At first glance, artist Steven J. Yazzie’s photograph “Canyon” looks like a normal aerial shot of a desert slot canyon – the bright, sun-washed landscape contrasting with the deep shadow of the narrow ravine. 

Closer scrutiny of the image, however, reveals that the darkness of the canyon is not the natural shadow one might expect in a documentary photograph; rather, it is sprinkled with stars set against a black backdrop. By looking down into the Earth, the viewer is also looking up and out into the universe. 

Yazzie, who now lives in Denver but spent much if his childhood in the Page area, created the image by taking a still shot from an aerial video he had made of a slot canyon and combining it with a photograph of the night sky.

“The placement of the starry sky and the land become a juxtaposition between the vastness of the natural world and the infinite expanse of the cosmos,” Yazzie explained. “The darkness of the canyon shadows creates a natural frame for the starry sky, as if the land is a canvas on which the stars are painted. This contrast of light and dark, earth and sky, reminds us of the interplay of opposing forces in the universe, and the beauty that can arise from their interaction.”

In an interview with the Chronicle, Yazzie said his image also presents a different way of seeing slot canyons – that is, peering into darkness rather than focusing on the beans of light that figure so prominently in the countless photographs of Antelope Canyon reproduced on posters and shared on social media.

And while many “nature” photographers take great pains to eliminate all traces of human interference, Yazzie keeps them intact. 

“There are echoes of our human experience in the land. I think there’s a box or something in the canyon photo that I found while I was editing, and I thought, ‘Oh, I gotta keep that in there,” he said.

Another one of Yazzie’s photographs explores the subtext of human experience in a different way: “Throwing Stars Over Monsters” is a night image of the New Mexico landmark Shiprock – known as Tsé Bitʼaʼí in Navajo, which translates as “rock with wings” or “winged rock.”

While Shiprock is a prominent feature of the photograph, much of the image is taken up by the starry sky over the landscape. Yazzie said that the image on its own is pretty straightforward, but he hopes people will read the title, go deeper and consider the subtext to the image. 

The idea of “throwing stars” is connected to a story about the Navajo folk figure Coyote, who became bored watching the other gods slowly placing the stars in the sky one at a time. Impatient, Coyote picked up the bag containing the remaining stars and threw it into the sky, creating the Milky Way with one swift gesture.

“One view of the story can be understood as metaphor of chaos to beauty, or perhaps creativity and resourcefulness. I also see Coyote’s actions as a form of immediacy and speed of time towards the spectacular, a form of what technology can bring,” Yazzie wrote about the photograph.

He also told the Chronicle, “Sure, it’s an image of Shiprock, but it’s also because I’m not focusing just on the rock itself, it’s sized down a little bit so that the sky is present. I’m hoping that these visual cues will echo that kind of reference to mythology or story or land. People hopefully will take that away from the work.”

“Throwing Stars Over Monsters” is one of several photographs by Yazzie now on display in a temporary exhibition at Amangiri just north of Page. “Canyon” is also there, displayed in both color and black-and-white versions. 

The Amangiri exhibition, which runs until May 31, is the result of a collaboration between the resort and the Heard Museum in Phoenix. 

Audrey Huttert, the general manager of Amangiri, said the idea for the exhibition came about late last year when resort management decided they wanted to give their small gallery space “a little bit more life and try to find new ways of exhibiting some of the fantastic work of our area.” Seeking an arts institution with a “similar level of excellence” as Amangiri, they reached out to the Heard Museum with the idea of collaborating on a pop-up exhibition. 

“They were extremely welcoming in terms of the idea we had in mind,” Huttert said. “They were also quite unfamiliar with Amangiri, so we invited them over because we wanted them to see it with their own eyes what a spectacular location this is.”

Amangiri rests on 900 acres of land in southern Utah, among monumental, starkly beautiful rock formations for which the region is world famous. With very little light pollution invading the resort’s property, one of the key experiences that guests enjoy is stargazing on dark nights.

 It just so happened that the Heard was launching an exhibition titled “Substance of Stars,” described by the museum as “a multi-sensory experience that presents historic and contemporary works focused on the creation stories and sky knowledge of four Indigenous communities.”

Among the four represented communities is the Diné (Navajo), whose homeland, Dinétah, is located near Amangiri and extends across the states of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico. And among the artists participating in the “Substance of Stars” exhibition was Steven J. Yazzie.

“Steven Yazzie’s name came up, which was great because apparently he spent his childhood days in this area, so it’s kind of home also for him,” Huttert said. “So, we thought, let’s connect with Steven and see if he would be keen on putting some works forward. He was overly excited about the idea, so it worked out beautifully.”

Yazzie has been working with the Heard Museum since 1999, when he won a grant to paint a mural there on the forced relocation and removal of Indigenous people in the Southwest. Since then, he’s worked in different capacities with the museum – as an exhibiting artist, a video producer for some of their marketing and fundraising content, and a consultant with some of their community outreach work.

