EMMI WHITEHORSE was for a very long time a regionally popular Diné painter from Crownpoint, New Mexico who enjoyed a successful career living in Santa Fe and being represented at Chiaroscuro Contemporary Art on Canyon Road.
Then, in 2023, something happened. Whitehorse was picked up by the uber-influential Garth Greenan Gallery in New York City. Garth is a frequent face at all the important contemporary art fairs around the world. The gallery also carries several Native artists with ties to Santa Fe including Melissa Cody, Yatika Starr Fields, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and James Luna.
So, in 2024, Whitehorse’s career suddenly skyrocketed as she was included in the lauded Venice Biennale. Whitehorse’s paintings on the secondary market began to hit well into the six figures and she is now thankfully considered one of the top contemporary painters working today. After Venice, she was picked up by the blue chip contemporary gallery, White Cube, with offices in London, Hong Kong, Paris, New York and Seoul. Now her work is incredibly sought after by international collectors.
One of the early important exhibitions for Whitehorse’s work happened at Santa Fe’s Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in the 1990s. And now, the museum has just opened Part One of a two-part retrospective of Whitehorse’s paintings titled Intimate Landscapes. Part One is titled Light and Space and Part Two, opening in June is titled Line and Form. Together, the exhibition looks at forty-five years of her career through forty paintings.
We were lucky enough to visit Emmi in her studio, which is full of Japanese anime collectibles — and quite a few bunnies. When we asked about the bunnies, she explained I just like them. — JR
Much of what you do goes back to your upbringing near Chaco Canyon. How has that found its way into your work?
I guess I really wasn’t aware of it, but I knew I could draw very well at a young age. So, when I went to UNM, I saw what some of the Native American artists were doing, and they were all painting. They were mostly from Oklahoma anyway. They were doing all these Indians with big feathers and they’re all dressed up on horseback, and I’m looking at it thinking, My people don’t look like that. I’m not going to be painting that. And then I thought to myself, what is it that I really know, that I can use as my source? So, I thought, being outside and looking at the land, the nature is what I know best. I’ve been in it. I move around in it. And it’s an endless source of inspiration, you know, material for my art. So, I said that’s my subject. And that’s what I’m still doing. I’m just looking at the land.
You’ve said that you knew you could draw early on. When did that kind of creative spark start?
It was around fourth grade. I did not pay attention to the lessons. I was a terrible student because I would just draw, you know, around the edges of the paper. Finally, my pencils were taken away, so I wouldn’t scribble. But I loved to draw. That’s all I wanted to do.
And who was the first person who encouraged you?
I think it was a drama teacher in high school. I went to school in two places. I went to a government boarding school for elementary school. And then for high school, I went to a public school in Crown Point, but then moved to Page, Arizona to finish the rest of my high school. And that was where I met the art teacher, and she would show us slides and explain to us a little bit about each painting, very short, so that we could understand what we were looking at. You know, a short history of European art. Just the major names: Picasso, Van Gogh.
So, she got me interested in other aspects of art — photography, acting on stage. I was really bad at that. It was terrifying to be an actress, or an actor in this stage play. She really pushed me, and also there was a speaking competition that we did. She made us do that. And I think her aim was to get me to lose some of my funky pronunciations of words, because we don’t have the Ps or the THs in the Navajo language. I was always stumbling over those. So, she made me aware of, you know, some of my hang ups or my shortcomings when it came to speaking two languages, but I still keep my language. I still know my language. I still speak my language.
Did she inspire you to go on to college?
I applied. And my own tribe offered me a scholarship too. They have scholarships for their graduating students so that they could go to universities. A lot of them went to ASU and I thought of going to ASU. But my mom and my grandmother said it has to be close, which was Albuquerque. UNM was in Albuquerque, so University of New Mexico was the one I chose.
And I just took everything I could. I took ceramics, I played around with clay, firing, I did sculpture, modeling, wood sculpture, metal, cutting metal, learning to use a torch. And they had Charles Mattox there; he was doing moving sculptures. So, I ended up trying to motorize some of my sculptures, wind moving sculptures. I don’t know where they ended up. They’re out there somewhere.
They’re somewhere out there!
Home or something or maybe my brother cut them down to use for the corral or something or another.
When your teacher showed you these things, did you think, Wow, I can do this?
Yeah, definitely. And, you know, there was no right way or wrong way, as far as abstraction. Except that it would be just creating things that were pleasing to the eye that it makes a comment or it could be about the human condition; it could be about, you know, anything. It was wide open. And I did not want to do landscape because that subject was so static to me. I did not want to paint landscapes in the traditional sense, where you have the mountains, and the lake, and the trees. I wasn’t interested in that. What really impressed me was this art that we get to live in — this 360-degree art that is all around us, being in it, we are floating in it.
