Painter Emmi Whitehorse, Known for Her Abstract Landscapes of the Indigenous Southwest, Joins White Cube

White Cube will now represent Emmi Whitehorse, alongside New York–based Garth Greenan Gallery, which has exhibited her work since 2022.

White Cube will feature Whitehorse’s 2025 painting Father Sky meets Mother Earth in its booth at Art Basel Hong Kong later this month. The representation comes after she had a solo exhibition at White Cube’s Paris location last September.

An enrolled member of the Navajo Nation, Whitehorse joining White Cube makes her one of the few Indigenous artists to have representation with an international blue-chip gallery.

Whitehorse is best known for dreamy, ethereal semi-abstract paintings that often feature light oil washes in gradients of just a few shades of color—blues, greens, oranges, reds, for example—that are filled with marks of flora and fauna. Whitehorse has described these works as landscapes, indebted to the Navajo philosophy of Hózhó, reflecting “a harmonious balance between humanity, beauty and nature,” according to a release.

Whitehorse was born in 1957 in Crown Point, New Mexico, and received her bachelor’s in painting in 1980 and her master’s in printing in 1982, both from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. During her time as a student, she cofounded, with late artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation), the Grey Canyon Group, a collective of Native American artists whose work aimed to challenge stereotypes of Indigenous people through their art.

Whitehorse has exhibited consistently throughout her career, though her biggest showcase to date came in 2024 when she was included in the main exhibition of that year’s Venice Biennale, “Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere,” curated by Adriano Pedrosa. Her work has also been included in major traveling group exhibitions, such as “The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans” (2023–24) at the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, D.C., and “Hearts of Our People” (2019) at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Her work is included in dozens of institutional collections, including the NGA, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Despite her importance, Whitehorse’s last institutional solo exhibition was in 2006 at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in Colorado.

In an email to ARTnews, White Cube’s global artistic director Susan May said, “We are delighted to welcome Emmi Whitehorse to the gallery. Her meditative and poetic paintings, inspired by the landscape she grew up in, encourage us to reconsider our relationship with nature. The sumptuous colour, gestural marks and symbolic motifs in the work point to the beauty of the natural world, while underlining humanity’s interdependency with the environment.”