Yazzie said the type of work he was doing with video fit well the “Substance of Stars” exhibition, so he was selected as one of four Indigenous artists to produce video content for the immersive gallery experience. 

“The exhibition is really focused on our relationship collectively as Indigenous people with the stars and the cosmos and the sky,” he said, adding that he was happy to be contacted by Amangiri about doing a temporary exhibition connected with “Substance of Stars.” 

“I’m happy to help in that way because, for me, it also helps to share work about our land and our places that we come from as Native people, and my work is really a meditation on that,” Yazzie said.

The images in display at Amangiri are the beginning of a video and photography series that Yazzie had just happened to be developing in relation to the “Substance of Starts” exhibit.

“I was already in the process of creating some new work, so the timing was right, and the fit was right, and it fit the type of small satellite exhibition Amangiri was looking to do,” Yazzie said.

The photos and video footage were collected over the course of a couple of months that Yazzie spent travelling back to the Navajo Reservation and areas that he had grown up around, including LeChee, Page and Marble Canyon.

Born in Newport Beach, California, Yazzie moved with his family to Black Mesa when he was 3 years old, after his father, who is Navajo, got a job working at Peabody Energy. Yazzie attended kindergarten in Kayenta, but then the family moved to LeChee. He attended school in Page from first grade until the end of his freshman year in high school.

Yazzie didn’t become interested in art until he was in his mid-20s, after he had spent 1988 to 1992 in the Marine Corps – including participating in the Desert Shield and Desert Storm operations in Kuwait and Iraq. 

“I started primarily as a painter in the mid-90s. I just kind of fell into it, as a way of therapy or meditation after my Marine Corps experience, or just a way of finding myself as a young person,” Yazzie told the Chronicle.

For years, he mostly focused on painting, but in his mid-30s he started experimenting with video, including video installation and short-form documentary work. He also began collaborating with other artists and moving into more conceptual practices. Photography became a natural extension of that work.

“I wouldn’t consider myself really a photographer but more of a conceptual artist when it comes to photography,” he said, adding, “I’m multidisciplinary in the sense that I work in a lot of different media – painting, installation, video and now photography.” 

He describes his early work as the “archives of myself” and very personal – portraits and other figurative paintings that explored ideas and experiences that had occurred in his past.

It was only over time that influences from his family history and Native culture started showing up in his artwork. At one point, he painted a portrait of his grandfather, Lemuel B. Yazzie, who was a renowned Navajo Code Talker during World War II.  

Yazzie studied fine arts at Arizona State University and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He cofounded Digital Preserve, a digital film production project that prioritizes collaborative production work with Indigenous communities, arts and cultural institutions, non-profit organizations and creative agencies. Yazzie was also a founding member of the Indigenous arts collective Postcommodity.

In addition to the Heard Museum, he has exhibited in numerous national and international institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Museum of the American Indian in New York, and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, as well as the Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona State University Art Museum, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson Museum of Art, and the Museum of Northern Arizona. 

Yazzie said that in the most direct way, his art is about “trying to connect people to the visuality of our landscape and of our place and the place that they’re visiting, and just hoping that people take away something meaningful from it.”

He said he was grateful to the Heard Museum and Amangiri for inviting him to exhibit at the resort and “representing and helping connect the museum with a different audience and also having the opportunity to show work that represents our Indigenous lands and stories in a small way.”

Huttert described the Yazzie exhibition at Amangiri as an “experiment,” and said it was nice to see all the key players move forward without hesitation and say, “OK, let’s make this work.”

“The primary purpose behind this was to give something more, to put forward a little bit more of the talent that comes with destinations like this. There are many possibilities to showcase the beauty of the land,” she said. “When we describe this land as being ‘otherworldly,’ one thing is saying it, one thing is demonstrating it, seeing it with your own eyes.”

Like Yazzie, Huttert hopes the exhibition will enhance the guests’ experience by prompting them to connect more deeply with the resort’s surroundings.  

“Aman is the Sanskrit word for ‘peace,’ so obviously the environment we offer is a peaceful one. It’s one of really reconnecting with the earth beneath you, embrace the land and the environment as much as you can,” she said. 

Stretching six miles from the bottom to the top of St Louis, and featuring 30 brand new art commissions, along with guided tours, workshops and school field trips, the second Counterpublic art triennial is a vast undertaking that aims to grapple with some sizable questions and redress historical wrongs.

“It was an exciting challenge,” said James McAnally, co-founder of Counterpublic. “In St Louis, the threads of change loom really large, and seeing that grassroots energy of this city, it sparked a lot of excitement. St Louis is really ripe for this kind of boundary-pushing.”

