Gazing into her canvases, you enter vast space. Is it the sky? Are you looking through a lagoon? Into the deep recesses of the universe? You’re surrounded by ethereal, tranquil work by an artist who spent her life observing the natural world, creating abstractions causing you to pause and contemplate. The masterful work in Emmi Whitehorse: Intimate Landscapes is on view at Santa Fe’s Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian through October 4, 2026.
This retrospective was mounted in two parts this year so that some of her recent large-scale canvases could have room to breathe in the hogan-inspired main gallery of the Wheelwright.
Whitehorse’s 2007 Fragment oil pastel, chalk, and paper on canvas. Courtesy: private collection; featured in Part 2 Line and Form.
Part 1 of the exhibition was subtitled Light and Space; Part 2 Line and Form. Works in both installations have hovering biomorphic shapes against a subtle ground that seems to undulate. Take a look in our Flickr album to see the gorgeous, atmospheric works from both installations of Emmi’s show.
Whitehorse’s 2019 Kelp Moss oil pastel, chalk, and paper on canvas. Courtesy: private collection; featured in Part 2 Line and Form.
Entering the Wheelwright, the introductory gallery features some of Emmi’s earliest work – a set of abstractions inspired by symbols of Diné culture and the color-field movement. From the start of her art training, Emmi was attracted to abstraction. Her delicate, mixed-media layers and light touches are a prequel of her mature style.
The artist’s beginnings: Three of Whitehorse’s 1980 works from her Kin Náh Zin series – collages with dyed rice paper, chalk, conte, and pencil on paper; inspired by memories of Ancestral Pueblo sites.
Nearby, a glass-topped case shows ephemera from Emmi’s earliest showings at the Wheelwright – a featured member of the Grey Canyon Artists, a ground-breaking collective initiated by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith; a set of portfolio slides from the archives; an early typewritten artist’s statement; and photos taken at the opening of her celebrated 1991 solo show exhibition.
1991 photo of Emmi Whitehorse with her grandmother and mother at the opening of her ten-year solo show at the Wheelwright.
The retrospective includes some of the impressive works from this period, on loan from private collections – hand-applied chalk and pastel on paper mounted on canvas. Right from the start, Emmi identified her ethereal abstractions as landscapes – inspired by her days as a young girl tending to her grandmother’s sheep amidst the endless vistas of the Navajo Nation, looking at horizons, skies, and the small details of the natural world at her feet. She imagined details of landscapes beyond the horizon, and held on to those images in her memory.
Whitehorse’s 1983 Landscape – East #255 oil pastel, chalk, and paper on canvas. Courtesy: private collection; featured in Part 2 Line and Form.
Early on, she sometimes incorporated symbols and slightly recognizable images into her work – such as domestic items (like her grandmother’s comb) or mysterious symbolic figures – but over the years, these types of definable shapes gave way to less recognizable abstract elements and shapes from her memory.
Whitehorse’s 1991 Untitled #883, with an abstracted depiction of her grandmother’s comb; oil pastel, chalk, and paper on canvas; featured in Part 1 Light and Space.
Symbolic landscape: Whitehorse’s 1999 Untitled #902, oil pastel, chalk, and paper on canvas; featured in Part 1 Light and Space.
The main gallery is populated by works of hazy, floating images created on paper with chalk, soft conte crayon, and pencil.
Whitehorse’s 2014 Charting a Walk-About oil pastel, chalk, and paper on canvas. Courtesy: private collection; featured in Part 2 Line and Form.
Emmi works on these images flat on a table (not an easel), so she can walk around and apply delicate layers by hand from all sides. When the work is complete, she mounts the paper on canvas – a structural support that makes for sturdier display, transport, and installation.
Whitehorse’s 1997 Witch Seed I, #1147 oil pastel, chalk, and paper on canvas; featured in Part 1 Light and Space.
The visual experience at each canvas truly feels like standing in nature, slowly observing surrounding details. Sometimes it feels as if you’re looking at the smallest details of pods and nature; sometimes it feels like you’re peering into a microscope to see the organisims populating a pond or a deep lake or ocean. Take a close-up view:
Whitehorse’s 2002 Undercurrent, #1315 oil pastel, chalk, and paper on canvas. Courtesy: the artist; featured in Part 1 Light and Space.
Video of details in Whitehorse’s 2002 Undercurrent, #1315
Her most recent works are confident and very large-scale, allowing you to get lost in the mystical expanse as you move across the work. It’s a lesson learned from the mid-century masters of American color-field painting but channeled through the mind of a quiet artist who has spent time really looking and feeling the world around her.
How does she do it? She treats the act of creation as a slow process, working on multiple pieces at a time. Large expanses populated with tiny details and memories.
