For the 2024 edition of Art Basel, Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to present a selection of works by Howardena Pindell, Fritz Scholder, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and Emmi Whitehorse. Each artist in the presentation has made historic contributions, some of which have only recently come into focus.

In the early ’70s, Howardena Pindell began spraying paint onto canvases through hole-punched cardstock, forming layers of dots and creating a sensuous interplay between background and foreground. Pindell recently revisited the technique for the first time in over three decades. In Deep Sea #2 (2024), the dots seem to spontaneously organize into compressions and rarefactions. Like her earliest experiments with the technique, Pindell sets her colored dots against a near-black background: warm and cool colors dance past each other, creating depth, movement, and dimensionality. Occasionally, vibrant and iridescent color busts through, evoking bioluminescence and celestial combustion in pure abstraction. Howardena Pindell’s career was celebrated in retrospectives at MCA Chicago (2018) and Fruitmarket, Edinburgh (2022), with the latter traveling across the UK and Ireland.

The recent painting by Emmi Whitehorse, Abloom (2024), shows a landscape in flux. Over time, her concrete forms have dematerialized into increasingly ephemeral substrates. Whitehorse’s intimate, intuitive compositions consciously reference the Navajo philosophy of Hózhó, which seeks harmony in life, mind, body, and nature. Light and meditative, her works are animated by abstract gestural marks that organize vaporous fields of color, a feature maximized in her most recent pieces. Emmi Whitehorse currently features in the 2024 Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s selection pairs historical works with a recent Trade Canoe painting, El Dorado (2024), which measures over 13 feet. In the historic example In the Future (1995), Quick-to-See Smith completes the titular phrase “In the future we will all be,” with, “Mestizos and mixed bloods.” A chorus of newspaper clippings alternately signal positivity and anxiety around the insight. “Intermarriage is on the increase,” meets with “Likable. Diverse.” A line drawing of a dinosaur teases the latent fear of extinction detectible in some of the quotes, while it evokes the longer timescale that renders all civilizational dramas irrelevant. The cacophony of violence, domination, antipathy, and prejudice, the work optimistically suggests, is temporary, as we inevitably converge into a good humored, universal family. The Whitney Museum mounted Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s Memory Map in 2023, which traveled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the Seattle Art Museum. A major European survey is set to open in 2026.

Though he was an enrolled member of the Luiseño tribe, Scholder initially vowed never to paint Native Americans. His frustration with cliched depictions of Native Americans confined to a romantic past, however, led him to a series of visceral and, at times, brutal depictions that forever changed the genre. In Dakota Portrait (1977), Scholder depicts a Native American on horseback. The figure’s face and headdress dematerialize in a single gestural paint stroke. The long shadow of the man and his horse pulsates with the same lurid, uneasy purple that was used to great effect by Francis Bacon. The extreme valence of the Native American subject, though, always threatened to overshadow the artist’s focus on materiality, paint, and technique. A similar double bind continues to confront artists of marginalized identities to this day. Fritz Scholder’s posthumous retrospective, Indian/Not Indian, exhibited at the National Museum of the American Indian’s Washington D.C. and New York City locations in 2008. His major traveling exhibition, Super Indian: Fritz Scholder, 1967-1980, followed at the Denver Art Museum in 2015.

Taken as a whole, the exhibition celebrates the accomplishments of groundbreaking artists who pushed against the headwinds of gender and race, clearing space for other artists as they went. Their work continues to prompt institutions to reevaluate the contributions of Black and Native American artists to contemporary painting.

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to represent Howardena Pindell, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Emmi Whitehorse, and the Estate of Fritz Scholder in association with LewAllen Galleries, New Mexico.