Emmi Whitehorse’s Chanter honors Changing Woman

In the Diné (Navajo) creation story, the Earth was uninhabitable, arid, and overrun by monsters. First Man and First Woman created Asdzą́ą́ Nádleehé (Changing Woman) to make the land safe and fruitful for the Diné peoples. Asdzą́ą́ Nádleehé, in turn, created the four original Navajo clans and implemented a matrilineal clan system. The life-giving qualities of the Earth are associated with and derived from her. This powerful deity is the subject of Emmi Whitehorse’s 1991 drawing, Chanter.

Whitehorse is a Diné multimedia artist based in Santa Fe. Her work is currently on view at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in the exhibition, Seeds: Containers of a World to Come. In 2024, her art  featured prominently in Foreigners Everywhere, the 60th International Art Exhibition organized by the Venice Biennale. Her drawings also contributed to the 2023 National Gallery of Art exhibition, The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans, curated by artist Jaune Quick-To-See Smith, citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation and a long-time collaborator with Whitehorse.

Whitehorse’s Diné community, the landscapes of the American Southwest, and ancestral knowledge have informed her oeuvre and continue to inspire her work today.

In 1991 she created Chanter, which features plant, animal, and human-like forms among geometric designs. Red arcing lines extend from the bottom right and nearly meet at the center, suggesting the torso of a woman. Whitehorse uses this picture to locate Asdzą́ą́ Nádleehé in contemporary society. In the drawing, the figure dwells in a space between boxy structures with pitched roofs and items that evoke historic Diné women’s labor and wealth, including the weaving comb at top left.

Soft edges and delicate lines imbue the hazy blue background with texture, fostering a dreamlike quality. While Whitehorse does not always assign meaning to her choice of color, she wrote that the blue in this work is “meant to convey early morning before first light strikes the landscape,” a time when the sky and the world transform.