Dakota Mace: Sǫʼ Baa Hane’ 2023-2025

Mace combines traditional and cameraless photographic methods, including cyanotype, chemigram, and natural dyes such as cochineal and Osage orange, with hand-applied glass beadwork drawn from motifs in Diné weaving and silversmithing. Working across these process-intensive, labor-dense materials, she translates Diné cosmology and oral history into a visual language in which design itself functions as a carrier of narrative. In both series, land operates not as a pictorial subject but as an archive. Land is a repository of ancestral memory and kinship that, in Mace’s framing, resists the proprietary logic of Western land ownership and instead figures place as an extension of the self and a site of intergenerational continuity.

Dakota Mace, Tséyí (Among the Canyons), 2023 - Courtesy of the artist and Higher Pictures.