Dyani White Hawk

White Hawk brings together Lakota and Western artistic techniques and practices of abstraction with deliberate fluency. Drawing on her Sičáŋǧu Lakota and Euro-American heritage, she describes her methods as deepening her “… understanding of the intricacies of self and culture, correlations between personal and national history, and Indigenous and mainstream art histories.” Her paintings translate and extend the meditative labor and artistic strength of Lakota practices into fields of saturated color and lines of measured brushwork, each mark imbued with the concentrated attention long sustained by Native women in their work. The effect is immediate and visceral; surfaces that register in the body before the intellect—works whose presence unsettles the categories of Eurocentric art history. By highlighting and forging connections between Indigenous practices and movements such as Color Field painting and Minimalism, White Hawk produces canvases that pulse with geometric clarity and chromatic intensity. As she notes, they honor “the importance of the contributions of Lakota women and Indigenous artists to our national artistic history … as well as the ways in which Indigenous artists helped shape the evolution of the practices of Western artists who were inspired by their work.”

This approach situates White Hawk within a lineage of Native artists who navigated and complicated the terrain of modernism. George Morrison, for instance, brought Ojibwe landscape sensibilities to Abstract Expressionism, while Jaune Quick-to-See Smith's flag paintings share symbolic ground with Jasper Johns’s work to probe questions of American history and identity. White Hawk extends this tradition while clarifying its stakes. The innovations of Native women—whether in color or composition—did not follow Western abstraction, but rather preceded, shaped, and existed alongside it.

White Hawk’s practice also moves decisively beyond the canvas through installations such as her ongoing LISTEN series. This multi-channel video work presents Native women speaking their Indigenous languages on tribal homelands without subtitles. The series asserts belonging, sharing, and presence on self-determined terms while also illustrating the profound and lasting effects of colonization. Collaboration is central to White Hawk’s project. Family members, friends, and community partners work together in the studio to create beaded sculptures and mixed media paintings using glass beads, sinew, and buckskin. These pieces insist on the conceptual sophistication of Indigenous making while celebrating the collective modes of creation that Native women have practiced for generations. White Hawk's public commissions, created through collaborations with glass and ceramic studios, extend this ethos into civic space, ensuring Indigenous communities see themselves—and their artistic histories—centered where they have long been marginalized. 

At its core, White Hawk's practice is sustained by ancestral respect and guided by value systems that center relationality and care for all life. By addressing inequities affecting Native communities, she creates opportunities for cross-cultural connection and prompts a critical examination of how artistic and national histories have been constructed. Her work invites viewers to evaluate current societal value systems and their capacity to support equitable futures.

This approach manifests in paintings and sculptures that serve as both aesthetic explorations and strategic interventions, illuminating the reciprocal influences that bind Indigenous and broader American art histories. Attentive to how artistic representation mirrors larger social structures, White Hawk’s work addresses omissions that have perpetuated exclusion and erasure. What emerges is art that joins formal rigor with political consciousness, advocating for a more honest and holistic American cultural narrative—one in which Indigenous art is recognized as a foundational and lasting force.

White Hawk has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including the upcoming 2025 major mid-career survey Dyani White Hawk: Love Language at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, which will travel to Remai Modern, Saskatoon, Canada in 2026. Other selected exhibitions include Dyani White Hawk: Bodies of Water, Baltimore Museum of Fine Arts, MD; Dyani White Hawk: Speaking to Relatives, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, traveled to Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, CO. White Hawk’s work has been included in many group exhibitions, including the Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN (2019), traveled to Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN (2019), Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK, and Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. (both 2020). White Hawk’s work is in the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others. She is the recipient of multiple awards and fellowships, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (2024); MacArthur Fellowship (2023); and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2021). In 2024, she received an honorary doctorate from the Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, NM. White Hawk is co-represented by Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis, MN. She lives and works in Minneapolis, MN.