SANTA FE — In DAHODIYINII – SACRED PLACES, Dakota Mace’s first solo museum exhibition at SITE Santa Fe, the Diné artist confronts genocide, grief, and inequality not through a linear narrative, but through a framework of Ałk’idáá: “events stacked up through time.” In extended exhibition labels, she writes: “ … in Diné philosophy, time is not a line; it’s a series of layers, movements unfolding simultaneously. The past isn’t something distant or detached — it’s woven into the present, and the present is braided with the future.” Mace confronts these layers head-on, investigating not just what is visible on the surface but the deeper strata of memory and Diné experience.
The exhibition opens with “Halchíí (Red area)” (2024), an earthen wall mural made in collaboration with Keyah Henry (Diné), which recalls deep red watercolor. It roots viewers in Land as both witness and archive. Composed of cochineal pigment, ash, corn pollen, and earth gathered from Diné Bikéyah (Navajo homelands), the work is site-specific and impermanent — adhered directly to the gallery wall, it will vanish when the exhibition ends.
As an opening gesture, “Halchíí” signals the importance of close looking across the 34 works in the show, which include lithographs, Mace’s camera-based and camera-less photography, such as cyanotypes and chemigrams; beadwork; tanned hides; a collaborative textile piece; and a sound installation. Spanning five galleries organized around themes of “Land,” “Memory,” and “Stars,” the exhibition reflects Mace’s Diné lens, where homelands, memory, and language are woven tightly together.
“Chahash’oh (Shadow)” and “Adinídíín (Light)” (both 2024) in the next room further draw us into the interplay between Diné philosophy and Mace’s meticulous material exploration. The former is made from sheep hide, jingle cones, and vintage Italian glass beads, while the latter uses the same materials, substituting deer hide for sheep. Invisibly suspended as if floating, each hide is adorned with beadwork and strings that fall in deliberately arranged lines. While distinct in composition, the works exist in conversation, not opposition. They guide us to consider the Diné philosophy of Hózhó (roughly translated to “balance”) not through didactics, but through the works’ presence and form. As a Diné asdzání (Navajo woman), I was attuned to the use of sheep and deer hides — materials that speak differently across Indigenous geographies. Sheep are central to Diné lifeways in the Southwest, while for me, deer hide evoked connections to our Athabaskan relatives across the Southwest and into Canada. Mace learned tanning techniques both virtually and in person, studying with Indigenous and non-Indigenous teachers in British Columbia and Wisconsin. These resonances stretch across land and lineage, embedded in the skin of the work.
In the next room, an installation of hanging digital archival prints mirrors the structure of a hexagonal hogan, the Diné home and ceremonial space. Viewers can walk beneath a mix of images of Mace’s family members and photographs of Diné elders, immersed in an installation that honors both kinship and ancestral presence. The only wall in the hexagon formation displays the singular textile work in the exhibition: “Shared Histories” (2021), a collaboration between Mace, weaver Tito Mendoza (Zapotec), and the Textile Arts Center of Madison’s Women’s Volunteer Collective. The minimalist design — three bold stripes, with a red center stripe embroidered by the collective in a constellation-like pattern with red beads — eschews the “eye-dazzling” geometry often expected of both Diné and Zapotec weaving. Instead, it quietly asserts a shared story. For Mace, this work reflects an Indigenous-to-Indigenous relationship grounded in respect, not extraction. It doesn’t copy or blend styles, but highlights the endurance of textile practices in dialogue. It embodies the exhibition’s aim not only to express Ałk’idáá as a philosophy of layered time, but also invites us to consider a geography of Indigenous experience that stretches across borders — from the United States Southwest to British Columbia to Oaxaca. The exhibition unfolds as a cartography of connection, where memory and material practice ripple across lands through Indigenous kinship, collaboration, and continuity.
