Emmi Whitehorse (Native American/Dine, b. 1957) Keyah Hozoni (Beautiful Land)

Emmi Whitehorse (Native American/Dine, b. 1957)
Emmi Whitehorse is a Native American painter and printmaker. She was born in Crownpoint, New Mexico and is a member of the Navajo Nation. In 1980, she earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in painting from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. 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. She has described her work as having a sense of chaos and randomness.
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 numerous public collections throughout North America, Europe, Japan, Uzbekistan and Morocco including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Heard Museum, Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Muscarelle Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.