It can be difficult.

Actually physically challenging.

Slowing down.

Our lives have been engineered to speed us up. Fast food. Drive-through. Text messages. Deadlines. Appointments. Productivity. Instant access to everything. Now or nothing.

Americans have been conditioned to go fast. To make more money. To produce more stuff. To buy more stuff. To constantly be busy. Hurry as a habit.

Hurry as a distraction from what matters most. A distraction from relationships. A distraction from the news. A distraction from nature. A distraction from art.

“People like about the work, when they see it, it slows them down,” painter Emmi Whitehorse (b. 1957; Diné) told me during a phone interview. “They really start looking. They have to come, literally, nose to nose with it because there's so many things moving. You start seeing things kind of wiggle and you go, ‘Oh, did that thing just move?’ Then all of a sudden, you go, ‘Where'd that line come from?’ You start noticing all the minute details and in that way people spend a lot of time gazing at my work.”

At paintings on view at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe, NM during “Emmi Whitehorse: Intimate Landscapes.”

Even art museums can speed us up. Timed tickets. Racing through trying to see everything to get your money’s worth. Thin slicing thousands of objects and 5,000 years of human creativity before your dinner reservation.

The Wheelwright wants you to slow down. The Museum’s scale is modest. There is nothing modest about its best-in-the-world collection of Southwestern jewelry. Save time to linger with it.

“Intimate Landscapes” is presented in two parts to avoid overwhelming visitors. To avoid rushing to see it all. To encourage slow looking. Part I runs through June 13, 2026, Part II from June 18 through October 3. General adult admission is $10. Come back. Take a docent-led tour at 11:00 AM or 1:00 PM.

Whitehorse describes her abstract paintings as “meditative and meant to be seen slowly.”

Find quiet in them. Solitude. A tiny measure of the quiet and solitude she experienced as a child tending to her family’s sheep in northwestern New Mexico on the Navajo Nation. A “magical and endless” landscape in her own words.

“I really did enjoy being out there,” Whitehorse remembers. “It meant you didn't have to be stuck at home with nothing to do which was the worst, at least you could entertain yourself walking around and finding interesting things to look at–bugs, birds. Once in a while, you would come across a porcupine or something like that, and just follow it, see where it goes, see what it eats.”

A newly commissioned film by Diné filmmaker Kelso Meyer playing at the museum provides additional insight into Whitehorse’s background and process. How her work has always been about the land.

“About being aware of your surroundings and appreciating the beauty of nature,” as her artist’s statement reads.

Whitehorse grew up without a television. Now most everyone carries a television, movie theater, gaming system, and radio in their pocket offering a constant bombardment of stimulus. Quick cut edits. Speed it up 2X. Alerts and notifications.

Society has become oblivious to our surroundings because we live in our phones. Observation replaced by doom scrolling.

What is lost when we stop being aware?

“We miss out on the beauty that surrounds us and how healing that can be–sitting outside, being outside, listening and looking at what's moving, how the clouds move and how they cast shadows across the land,” Whitehorse said.

The artist is describing, in a way, the Diné philosophy of Hózhó. No single word in the English language approximates it. It’s a lifestyle. Harmony. Balance between nature and humanity.

“It's a way of living in beauty, living with nature, appreciating nature… gives you a sense of calmness, much better for your health,” Whitehorse explains of what Hózhó means to her. “Living a holistic, natural life with nature. Realizing that you do live on a beautiful planet; it's a one-of-a-kind planet. Truly understanding that is quite an eye opener.”

Painting Pollen

Whitehorse’s paintings are rooted in childhood memories and lived experience; each work is autobiographical, intimate, and specific. Each composition captures the sensory experience of being within a landscape

“The intricate language of symbols relates to specific plants, people, and experiences,” according to her artist’s statement.

Fascinating worlds all their own. Like looking into the night sky or a tidal pool or a Petrie dish through a microscope. Simultaneously cosmic and microscopic. Artworks titled Globular Star Cluster and Prickly Pear.

Some of her marks are made to be recognizable. Others not.

“I make them up. I do look at seed pods, pollen, photographs of pollen enlarged,” Whitehorse explains of the origins of her mark-making. “You start seeing all those clusters and puff balls all packed together. You start getting the sense that you're in a world, but it is what's around you. It's all those little unseen things that float around you every day that's in the work.”

Dandelion tufts and falling leaves floating on the breeze people once enjoyed following. Water skeeters. Animal tracks in soft mud.

“Abstract, gestural marks amidst vaporous fields of color,” as described by one of her galleries, Garth Greenan in New York.

Abstraction.

Whitehorse was always drawn to it.

“It was very comfortable for me to work like that,” she said. “I don't know if this has anything to do with it, but it might have somehow contributed in a roundabout way. When I was a child, I didn't realize I needed glasses, and I didn't get glasses until I was in like eighth grade. I didn't realize how people saw. Everything was blobby, blurry. I just assumed everybody saw like that. That might have colored my sense of perception.”

Coming up in the 1980s as a young artist, the art world had little use for abstract art from Native artists. Particularly women.

“We had to battle a lot of misconceptions, a lot of inequality,” Whitehorse remembers. “I was told that I should be home doing the traditional work. My grandmother was a weaver. That's what I should be doing. Your grandmother was a weaver, you should be learning to be a weaver. That's what we were told.”

Whitehorse was more interested in Twombly and Rothko than warp and weft. Fellow future groundbreaker Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940-2025; Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes) was an early influence in the late 1970s while studying at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

Slow down.

Force yourself.

Don’t “mute” your phone, leave it in the car.

Stop in front of an Emmi Whitehorse painting. Stay there. Investigate the canvas inch by inch. Enter her world. What wiggles? What blows in the wind?

You’ll be delighted by what you find.

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