Dakota Mace
Dáda'ak'ehgo titso (there are yellow fields all around), 2024 Paper, silk, natural pigments Courtesy of the artist 2025.11 Once natural materials are transformed into architectural or design elements, it becomes easy to overlook or even forget their past livingness and connection to faraway lands. Plants and flowers abound across the wallpapers and carved wood paneling of the Nickerson Mansion, albeit only in the form of representations. Tapping into the intimate connection of vegetal pigmentation, Mace brings nature into the building on a pure, elemental level. Responding to the textile nature of wallpapers, carpets, and tapestries around the building, these yellow color fields, blending silk and anthotype photographic processes, re-envision the transcendental tradition of modernist color-field painting to recover past histories in the artist's Diné, Indigenous culture. In this tradition, yellow is a healing color. Change, lifespan, and evolution- from the delicate shades of sagebrush to the vibrant hues of Osage orange, Mace pays tribute to the histories of co-creation and dependency that have characterized the building's multiple iterations over time.
