SANTA FE, NM.- Gerald Peters Contemporary is presenting What Water Remembers, a new exhibition by multidisciplinary artist Steven J. Yazzie. Interested in exploring the convergence of land, water, and cultural memory, the exhibition draws upon the artist’s personal history and immersive experiences in the desert southwest.

Included in the exhibition are two new abstract landscapes and a single digital composite photograph accompanied by a suite of watercolors from the artist’s newest series, Drifting & Painting: San Juan River. Created en plein air while Yazzie floated down the San Juan River through the Goosenecks and Glen Canyon Recreation Area, Utah, the series of twelve watercolors and corresponding film debut with the exhibition.

This stretch of the San Juan river flows through politically and spiritually charged geography. Here the river divides the Navajo Reservation and public federal lands, weaving through locations marked with historical tension and natural beauty. Yazzie’s process of drifting while painting merges movement with mark-making, allowing the water’s rhythm to influence form, gesture, and palette. The resulting works are contemplative meditations on presence, mobility, and the stories landscapes carry.

Through abstraction and site-responsive practice, What Water Remembers invites viewers to consider the layered histories embedded in the land and ask: what does the river hold, and what does it release?

Steven J. Yazzie (b.1970, Diné/Pueblo of Laguna/European Ancestry) is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, installation, video/film, photography and community collaboration. Yazzie is a member of the Navajo Nation and a veteran of the Gulf War, serving honorably with the United States Marine Corps, 1988-92. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Intermedia at Arizona State University and named 2014 Outstanding Graduate for the Herberger Institute for Design and Art; Yazzie was a Community Scholar for the Interdisciplinary Research Institute for the Study of (in)Equality, University of Denver, Colorado, 2019-20; Additionally, Yazzie was a founding member of Postcommodity, an indigenous arts collective, and the co-founder of the Museum of Walking.

Yazzie’s notable exhibitions include the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Museum of the American Indian, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Denver Art Museum, Colorado; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; Phoenix Art Museum, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Tucson Museum of Art in Arizona. Yazzie has been selected for the 2025 Sharjah Biennial 16, UAE.