Do you think growing up in Navajo culture, surrounded by jewelers and textile artists, inspired your initial creative direction?
Definitely. My grandmother’s name was Hadibah, which translates to War Swept Over. Many of the women in our people had names referencing war. I was the youngest, so I spent a lot of time with her. She tended sheep and was an exceptional weaver.
Her specialty was doing really fancy saddle blankets. And she did the ones with the patterns on the edges, almost like Greek keys, and then she would make these really fancy pom poms that would drop down, just beautifully, shaped in that form. And she would sell those and those were the kinds of saddle blankets that the young men would like to buy and show off. You know, drape them on their horses and show them off. So, she did that to earn income for herself. But I also would always help her.
What do you remember about making blankets?
She created intricate blankets, frequently with yellow ochre because it was affordable. She made the dye herself from wild mustard plants. I helped her collect them. We would dry the plants, boil them, stir the mixture outside in heavy tubs. Then she’d soak the wool skeins — thick, twisted bundles like braided bread — lift them out, hang them, and let the sun oxidize the dye into a deep ochre.
It was physical, labor-intensive work. And traders often didn’t like yellow — it wasn’t trendy. She’d struggle to sell those pieces. That frustrated me. There was so much labor and creativity involved, yet the market tastes dictated what was acceptable.
Later, I made a series titled Another Blanket — a commentary on that dynamic.
The wild mustard was very labor-intensive work.
Yeah. She’d boil it, dry it, boil it, hang them, you know, they have to dry really good first, so half the time the whole inside of the house looked like an upside down, you know, landscape with all these things hanging to dry. And it was a lot of work for that color. I mean, it’s for that yellow, you know.
And then after they were thoroughly dried, she would pick out all the duds that she didn’t want floating in there, and then pile it all up in this big tub and pour water in it. She’d heat it up and then she’d be out there stirring it, making sure the water was slushing through all parts of that, just kind of blending it. Then she would fish them out, and she was done with the plants and she would throw them out. And then the water would be what was be left.
And then she would have wool already prepared and spun, and so you would have these long skeins that were already made into yarn. They were always twisted, so they all look like a little loaf of bread, you know?
But visually, what stayed with me most were my grandmother’s black, white, and gray geometric weavings of cubes that seemed to move in space. They pulsed in and out. I didn’t know the term optical illusion then, but I felt it.
The more you look at them, they started moving, you know, in and out. And to me, they always moved in space. I was always fascinated by that effect. I think that instilled this idea of having the 3D effect and optical illusion on the flat surface. You feel like you’re looking at an open window or you know, you’re standing there looking at the landscape and you can see far away, you can see things up close. That’s where it all really started for me. And my work and how it reflects the land.
So your paintings are almost maps in a way.
Yes! And taking it more like to a macro level, microscopic level, seeing what’s floating around you. You’re breathing in those little pollens, little seed pods, that float around — all the stuff that’s the soup that’s in the air. That’s what I’m focusing on. So, you see those funky little foreshortened forms and little, you know, pollen pieces floating around in the works, too.
It’s the land in the sky, everything. Yes. Everything that surrounds us, that we are walking around in. That’s all in the paintings. And those early moments, that is what pushed me towards abstraction, I think. My work is and has always been about land, about being aware of our surroundings and appreciating the beauty of nature. I am concerned that we are no longer aware of those issues. What I see is beauty, that’s what I see around me. And that’s what I hope that people see in these paintings.
When do you first remember picking up a pencil or a brush?
Oh, very early. Coloring, the coloring. We would, you know, make my mother buy it for us, bring it. This is what we wanted. Coloring books, and comic books, we just loved comic books. My love for anime started at that time too. You see that in comic books: the exaggerated action figures, you know, with the foot coming at you. Body in the back. I loved that. You could see the 3D in motion and the action. And the coloring books, we would kind of leave them out in the sun and the paper would heat up and then we’d kind of smear around the waxy crayons and do funky blends.
When did you decide, I’m going to be a painter?
I met a teacher, Garo Antreasian, and he was the father of lithography or bringing back the art of lithography. Such a nice man, so nice, and such a great teacher. You know, we just loved him. And I took some of his classes and he just explained the process of doing the lithography, a print, and the importance of paper, how paper performs. For lithography, you know, you just dissect the paper and I just fell in love with paper after that.
It’s the touch, it’s the human element. It’s this feeling, this connection that you get with paper. I’m touching the work. You know, I work with my hands. That to me is really important. I cannot paint using brushes. I mean, I will use brushes in some of the early prep stages to quickly spread out color. But then the other process is mostly adding the lines with my fingers and dabbing them. It makes me feel like a human made it, you know, it’s not something that’s separated from who I am.
In your exhibition at the Wheelwright, there’s an importance of the natural world, the way the sky and the water series balance each other.