Detail of Whitehorse’s 1996 Tó (Water), #1109 oil pastel, chalk, and paper on canvas; featured in Part 1 Light and Space.
Detail of Whitehorse’s 2019 Kelp Moss oil pastel, chalk, and paper on canvas. Courtesy: private collection; featured in Part 2 Line and Form.
Enjoy this visit with Emmi talking about the land and family that formed her, her life path, and how she creates in her beautiful studio. Kudos to Diné filmmaker Kelso Meyer for such an insightful portrait:
The scale and scope of the contemporary art on display is tremendous, but how often do art-seekers also get an opportunity to travel across ancient streets and landscapes, to meet real and fictional historic characters, contemplate fables and real-life stories, and see art of the past and present side by side?
It can take days to experience and fully absorb all of the history and potential futues presented in the films, paintings, sculptures, and installations in Once Within a Time: 12th SITE Santa Fe International, on view across 15 art spaces across Santa Fe through January 12, 2026.
Exhibition banner in the courtyard of Palace of the Governors (1610) (New Mexico History Museum) – gateway to SITE installations by Daisy Quezada Ureña (Santa Fe) and Charisse Perlina Weston. (Harlem, New York)
Besides the expansive white galleries and screening rooms of SITE’s museum in Santa Fe’s always-popping Railyard District, visitors can choose to contemplate giant abstract murals in a church-like auditorium, an innovative historical-object installation in a 400-year-old seat of power, or enter an old foundry to see an evocative installation by a Silk Road artist across farm fields adjacent to the Old Spanish Trail.
SITE Santa Fe gallery theme: appears like real life and sensual free-thinkers. 2025 mixed-media sculpture “18-1-4-5-7-21-14-4” by Patricia Ayres; copper work by Santiago de Paoli; Katja Sieb’s 2025 “perpetual novice” painting; and 2020 grid painting “Atlas” by Penny Siopis (South Africa).
SITE Santa Fe gallery theme: in touch with light (spiritual) – Agnes Pelton’s paintings (1930s), Maja Ruznic’s mural (2025), and the 1895 healing rod of itinerant Southwestern mystic Francis Schlatter. Courtesy: Phoeix Art Museum; New Mexico Museum of Art; Oakland Museum of California; Maja Ruznic and Karma Gallery; and New Mexico History Museum.
In every space and art encounter, visitors may reflect upon whether history is repeating itself and whether inspiration can be drawn from futures that artists imagined nearly a century ago. Each space is designed for visitors to look, read, encounter, and reflect.
In the old foundry at Tesuque: 2024 video As We Fade by Saodat Ismailova (Uzbeckistan), showing visitors to one of Central Asia’s most sacred sites (Throne of Solomon) along the ancient Silk Road; projected across 24 suspended silk screens. Courtesy: the artist and Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca.
The theme for the show – Once Within a Time – is inspired by Godfrey Reggio’s most recent film – a suggestive and wordless mix of innocence, nostalgic images, visual poetry, and the future facing the next generation. The film screens continuously inside SITE, with visitors caught up in Godfrey’s dream-like images, which highlighted in this mesmerizing movie trailer:
Like Godfrey’s film, each space and gallery presents a theme, story, historic character, and provocative contemporary art that pulls back in time, creates an unforgettable experience, and asks the viewer to go inward to contemplate the future.
Joanna Keane Lopez’s 2024 Batter my heart, three person’d God – adobe, a handmade bed, colcha embroidery showing a radiation cloud, and creosote bush, referencing her family’s experience of living downwind of the Trinity detonation.
Cochiti pueblo ceramicist Helen Cordero’s storyteller figures are paired with Pablita Velardi’s storyteller illustrations (both are inspired by grandfathers and fathers) and Simone Leigh’s epic stone and raffia goddesses.
SITE Santa Fe gallery theme: storytelling. Simone Leigh’s 2025 untiled stoneware and raffia sculpture. At rear, 2025 oil The Solemn and Dignified Burial Befitting My Beloved for All Seasons by Dominique Knowles. Courtesy: Matthew Marks Gallery; the artist and Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles.
Gallery theme: storytelling. Helen Cordero’s 1970 painted clay Storyteller – the creator of the Cochiti Pueblo sculptural tradition, inspired by her grandfather’s stories; championed by patron Alexander Girard. Courtesy: School for Advanced Research.
SITE Santa Fe gallery theme: language Marilou Schultz’s 2024 weaving Integrated Circuit Chip & AI Diné Weaving – a reference to the controvercial 1970s Fairchild Semiconductor chip plant on Navajo Nation staffed primarily with Diné women. Courtesy: private foundation.
The story of the legendary WWII heroes, the Navajo Code Talkers, is featured in a gallery alongside Marilou Schultz’s weavings of chip technology using traditional Diné methods with Fred Hammersly’s ground-breaking IBM computer drawings at the University of New Mexico in 1968-1970.
