Dakota Mace’s 2025 art installation “DAHODIYINII—SACRED PLACES,” which was displayed at SITE Santa Fe in New Mexico, opens with a full-wall piece titled “Halchíí (Red Area)” that consists of dark red, deep orange, and dull brown hues. Abstract in nature, its colors and shapes—which utilize cochineal pigment and earth sourced from Arizona and Mexico—could resemble the humble slopes of hills, smears of clay dirt, or even stains of blood. One might also be inclined to see nothing—to leave its colors without meaning, to accept the absence of a clear shape as a signal of emptiness.
But this inclination to see nothing—especially when it comes to depictions of land—is exactly the intervention that Mace puts forth in her work, which spans both photography and textile arts. As a Diné artist who grew up in New Mexico, Mace is attuned to the stories, gifts, and pain that land holds, especially for Indigenous peoples.
Mace first moved to Madison to pursue MA and MFA degrees in Photography and Textile Design at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has been an integral part of the arts community ever since. Developing workshops around cultural appropriation and design sovereignty, Mace creates spaces for dialogue about people’s relationships with Indigenous art and pushes them to think critically about the ways in which land provides us with the very materials to make that art.
Now, as Textile Arts Center of Madison (TAC)’s first-ever artist-in-residence, Mace continues to give back to the Madison community by facilitating a group art project and developing workshops featuring artists from Teejop (the Ho-Chunk name for the place where Madison now sits), all while bringing pieces of home with her. Her current project, entitled “Land and Place,” invites TAC visitors to create photograms on silk organza as part of a larger memory quilt exploring the history of Teejop land and its importance to Indigenous people in Wisconsin. It is inspired by the matrilineal practices of Diné grandmothers, mothers, aunts, and sisters of passing down textile artistry to younger generations.
Mace will be TAC’s artist-in-residence until June, and she will be present at TAC on Thursdays from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m. to assist community members in contributing to the memory quilt.
Madison365’s Rodlyn-mae Banting spoke with Mace about how she came to her various art forms, cultural appreciation, and the importance of continuity, in both land and art practice.
Rodlyn-mae Banting: You are an interdisciplinary artist. What do you consider to be your first art form, and how were you introduced to it?
Dakota Mace: One of my art forms that I’m most well known for is my photography. So that’s something that I’ve always originally gravitated back to because of the familiarity. Something that really drew me in when I was a child was thinking of the camera in terms of documentation. As I got older, and especially in grad school, [I was] exploring different ways that a photograph can be translated and a photograph can be taken. So for a lot of my current work, it’s pushing the boundaries of what a photograph means, and especially exploring alternative ways of how that’s being represented.
RB: You’ve studied in the Navajo region where you’re from, and also here in Wisconsin. What has that experience been like, especially since Wisconsin is also really connected to its Indigenous peoples?
DM: That’s actually what drew me to Madison. It was actually my mentor, Tom Jones, who’s also a well known Ho-Chunk photographer. It was through his mentorship that I really wanted to push people’s interpretation of what it means to be Diné or Navajo, and especially the way we see the land and how we build a relationship with that land. I initially grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico. My family is originally from Torreon, New Mexico and that’s checkerboard Navajo Nation. So there’s a lot of complicated relationships in terms of understanding land ownership within that area of New Mexico. So that was something I wanted to explore, especially as a grad student, is this idea of not only being separated from the place I would call home, but also finding a new home in Madison—especially the importance of community that’s expressed for a lot of Indigenous people that live here today.
RB: Could you explain that process of checkerboarding of land?
DM: There’s still not a lot of understanding of it, at least for the public, because there’s BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs) land, there’s public land, there’s private land, of course, there’s Navajo Nation. So it’s really complicated for people who may not understand the way that ownership is represented. But I think for a lot of my work, and my newer bodies of work, [it’s] exploring those interpretations of ownership, and really exploring that land is not meant to be owned, right? It’s a living entity. And just showing respect to that.
RB: Both land and memory play significant roles in your work. Could you talk a little bit more about that?
DM: Memory initially comes from my interest in photography, and this started with my undergrad at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where the only photographs that were represented of Indigenous people were taken by outsiders. I think that for me, it became a starting point into understanding why that was [and] why is it that this interpretation of memory is always through a photograph. That led to a lot of my current work, which is thinking about storytelling and this idea of stepping away from this terminology of preservation, and thinking about how memory doesn’t just exist within the visual, but it exists within our language, within our stories, our songs.
There’s so many different ways that we can understand memory, and I think it’s that interconnectedness of our lived experiences with our ancestors where we start to really, truly understand continuity and the way that for many Indigenous communities, and especially for my own community, it’s about this continuance. It’s about this idea of everything being cyclical, going back into land, being born of the land, and really acknowledging and expressing that through the practice of my work.
RB: I’m really struck by your one weaving project that pushes against the idea that Diné art is not “fine art.” Can you talk a bit about where that distinction comes from, and what you’re challenging?
DM: This all kind of culminated into my solo exhibition that was outside Santa Fe. The title of the show, which was “Dahodiyinii/Sacred Places,” was thinking about this idea of presence—of land being a presence, and sitting within a place and acknowledging its weight and its history. And that allowed me to start exploring these different materials. Materiality becomes a big point of my work in terms of thinking about how these materials begin our stories, of our memories, and especially within our own creation. For me, it’s similar to the way that I see a photograph, where it’s this balance between light and shadow, and for Diné people, that word is hózhó, which is creating that balance.