Well, the water series started when some guy once made a funny comment at one of the dances at the Pueblos, saying that you all, you think all our songs are about prayers and whatnot. And he said, no, it’s just all about — it’s all about water. It’s a lot of water, needing water, asking for water, petitioning the gods for water.
Everybody, all these young people, just listen to the love songs on the radio. That’s all it is, it’s just about love. Everything is about love. The one of love, love, don’t do me wrong, you know.
And I thought, Wow, yeah, you know, when you look at it that way, that’s two things that really do make a difference between two groups of people, you know? So, if you look in the Southwest, you really need the water.
So, then I started doing the water — that sense of having water or looking at water, you know, looking at the surface and trying to make it look like gold, it’s precious. I think I ran for like a year or two of just glazing and adding color, layer by layer and building it up so that it would feel like you really are underwater. Like if you’re looking at an aquarium and you get to see what’s on the ground. That sense, I was kind of aiming for.
And then some are connected to the sky.
Yeah, mostly about going more back to the plant life. The atmosphere. Yeah, the atmosphere. It’s the 360-degree skies that we see here. You don’t see it in other places because they’re so built up. You don’t see it in New York, you don’t see the light. A lot of the European artists went to Paris because the light in France was so different, it’s very bright and a lot of them ended up migrating — it’s so dark half the time in England. It’s so gray all the time. Every time I’m there, it’s gray. It’s raining.
Is that what made you stay in Santa Fe? Was it the natural world?
Actually, I ended up here because I got lost. I was living in Albuquerque, working out of Albuquerque. But every time we came to Santa Fe, we would never figure out how to get out of town.
It’s a problem. It’s a circle.
Yeah. So, I ended up getting lost, and I ended up right where the Buddhist temple was. And I drove down that road and it turned out it was a dead end, so I turned around and went back, and then I noticed there were some warehouses to the side of me. And I saw a sign that said, Warehouse for Rent. Could there really be warehouses in Santa Fe?
So, I stopped, got out and walked around and looked and there was more than just one. There were all these warehouses in the back. I thought, this could be interesting.
And do you think the creative environment here inspired your work?
Everybody said I should move to New York and work there. New York scared the heck out of me. And I knew I probably couldn’t afford it. So, I just kind of moved around it. I ended up in Sag Harbor for a year. And then in Connecticut, Bridgeport for a while, then Fairfield. Rented a home from a very elderly Italian grandma, and I painted in the living room. Every Sunday she would have dinner with her friends and she would cook up a storm, make lasagna or some Italian dish, and the smell of garlic would just waft up the stairwell. Well, her old buddies, the old guys came by and they would see me out there painting away, and so they all got curious and would come over and watch me paint. They’d be talking to themselves and I’d be working away.
You met the painter Jaune Quick-to-See Smith early on.
We met each other at UNM, yeah. We were both beginning painting. She was in the painting department and I was downstairs in the drawing department.
And would you bounce ideas off each other?
Yeah, we had the same ideas of what was popular in Santa Fe. We would come up to Santa Fe and go to the openings. And we thought, this is not what Indians do. They painted horses, Indians on horseback, and it’s all guys, you know, and we complained loudly about that. So, we decided to change that. And the problem was a lot of the gallery owners were all women.
Our first foot in the door was with the Wheelwright. I think Jonathan Batkin was the director then. He took a chance and gave us a show. And then at the opening, all the docents came and were all so pissed off at us. They hissed at us, oh God, we got hissed. We just backed out the door and left. They were so mad at us, saying What is wrong with you guys? You should be home making rugs, making pottery, what your grandparents are doing. You’re ensuring that your craft disappears. And we were like… Yeah.
Juane was very good at meeting people and she befriended Mimi Schapiro, and she was experiencing the same thing, you know, woman’s work not being artwork, not being accepted as real art or good art.
And through her, we met Harmony Hammond. She was wrapping letters with rags and painting them and leaning them as sculpture against the wall, and everybody was like rolling their eyes. This is terrible. You guys should just stay home and wash dishes or have kids. They were getting the same blowback as we were. So that kind of really, you know, bonded those two worlds together.
And then we did shows in New York, group shows with a Native American-run organization that was based in New York City by the Turtle, the upper New York tribes there.
You were showcased at the Venice Biennale. The international appeal of your work must be satisfying.
Yeah, that’s a shot, but on the other hand, Europeans also are very partial to all things Native. So, I have an advantage there.
When I was there looking at people going through the show, and I was just standing in the back, watching people, they came rushing into the front, and then they saw the work, and they just kind of went, Wait a minute. And then they get up real close. And then they would run over to the side where the placard was and take a photo of the artist’s name, my name, and they’d go back and start looking again. It was very interesting to watch.
It really did slow people up. It was something that was so different, I guess. They could see that it was a very personal drawing. There’s a sense of intimacy in the works. It didn’t scream at you.