International powerhouse White Cube will represent Indigenous artist Emmi Whitehorse alongside New York’s Garth Greenan Gallery.
White Cube mounted its first solo exhibition of the artist at its Paris gallery in fall 2025 and will show her painting, Father Sky meets Mother Earth (2025), at its Art Basel Hong Kong booth later this month.
Whitehorse is an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation, the largest Indigenous American reservation in the U.S. Her Indigenous heritage and rural upbringing in New Mexico greatly inform her meditative landscape paintings, which employ acrylics, pastels, graphite, chalk, and charcoal that she often smears by hand to create layered, ethereal compositions. She has developed her own visual language of iconography inspired by Native symbols resembling botanical and vegetable forms, which she embeds into the works. She is guided by the Navajo philosophy of Hózhó, or balance, and strives to find the equilibrium between nature and humanity.
“My paintings tell the story of knowing land over time—of being completely, microcosmically within a place,” Whitehorse told the Observer in 2024. Born in New Mexico in 1957, the artist spent her early years surrounded by sacred Navajo and archaeological sites. These Ancestral Puebloan ruins and the vast landscapes of nearby Chaco Canyon would leave a lasting impact. She experimented with clay, metal, and wood as a student before receiving her B.A. in painting (1980) and her M.A. in printmaking (1982), both from the University of New Mexico. During her university years, she co-founded the Grey Canyon Group, a collective of Native American artists, alongside the late Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith. Active for four years, the group’s aim was to carve out a space for Native art that defied stereotypes and existed beyond the bounds of traditional craft practices. They made and exhibited art across New Mexico, New York, and the American West in the late 1970s.
Moss Bedding, 2025
Emmi Whitehorse
Garth Greenan Gallery
Whitehorse has participated in prestigious group shows, including the 2024 Venice Biennale, and has shown at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
In addition to solo shows at White Cube and Garth Greenan Gallery, she has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, Chiaroscuro Contemporary Art, and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Her work is held in collections at institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Denver Art Museum.
This summer, works by Whitehorse will also be included in a group exhibition, “Earth: Works by Contemporary Indigenous North American Artists from Tia Collection,” at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the U.K., which opens June 13th and runs through April 18, 2027.
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