For me, the materials invoke a sense of place, and it comes either from the land or from the animals that connect us back to our homeland. This idea of weaving and beadwork become extensions of ourselves or our memories. Looking at my own family history, my own community’s history, a lot of our elders had shared their experiences within this project. They essentially told us in Diné that as makers, we’re not meant to create an excess, and we have to respect our materials. The biggest takeaway from that exhibition was that making is about balance and not endless production. And that’s something that I think a lot of younger artists really resonated with, because this practice of being an artist is commercialized, and I think for them to have a moment to sit back and reflect on it’s not always about the end production, but it’s that experience of creating, [was important].
RB: I know that you have done a bit of work educating others about cultural appropriation. Where do you think that issue stems from?
DM: This was something that I had proposed initially in grad school. I was thinking about our relationship with design and especially considering design sovereignty from a lot of these academic spaces where it’s often taken or pulled, especially within the realm of the arts. For me, that research became so much more in terms of developing not only lesson plans, which is free access to anyone who wants it, but also to be able to develop workshops through the Center for Design and Material Culture, which is based here in Madison, and really supporting the understanding of not only design sovereignty, but also ways to avoid those moments of appropriation and also allowing like participants to engage with these materials really thoughtfully.
I think the hardest thing is that appropriation always has this very hard yes/no situation. And I think it’s a lot more complicated than that. It’s a lot more nuanced. So through these workshops, and especially through the Textile Collection on campus, we try to educate those in terms of the ways of thinking about “What is design? How are people inspired by that? What ways can we navigate those difficult power dynamics that are unfortunately inherent to the study of diverse cultural materials, and especially within the world of textiles itself?”
So we developed this workshop which initially led to being able to create a toolkit for other educators to implement into their own lesson plans and teaching. It’s been so many different iterations of these workshops. For me, it’s always been about giving back to my community in different ways, and a big initiative with this project is making sure that we’re educating others on design inspiration and appropriation, but also thinking of ways that we can compose better collaborations with Indigenous people and artists.
RB: What would you say is the biggest distinction between appreciation and appropriation?
DM: That’s what we talk about in the toolkit, and especially the workshops, is that it’s truly such a gray area that I think it’s hard to kind of place things in situations. So we talk through these nuanced topics and objects that we bring out from the collection, and really consider the weight in terms of not only the history of these objects, but also its material culture, its relation to the larger part of not only U.S. and world history, but also how it continues to have meaningful impact within the communities that it originates from. So I think it’s teaching people to consider transparency in terms of the interactions that they’re having, not only with the objects themselves, but also with the cultures and communities that they’re hoping to collaborate with.
RB: You are TAC’s first ever artist in residence. What are you looking forward to the most with this residency? What projects are you interested in pursuing?
DM: Photography and textiles have always been central to my interdisciplinary practice, and I wanted to continue that collaboration at a more local level, since my work extends outside of the Midwest and especially Wisconsin itself. I wanted to continue that exploration of the intersections of material Indigenous culture, but also think about improving representation within these spaces, and especially more community-oriented spaces.
So with this residency, I wanted to explore not only the importance of textiles within Wisconsin’s Indigenous communities, but specifically focus on developing programming that supports individual artists and their practices. And for me, it’s about not only having this serve as a starting point into better understanding textiles themselves within Wisconsin, but also how it’s central to a lot of our cultural experiences and identities. And hopefully the biggest takeaway of this residency is for people to really start to acknowledge the importance of Indigenous ingenuity and adaptation. So having these discussions, but also allowing for people to participate in that with the various types of works that I’ll be creating through my residency time.
RB: So you’ll be creating new art during the residency that folks are going to be able to participate in?
DM: Right now there is a community quilt project that is a different iteration of a couple of different works I’ve done. My idea was to consider this idea of memory quilts and a public installation will be installed throughout my entirety of the residency. Right now it’s titled, “Land and Place” and it thinks about people’s interpretation of a photograph. So I encourage visitors to create photograms on silk organza and encourage them to explore the surrounding area and learn to consider the history of not only Teejop itself, but also its significance to so many indigenous communities that you know have called this place of trade, but also their their own weight of materiality and the relationship to the matriarch. I think that’s the biggest thing within the textile world, is that we learn from our mothers and our grandmothers and our aunties and our sisters, but our recorded history of those moments are very rare. So for people who participate in this, [I’d like them] to think of that weight, of that memory and time, and to create a piece of themselves that becomes [part of] a larger collective story, or, in this case, this memory quilt.
RB: Will you be collaborating with any artists from Teejop during the residency?
DM: That will be the programming that I’m developing. My purpose for that was not only doing this programming, but eventually through TAC, there will be an exhibition to support Indigenous community here in Madison and the greater part of Wisconsin to be able to think about deeper ways that we can continue the support of Indigenous people, but also not have that just end at the end of my residency, where it continues on in different iterations. I think that’s the biggest takeaway for me, is making sure that with any residency or project that I do, that things continue to go on, and those stories continue to be carried on.
