Born in Crownpoint, New Mexico in 1957, Whitehorse grew up near Chaco Canyon – a major archaeological site that served as the centre of the Ancestral Puebloan civilisation between AD 850 and 1250, and acted as a nexus linking Indigenous communities across the American Southwest. Her childhood was nomadic, divided between summers at Whitehorse Lake – named for the white horses her family kept, which would gather at the lake to drink – and a winter home in the shadow of Mount Taylor (Tsoodził), a dormant stratovolcano of great significance to the Navajo people. The lake, surrounded by Anasazi and Pueblo ruins, lay on land scattered with fossils, arrowheads and shards of pottery. These early encounters with archaeological and natural phenomena are distilled into her paintings, in which a distinctive symbology emerges, functioning to register both the minute flurries of life and the vast cosmological and seasonal cycles.

A student at the University of New Mexico, Whitehorse received a BA in Painting in 1980, followed by an MA in Printmaking in 1982. During this period, she met the late Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith, with whom she co-founded the Grey Canyon Group – a Native American artist collective established in 1977 that challenged prevailing stereotypes of Indigenous-made art. Holding artistic admiration for the Colour Field abstractions of Mark Rothko and the surreal, ornate depictions of Hieronymus Bosch, Whitehorse draws her creative wellspring foremost from the land, which she approaches in a spirit of reciprocity and balance, rather than extraction. This ethos echoes the Navajo concept of hózhó, a holistic philosophy meaning ‘walking in beauty’ that encompasses the maintenance of beauty, harmony and order through continual acknowledgement and practice of balance in all aspects of life. It is this philosophy that pervades Whitehorse’s canvases, traversing time and place, and using painting to reiterate sacred connections to the land.

Taking her lead from her environment, she imbues each painting with a distinct palette, weaving together evocations of natural phenomena – dust billowing across open plains, the arrival of rain, the germination of a seed pod. In Rincon Marquez (1987) and Rincon Marquez II (1986), created during her years living in Connecticut in the 1980s, the atmosphere of Whitehorse’s compositions assumes a claustrophobic character: larger, flatter motifs are compressed within the picture plane, pushed towards the viewer, their forms jostling for space in visual analogue to the overwhelming presence of buildings, roads and people. Upon her return to the Southwest, her work opened up once more, conveying a measured and reverent observation of a quietly changing land, articulated through expanded spatial depth, softened formal tension and a renewed sense of compositional balance. 

In works from the 1990s, such as Sandstone (1998) and Tsin Tah II (Amidst Forrest) (1992), earthy tones dominate: shades of burnt amber and aubergine dissolve into swathes of pale ecru, charting the sun’s passage as its light bleaches and flattens the landscape at noon. Shallows (2025), with its azure hue, gestures not to water as its title might suggest, but to the open sky above. The title instead alludes to a longing for water – an element held sacred by the Navajo in all its forms, from mist and fog to rain. 

Embedded within Navajo culture is the art of weaving, which, according to oral tradition, replicates the rendering of earth and sky, encapsulating a moment of creation. Whitehorse’s canvases echo the layered structure of textiles, beginning with atmospheric grounds of vaporous washes of oil paint, upon which intricate symbolic configurations in Conté pencil, pastel and chalk are overlaid and intertwined. These grounds are further interrupted by precise, linear forms that recall the illusory geometric rugs Whitehorse once witnessed her grandmother weave. In the early 1990s, she began to incorporate the iconography of weaving, introducing her grandmother’s tools – combs and bowls – as visual stimuli for her glyphic lexicon. In her paintings, weaving is reimagined through a disrupted and intricate pictorial plane, evoking the optical deception, technical virtuosity and cultural affirmation of a deftly woven Navajo rug. 

Through her destabilisation of spatial depth and her measured observation of the environment, Whitehorse’s work recalls the art of cartography. In Dream Site (2016), the vast, arid plains of Chaco Canyon are called forth through a diaphanous wash of ochre, upon which abstract organic motifs – suggestive of birds, sheep, and dried plants – hover and interlace across the pictorial field, evoking the topography of the land and the changing of the seasons. While not maps in the conventional sense, these works can be interpreted as a form of spiritual cartography, recording the nomadic practices of the Navajo peoples and the intangible connections between individual, land and cosmos. 

Rooted in the entangled histories of human and non-human life, Whitehorse’s paintings operate as meditations on temporal and spatial scale. The organic motifs that punctuate her canvases oscillate between the vast geological timescales of terrain shaped over millennia and the minute precision of a seed pod poised to split. Pollen, air and fossils become compositional fragments, holding together extremes of the microscopic and the monumental. This duality underlines a quiet political sensibility, one that offers a counterpoint to the swashbuckling, machismo-inflected traditions of the landscape genre, and articulates instead an insistence on the stewardship of land and the preservation of its legacies. Whitehorse’s work calls us back to the organic sources of life that sustain us – a reminder that ‘what we do to the land comes back to us’.²