Fred was given an opportunity to create the first mainframe-generated art in the form of drawings programmed by traditional IBM punch-card technology and the Art1 program. SIITE not only displays a selection of the 400 computer drawings that he generated over the course of 18 months, but some of the punch cards he used, which are now archived at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.
Sensual free-thinkers are represented by the story of Santa Fe gambling mogul Doña Tules (Maria Gertrudis Barceló) and her actual 1840s money chest, witty contemporary porcelain playing cards and magical paintings by Katja Seib (UK), and jaw-dropping drawings by Shanghai’s Zhang Yunyao.
SITE Santa Fe gallery theme: sensual free-thinkers. Two of three 2025 Connector drawings by Zhang Yunyao (Shanghai); pencil on stretched felt. Courtesy: the artist, Don Gallery.
Around the corner from Agnes Pelton’s transcendental paintings are Diego Medina’s landscapes reflecting the Piro-Mansa-Tiwa spiritual power inhabiting ancestral lands of Southern New Mexico and also installations about a different type of New Mexico light – the impact of the nuclear energy tests on people living downwind and the legacy of uranium mining across native lands.
SITE Santa Fe gallery theme:In touch with light (nuclear energy): Will Wilson’s 2025 series Hubris on the Land – aerial photography of abandoned 1940s uranium mines on Navajo Nation paired with his documentation of Land Art sites created by Holt, Smithson, Heiser, and Turrell in the 1960s-1970s. Courtesy: the artist
New Mexico’s natural world is paid tribute in stories and artwork by travelers and residents – watercolors of Pueblo spirits and wildlife by Awa Tsireh (Alfonso Roybal) in the 1930s, Vladimir Nabokov’s sketches of butterfly wing cells (1940s-1950s), and Eliot Porter’s spectacular photos of Tesuque jays in the 1960s.
But these examples are just snippets of Once Within a Time – the entire show deserves multiple visits, and time to visit the other locations in the city, such as the hidden basement natural wonderland epic at the Museum of Internatonal Folk Art created by Taiwan ‘s Zhang Xu Zhan. It’s not only an immersive environment, but a film, animal-spirit sculptures, and selections from the MoIFA’s paper funerary object collection. Don’t miss the Day of the Dead altar, the 18th-century Pere Lachaise Cemetary tribute initially collected by Mr. Girard himself, and paper funerary fantasies made by the artist’s own family. Truly unforgettable.
Museum of International Folk Art: Zhang Xu Zhan’s 2020-2022 paper-animation video Compound Eyes of Tropical (Animal story series), with a Southeastern Asian deer-mouse outwitting a group of predatory crocodiles. Courtesy: the artist and Project Fulfill Art Space, Taiwan.
The Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian fills the Klah Gallery (in the shape of a traditional hogan) with a meditation on healing by Cristina Flores Pescorán, a wild organic sculpture by Nora Naranjo Morse, and a mini-retrospective of paintings by the incomparable Emmi Whitehorse.
Wheelwright Klah Gallery theme: journeys. Nora Naranjo Morse’s sculpture Into the Forever; on walls, Cristina Flores Pescorán’s 2025 installation Treinta y ocho. Ofrendas para reescribir historia medica y renacer Huaca. Courtesy: the artists
The Tesuque location also features rooms with installations by Mexico’s Guillermo Galindo incorporating burned wood from the recent New Mexico fires (crossed with Picasso’s Guernica), David Horvitz’s tribute to the men incarcerated in Santa Fe’s Japanese internment camp (and a hat from one them), and Thailand’s Korakrit Arunanondchai’s room-sized contemplation that incorporates the ashes from the burning of Zozobra.
Video of Korakrit Arunanondchai’s 2025 installation Unity for Nostalgia, with floor incorporating ashes from Santa Fe’s Zozobra’s burning and a prayer to the phoenix; layered soundtrack. Courtesy: the artist, Bangkok City Gallery, London’s Carlos/Ishikawa, CLEARNING NY-LA, Kukje Gallery, Seoul
Video of Max Hooper Schneider’s 2025 Written in Sand (Finquita Garden) installation; spheres mysteriously travel sand channels. Courtesy: the artist; Maureen Paley, London, Hove; Francois Ghebaley, Los Angeles, New York.
For more, take a walk through the main exhibit and five other sites in and around Santa in our Flickr album to see work by legendary New Mexican artists, and travel back and forth to see how contemporary art reflects epic histories and mystic systems of the Southwest.
View of historic St. Francis Auditorium (1917) with Maja Ruznic’s 2025 Kisa Pada, Trava Raste, Gora Zeleni installed atop Donald Beauregad’s painting The Conversion of St. Francis; to right, Beauregard’s The Renunciation of Santa Clara.
