Dakota Mace: Sǫʼ Baa Hane’ 2023-2025

Higher Pictures presents Sǫʼ Baa Hane’, the gallery’s first exhibition with Diné artist Dakota Mace. The exhibition brings together nine works made between 2023 and 2025 from two series, Sǫʼ and Distorted Landscapes.

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.

In Sǫʼ, Mace honors the tradition of Diné storytelling, told by campfire beneath the night sky and passed on only at specific times of year, especially in winter. Created through cyanotype with cochineal and chemical dyes, each work is unique but tied together, a reflection of the Diné philosophy that all things are connected even as each carries its own texture and design. Drawing on designs passed down through weaving, silversmithing, and the ancestors who came before, Mace offers a way for a younger generation to understand what it means to remain connected to their stories.

https://higherpictures.com/exhibitions/dakota-mace-s%C7%AB%CA%BC-baa-hane-story-of-the-stars/