Inaugurated in 2019, Counterpublic aims to be a regular reckoning with many of the questions that underlie St Louis’s – and by extension America’s – history. The first Counterpublic placed itself deep into the St Louis community, operating in neighborhood sites like a tea shop, yoga studio, punk club, convenience store, Buddhist temple and Mexican panadería. It was lauded both for seamlessly fusing its art interventions into the local cultures of its sites and for its steadfast dedication to community engagement. “It’s a really unique experience, to see that density and range of newly commissioned artworks,” said McAnally.

For the second Counterpublic, running through 15 July, McAnally, and the numerous curators who have worked alongside him on this huge project, placed a high value on a continued public focus. “The planning started with a process of listening – a year-long community engagement process where we met with some 800 people living in the neighborhoods. We asked these people what was important to them. What we heard really informed the exhibition – we heard a lot about public memory, people feeling like the histories of their own neighborhood were not being presented and seen. There was also a lot about reckoning around monuments nationwide, and just thinking about where is history held, where is it kept.”

Counterpublic’s ambitions are to get outside of the traditional structures of the art world and to exhibit in spaces that feel crucial to diverse communities. Its goals to bring new forms of relevance to art are well-stated in the show’s catalog, where McAnally offers these passionate words. “This is an exhibition emerging from frustration at the limitations of an anemic art world met with concrete possibilities for more liveable worlds experienced in grassroots organizing in St Louis, as well as a deep care for a place I have committed much of my adult life to seeing flourish, despite witnessing its legacies of harm, fragmentation, and structural inequities firsthand. In envisioning the exhibition, I aimed for something altogether different – a triennial that allied itself with generational, cultural, economic, and civic change; a post-pandemic, post-uprising exhibition demanding that we, as arts workers and artists, do more to repair our broken world.”

One act of reckoning with history that headlines Counterpublic are efforts to rematriate the last remaining historic mound of the Osage Nation. One of numerous such sacred sites constructed by the Osage between 800 and 1450 AD, this last mound now sits on a quiet residential street beneath two homes.

Although the Osage Nation did purchase roughly one-third of the mound in 2008, McAnally shared that this was not enough to permit the kind of preservation and archaeological work that such a site requires. As a part of Counterpublic, McAnally and his colleagues have made formal offers to transfer the two homes currently sitting on the mound. “As a longtime resident of St Louis, I’ve been aware of this mound and the larger history of dozens of mounds that have been destroyed. It was a site that I passed by weekly. It keeps the work quite grounded because it’s in service to something larger than a three-month exhibition.”

As a part of Counterpublic, the “public secret society” New Red Order, which has presented art installations nationwide in an effort to reimagine futures for Native American peoples, will screen a video documenting legal efforts to rematriate the mound. An accompanying art installation by the Osage artist Anita Fields will surround the mound, and in an adjoining neighborhood, the Native American artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith will display an enormous map painting interfacing with streets named for Indigenous tribes and leaders and their intersections with streets named for American states.

Opposite the Osage mound, at Counterpublic’s other end, stands the Griot Museum of Black History, a 25-year-old community museum which McAnally was drawn to because it is so deeply rooted in the neighborhood. “It’s holding all these Black histories of St Louis. With this site, the question was how to build capacity. They wanted something permanent and public that really celebrated their place in the city.” With these goals in mind, Counterpublic commissioned prominent Black architect David Adjaye to create his first-ever permanent public artwork – a massive earthwork that will take shape over the course of Counterpublic and that will come with its own two-year fellowship at the Griot museum in order to conserve and contextualize the piece. “The David Adjaye piece is being built in public, on site. He’s bringing this traditional African building process and constructing it in public view, and I think that’s a really exciting invitation for people.

Other Counterpublic works will be more ephemeral. For instance, the Nigerian-American musicians Mendi + Keith Obadike’s Slow Drag will comprise dozens of cars slowly navigating through St Louis while playing various remixes of an original piece. “They’re really thinking about the distribution of sound and immersiveness throughout place. I’ve never heard anything like it, I’ve never experienced anything like it – it’ll be exciting to get to experience it for the first time alongside everybody else.” Elsewhere, the Native American artist Cannupa Hanska Luger offers an augmented reality piece – “it will hover in the St Louis landscape and will be visible throughout the exhibition footprint, figures dancing along the horizon line of the city.”

Counterpublic’s goal is to think on long-term timescales and to imagine futures that do not currently exist in the public’s mind. “I like that it’s art going beyond itself,” said McAnally. It brings something concrete and focused to be thinking generationally. Our goal is to reimagine civic infrastructures toward generational change.”

A big part of this generational thinking is reckoning with St Louis’s place in American history, and how it is uniquely poised to think through questions of national historic wrongs. “St Louis is situated right in the center of the US – in the 18th century it was even proposed as the nation’s capital, as this hinge between the east and the west. We’re interested in the ways it has been an epicenter of American culture and development in both good and bad. St Louis’s possibilities and issues are really American possibilities and issues. It poses fundamentally American questions. We are really trying to think through a lens of healing and repair. We are really intending to try to do something new.”

• Counterpublic 2023 is running in and around St Louis until 15 July