Light on Water

Emmi Whitehorse (born 1956) is a Native American painter and printmaker. She was born in Crownpoint, New Mexico and is a member of the Navajo Nation. She currently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Whitehorse grew up on the open land northeast of Gallup, New Mexico in a family where only the Navajo Language was spoken. In 1980, Whitehorse earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in painting from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque (UNM). She earned her master's degree in art in 1982, also from UNM, majoring in printmaking and minoring in art history. Whitehorse's paintings draw upon a personal iconography, based on her reflections of her natural surroundings. She brings together Navajo cosmological perspectives with abstraction in her work. Whitehorse's work is deliberately apolitical. Her paintings are usually oil on paper, mounted on canvas, such as Movement, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art. This work, from 1989, demonstrates the luxuriant, atmospheric, and meditative abstractions for which she is known. Her work is represented in public collections throughout North America, Europe, Japan, Uzbekistan and Morocco.