WASHINGTON, DC.- The National Gallery of Art has acquired Fog Bank (2020), a mixed-media work by Emmi Whitehorse (Diné, b. 1957). It is the first by this highly respected Native American artist to join the collection. Whitehorse’s artwork embodies the natural harmony she observes in the landscape at her home near Santa Fe, New Mexico. It conveys her intimate knowledge of a place, in keeping with Navajo philosophy.
To make the color-saturated ground for this work, Whitehorse used her hands, as well as brushes, to rub pastel onto paper attached to a canvas. The ethereal ground in Fog Bank reads as an expansive atmospheric backdrop of sky or water. The first layer comprises ground chalk applied by hand, over which a fixative is applied. Whitehorse then used a turpentine wash, and a thinned oil stick application working on two, side by side, sheets of paper. Following years of observation of the desert and intuition, the artist draws with conte pencils and conte chalk. Whitehorse has described the marks and shapes as an “intricate language of symbols [that] refer to specific plants, people and experiences.” Made on a flat surface, the work is assigned neither a top nor a bottom, a strategy meant to avoid, as Whitehorse says, “the Western tendency to schematize.”
Whitehorse received her BA in painting at the University of New Mexico, where she later earned an MA in printmaking and a minor in art history. She has been the subject of solo shows at the Jocelyn Art Museum and Tucson Museum of Art, among others, and her work has been featured in group exhibitions at the National Museum of the American Indian, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Denver Art Museum. Whitehorse is represented in numerous public collections, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Acquisition: Sculpture by Marie Watt
The National Gallery of Art has acquired Antipodes (2020), a two-part beaded work by Marie Watt (Seneca Nation of Indians/European descent, b. 1967). The sculpture addresses the temporal, material, linguistic, and spatial constructs of distance in Indigenous culture. In her artistic practice, which draws from Native histories, knowledge, biography, and belief systems, Watt investigates past, present, and future in community to better connect to place and to one another.
Antipodes calls on the history and role of trading beads exchanged by Indigenous peoples and European settler colonists to examine ideas of cultural exchange. The work’s stepped design, made of pre-1920s Venetian glass beads that were sewn by hand to two felt backings, alludes to geometric patterns featured in traditional Native American cultural objects. It also suggests the step-back architecture used in 20th-century buildings to increase the natural light and public space that would otherwise be obscured by monolithic skyscrapers. Watt incorporates a word on each of the two beaded wall hangings. “Skywalker,” on the upper left element, honors the Khanawake Mohawk ironworkers who labored at great heights to build New York City’s bridges and skyscrapers in the late 19th and early 20th century. It also refers to the character Luke Skywalker from the Star Wars movie franchise, bringing the work into the contemporary realm. “Skyscraper,” on the lower right element, refers to the towering structure in the Native ironworkers’ story and the means of their separation from the ground, which brought them to celestial and legendary heights.
