (Diné, b. 1957)
Study for – Mapping a Walk About, circa 2014
Mixed media on paper mounted on canvas
18″ W × 24″ H
There’s a quiet pull to this painting. Whitehorse scatters a handful of small marks across it—seeds, curling tendrils, shapes that feel like plants half-remembered, the faint trace of something that moved through and kept going—and floats them in soft washes of color. You don’t so much look at a landscape here as remember what it felt like to stand in one.
She works slowly, by feel. Oil, pastel, chalk, graphite—she smears the color in with her hands, then draws back into it with fine, deliberate lines pulled from a vocabulary of symbols. Your eye just wanders, which is the point. You make your own way across it like a map you are studying.
That’s what the title is getting at—a walk about, a wander through country she carries in memory. The way light changes when clouds roll in and move on. The color of the sun coming up or going down. The small busy life of plants and animals most people never slow down enough to notice. Running underneath all of it is Hózhó, the Diné idea of living in balance and beauty with the world around you.
What makes a study like this special is that it’s the artist thinking out loud. It’s where the ideas get worked out before they grow into the large paintings she’s known for. You get all of her sensibility at a size that fits a real wall in a real home—from an artist whose work hangs in the Whitney, the National Gallery of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and Crystal Bridges, and who showed at the Venice Biennale in 2024.
