Painter Emmi Whitehorse Joins White Cube

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

Whitehorse to exhibit 2025 paintings by White Cube Heavenly Father Meets Mother Earth On the booth at Art Basel in Hong Kong later this month. The exhibition follows her solo exhibition at White Cube in Paris last September.

Whitehorse is a registered member of the Navajo Nation, and joining White Cube makes her one of the few Native artists represented in international blue-chip galleries.

Whitehorse is known for his dreamy, ethereal semi-abstract paintings, which often feature light oil paintings in several color gradients, such as blue, green, orange, red, and are filled with traces of flora and fauna. Whitehorse described these works as landscapes, indebted to Navajo philosophy Huo RuoReflecting “a harmonious balance between humanity, beauty and nature,” according to a press release.

Whitehorse was born in Crown Point, New Mexico, in 1957. He received a bachelor’s degree in painting from the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque in 1980 and an master’s degree in printing in 1982. As a student, she co-founded the Gray Canyon Group with the late artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, a citizen of the Confederation of Salish and Kootenai Nations, a collective of Native American artists whose work seeks to challenge stereotypes of Native people through art.

Whitehorse has exhibited consistently throughout her career, although her largest presentation to date was in 2024, when she participated 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 exhibitions such as The Land Bears Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art of Native Americans at the National Gallery of Art (NGA), Washington, D.C. (2023-24), and Hearts of Our People at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (2019).

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

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

in an email art newsSusan May, Global Artistic Director at White Cube, said: “We are delighted to welcome Amy Whitehorse to the gallery. Her meditative and poetic paintings are inspired by the landscapes in which she grew up, encouraging us to reconsider our relationship with nature. The gorgeous colors, gestural marks and symbolic patterns in the work point to the beauty of the natural world while emphasizing the interdependence of humans and the environment.”