The preceding installations set the stage for “Dahodiyinii (Sacred Places)” (2021), the namesake and heart of the exhibition. Between 1863 and 1866, the US government forcibly marched more than 10,000 Diné people to Bosque Redondo, a prison camp at Fort Sumner. Known in the Diné Bizaad (Navajo Language) as Hwéeldi, or “place of suffering,” it is located in what is now eastern New Mexico. Hwéeldi is sometimes left unspoken in Diné communities — too painful, too heavy — but here, Mace confronts it through land, light, and material memory. Departing from conventional photography, she created cyanotypes on 5 x 7-inch (~13 x 18 cm) paper, each dyed with cochineal and exposed using earth gathered from sites along the route to Hwéeldi. This camera-less process becomes a tool for honoring rather than documenting: Mace placed each paper directly on the ground, allowing wind, water, sand, and rock to leave their trace. The final installation includes 1,674 prints — one for each day between the first Diné surrender and the eventual signing of the Bosque Redondo Treaty in 1868. The accumulation of prints — textural, tonal, and marked by presence — conveys both overwhelming loss and a refusal to forget. Rather than relying on archival images of Diné from the 1860s, the work invites viewers into a meditative space where the land both makes the image and bears witness. In their quiet, intimately sized forms, they form a collective wall of memory. In honoring the unnamed and unrecognized, the installation becomes the emotional origin point of the exhibition — layering days, grief, and resilience into a vast wall hued in variations of red, suggesting both mourning and survival.
The final gallery closes the exhibition in the same way it began — with earth. “Hadootł’izh (Blue Area)” (2024), another mural made in collaboration with Keyah Henry (Diné) from indigo pigment, ash, corn pollen, and gallons of earth gathered from Diné Bikéyah, evokes both cycle and return. When I first encountered it, I stopped in my tracks. The mural suggests movement and water — like dye dispersing in a bath. Each is made from materials that carry long-standing roles in Diné textile practices and remain in use today: “Hadootł’izh” with indigo and “Halchíí ” with cochineal. The reference to textiles isn’t spelled out in the wall text, but it’s there — a quiet, confident refusal to over-explain. Installed beside the mural is “Níłtsą́ Bi’áád (Gentle Rain)” (2023), composed of 64 cyanotypes affixed with churro wool. Made on-site by Mace at Hwéeldi as rain fell, the work reflects on the U.S. government’s restriction of Diné access to drinkable water during their imprisonment in the 1860s — a struggle that continues today, as communities on the Navajo Nation still face systemic barriers to water rights. The prints are designed to darken with light exposure over time, eventually fading into memory, like the rain itself. Overhead, viewers don’t hear the sound of rain but something equally important: The audio installation “Badahani (Their Stories)” (2024) fills the room. Recorded mostly in Diné Bizaad, the stories of elders — those pictured in the previously mentioned hogan installation — offer a deep sense of kinship; there are no translations into English. A chair is placed beneath the speakers, inviting visitors to sit and listen, like one might do in a family home where stories are passed down across generations.
Dakota Mace’s exhibition doesn’t just exhibit Diné philosophy — it enacts it. Through thoughtful curatorial choices and her wide-ranging practice, DAHODIYINII – SACRED PLACES shows how Indigenous thought and contemporary exhibition-making can co-exist without compromise. Her practice is intentional and slow — the beadwork square in “Adinídíín” took 10 years. I wonder … would a non-Diné viewer catch the full story of these works? Maybe not. But this show does not cater to non-Diné audiences, and that’s part of its strength. It doesn’t over-explain or flatten its meaning. Diné Bizaad is prioritized over English. Exhibition text is sparse. And in that absence, something critical happens: The work breathes. Does refusing to explain every detail of a work by an Indigenous artist offer a kind of freedom — for the work and for us?
Mace’s commitment — to her people, materials, and process — bleeds through every corner of the five-gallery exhibition like dye through wool. DAHODIYINII – SACRED PLACES deals with painful history, but it does not sensationalize or simplify. The work invites presence, not consumption. Though the show will not travel after it closes at SITE Santa Fe on May 19, that impermanence echoes Mace’s embrace of ephemerality. It is a significant contribution to contemporary Indigenous art discourse. I highly recommend Mace’s recorded conversation with artist Porfirio Gutiérrez (Zapotec), presented as part of the exhibition programming — a dialogue that reflects the care, complexity, and kinship at the heart of this work.
Dakota Mace: DAHODIYINII – SACRED PLACES continues at SITE Santa Fe (1606 Paseo De Peralta, Santa Fe, Santa Fe, New Mexico) through May 19. The exhibition was curated by Brandee Caoba.