Emmi Whitehorse is a member of the Navajo Nation. She earned her BFA in painting at the University of New Mexico in 1980 and her MFA from the same institution in 1982. As a student in the late 1970s, E. Whitehorse joined the groundbreaking “Grey Canyon Group”, which was comprised of other contemporary Native American artists, such as Jaune Quick-To-See Smith (b. 1940, founder of the group), Conrad House (b. 1956), and Felice Lucero-Giaccardo (b. 1946). Together, the group defied expectations placed on Indigenous-made art by utilising modernist abstraction to express Indigenous themes or worldviews.
Throughout her forty-year career, the artist has created abstract and meditative mixed-media paintings. Her main sources of inspiration come from the landscapes of the American southwest and her Navajo culture. E. Whitehorse cites her grandmother, who was a traditional Navajo weaver, as one of her earliest art mentors. Her grandmother’s influence not only shaped how the artist viewed composition but also ingrained in her the Navajo philosophy of Hózhó, or balance. This philosophy has inspired the artist to make artworks that honour the aspirations of a harmonious balance between nature and humanity.

Her primary focus has always been landscapes, nature and “being completely, micro-cosmically within a place”(“Emmi Whitehorse: Mapping the Microcosm,” Chiaroscuro Contemporary Art Gallery Santa Fe, accessed 31 July, 2023). Her landscapes are filled with abstraction, blooms of colour and pastel or graphite line drawings. Her line drawings often depict minute details such as the activity of plant life or the tracks left behind by animals. They are works that are meant to be viewed slowly and deliberately to fully appreciate their delicate intricacies.

Early in her career, with works such as Another Blanket (1983), the artist primarily created drawings with minimalist compositions. She eventually began incorporating oil paint into her work, which introduced new colour palettes, textures and compositions. Such works include Fire Weed (1998) and Water Gap (2022). It is these large-scale oil paintings on paper for which she is best known. To craft these works, she lays her pieces flat and works on them from all sides. She blends materials, colours and layers before adding geometric and biomorphic figures. While most of her work has been deliberately apolitical, in 2015 she created the triptych Outset, Launching, Progression, as a response to the long history of oil and uranium extraction on Navajo lands. The first canvas depicts the landscape as pristine and without the presence of human interference; the second canvas shows the planning stages of both land divisions and resource extraction; and the last canvas illustrates the aftermath of resource extraction, defined as destruction and traces of both hazardous chemicals and gases.

E. Whitehorse resides and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Some of her solo exhibitions include the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art’s Emmi Whitehorse: Language Imagined (2006) and the Wheelwright Museum’s Neeznáá: Emmi Whitehorse Ten Years (1991). Whitehorse has also been featured in well-received group exhibitions, such as the Minneapolis Museum of Art’s Hearts of Our People: Native American Women Artists (2019). Whitehorse’s works are in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico, among others, and she has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally.