A pair of silver gelatin cameraless photographs, marked by painterly drips and splatters of photo chemistry and punctured by delicate patterns of red glass beads, were the first works by Dakota Mace [MFA ’19] that I encountered in person. This diptych, Náhookǫs Bikǫʼ I, registered as much more than an aesthetic exercise; these chemigrams presented a field of information about Diné culture, cosmology, and the design motifs that carry stories through ancestral lines of cultural practices. My research in experimental approaches to photo-sensitive materials had led me to visit and write about Direct Contact: Cameraless Photography Now, a diverse exhibition of works that pushed the boundaries of photography to mesmerizing effect. Since then, I have followed Dakota Mace’s work and career with fervent interest. She is a Diné (Navajo) artist whose interdisciplinary practice exemplifies the traits of Indigenous aesthetics: sovereignty, kinship, ceremonial customs, storytelling, and deep connections to homelands and place. Materiality and ancestral memory emerge as the most salient elements, and the following overview of her recent solo exhibition, with insights gleaned from a lengthy conversation at her studio, demonstrate the ways that Mace has found balance between vigorous experimentation and Diné tradition.

Earlier this year, on one of the coldest days in January, I drove up to Madison, Wisconsin to visit Mace in her studio located in the Arts + Literature Laboratory. With many exhibitions on the horizon for 2025, her studio was full of works in progress and various stages of packing and organizing. Anthotype prints dyed with Osage orange and eco-printed silk panels ready to be steamed sat to one side; these new works would soon be installed in a group exhibition A Tale of Today: Materialities that opened in early February at the Driehaus Museum in Chicago. Neatly wrapped framed works were stacked in the back of the room, perhaps in preparation for shipment to other group exhibitions later in the year: Smoke in Our Hair: Native Memory and Unsettled Time at the Hudson River Museum, and An Indigenous Present at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston. The rest of the studio was consumed by final preparations for her first major solo exhibition, DAHODIYINII – SACRED PLACES, which opened at SITE Santa Fe at the end of February. I caught glimpses of some of the works for the exhibition: a large weaving of natural churro wool with a deep red band dotted with glass beadwork, carefully folded on a table; a tanned sheepskin stretched on an easel; and several clamshell boxes filled with hundreds of cochineal-dyed cyanotypes. On a table near the windows, a tanned deerskin was laid flat with a large, beaded panel atop it, awaiting attachment; here she sat, threading ribbon through dozens of silver jingle cones while we talked. Our conversation spanned from her experience at the Venice Indigenous Arts School that coincided with Jeffrey Gibson’s Venice Biennale exhibition in 2024, to her undergraduate studies in photography at the acclaimed Institute of American Indian Arts, to building relationships with curators, to a Diné concept of cyclical time and memory: Ałk’idáá. Mace is soft-spoken, but unmistakably self-assured; when speaking about her work, she consistently returns to Diné philosophy, the importance of collaboration, and the agency of materials.

These imperatives are evident in her photo-based work, particularly the cameraless methods that she employs in her series of chemigrams and cyanotypes. These practices which make photographs by circumventing the inscriptive tool of the camera open up new possibilities for accessing the language of memory. Mace’s methods underscore photography as a material medium, a temporal medium–a fertile combination for exploring the language and ecology of memory. But it is primarily a way of knowing. In Mace’s hands, photography becomes a method of Diné epistemology: a way of knowing and a transmission of knowledge.