Artist Biography
Using a private language of symbols and memories, Emmi Whitehorse makes visual diaries of her life as an artist and of her aboriginal heritage. She creates textures and colors that conjure up the atmosphere and experience of the New Mexico landscape. Critic Lucy Lippard writes, “This land appears in [Whitehorse’s] work simultaneously as very distant and very close up, in atmospheric washes and sharp details and lines. As we see, her paintings are consummate abstractions, welcome in the world of art for art’s sake for their finely balanced forms and colors. They are also metaphysical views from the Navajo world. As such, they offer to viewers ‘from both worlds’ a glimpse of what art can be.”
Whitehorse’s lithographs created at Shark’s embody all of these qualities. With a mastery of skill and vision, the artist’s drawn and painted marks seem to emanate like apparitions or dreams from the plane of the prints’ paper surface.
Selected Collections: Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ; Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE; St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM.
View or download her complete biography.
