Textile artist Dakota Mace’s work is imbued with a sense of place
Dakota Mace (Diné) dedicates her well-curated and sensible Instagram account to her art. Some of the photos are of her hands at work, gloved or ungloved; others show her hands holding some of her artworks or fibers she works with. Another image shows participants in a workshop in which they learned to work with hides. And then there are all the gorgeous photos of fabrics and weavings and indigo-dyed cloths.
Mace, obviously, is a textile artist and photographer. She’s a graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts where she earned a BFA in photography, and she holds an MA and an MFA in photography and textile design from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Her artwork is part of permanent collections at such institutions as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Everson Museum of Art, the Amon Carter Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Forge Project Collection, and the Library of Congress. On Friday, July 10, the Museum of Contemporary Native Art opens a solo exhibition of her work.
Dakota Mace: 2026-Shímásání Bila’ (My Grandmother’s Hand) runs through January 3, 2027. The exhibition gave the artist the opportunity to think about what it means to her to be Diné, and what it means to embrace distinct textile techniques and understand their histories and the Diné’s relationship to land through them.
“The curators at MoCNA were particularly interested in specifically textile works from me,” Mace says. “So, I decided to build a body of work that looked at this very complex term of ‘craft’ and how it has defined a lot of Diné women’s experiences. I wanted to look at the stories of our grandmothers, our mothers, our daughters, our aunties, and their contribution to our stories, especially through their hands and through the process of making.
“This show is a nod to makers before me and the makers who eventually will come after me, into the future,” she adds. “I’m looking at how our history has passed and will continue passing through our hands. That’s something really important to the Diné.”
Mace comes from a family of artists who practiced, as she says, a mixture of everything.
“My grandfather is a silversmith,” she says. “My grandmother helped with my grandfather’s silversmithing. She did her own art too; she practiced weaving and bead work. My mother and my father were both amazing drawers and did a lot of drawing. And it all just melded into a lot of my interests. I think that’s why I use the term ‘interdisciplinary’ to describe my work and use so many different processes within my work. I don’t like to limit myself to just one process.”
Currently, Mace focuses more on site-specific art as her work begins appearing in public and private spaces across the U.S. and abroad. She uses every new location to further her already deep understanding of the idea of land. She creates these works explicitly in relation to the space where they are on display.
In early May, for instance, the New York City transit system commissioned the Indigenous Space piece by Mace at the MTA Bowling Green Station in Manhattan’s financial district. With Indigenous Space, the artist hopes to open conversations about land and Indigeneity in a very precise geographic point, which she refers to as “A grounding point for so many Indigenous people throughout history.”
The location was formerly a council ground for Indigenous people before the arrival of Europeans and the place where Dutch merchant Peter Minuit bought Manhattan in 1626.
In June, another piece, titled Kéyah Yinílniih (The Land Remembers, 2026), was showcased as part of the group exhibition Hold to This Earth: Indigenous North American Art at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park northeast of Manchester in the U.K. The exhibition is made of artworks from the Tia Collection and runs through April 2027.
Her site-specific work, Mace says, “is all about this idea of being able to visit a site to be able to engage with it through my interpretation of it as a Diné person, but also really learning from the people who call that place home, and their histories. For me, it’s not just a one-off relationship either. It’s something that continues for many, many years, and I go back to these places and consider and think about these locations and how the temperature shifts and the weather changes.”