The Sičáŋǧu Lakota Artist Pays Tribute to Her Ancestors and Honors Native Women in a Powerful Exhibit at Kemper Museum
Like a juggler twirling multiple plates, Dyani White Hawk, in her exhibition “Speaking to Relatives,” seamlessly melds different cultures, languages and aesthetic traditions into one immersive event. Her exhibit, which includes paintings, sculpture, beadwork, photography and video, is a powerful and unforgettable experience, which curator Jade Powers has installed to perfection. For those who linger and look, White Hawk’s art fills up the heart, mind and body; it may also stir up unknown, unbidden ancestral longings.
White Hawk is a Sičáŋǧu Lakota artist born in 1976. She is also a curator, lecturer and jewelry designer. Her work has been featured in Kansas City in group exhibits at The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art and the Sherry Leedy Gallery, but seeing the diversity of her art in one space is a different experience. As generous and beautiful as the show is — it’s a well-deserved tribute to the artistry of her predecessors, mostly anonymous — White Hawk also brings us face to face with centuries of her culture’s wrenching legacy of female abuse. As written in one exhibit label: “Native women in today’s America are not seen as human. We are often not seen at all. Our profound invisibility gives way to gross stereotypes and distorted sexualized caricatures that dehumanize and commodify us . . . Indigenous women face a murder rate 10 times higher than the national average, with 84 percent experiencing some form of violence in their lifetimes.”
White Hawk deals with these issues in various ways. “Speaking to Relatives” is divided into four main parts — abstract paintings of vamps (the upper toe of a moccasin), many of which incorporate beadwork; symbolic beaded and fringed sculptures that reference Lakota carrying vessels; six life-sized color photographs, front and back, of Native women; and eight video installations of Indigenous women speaking their native languages on their ancestral lands.
There are 10 large-scale paintings of vamps; they range from realistic to abstract, and many of them include stunning beadwork. In earlier pieces, such as “Connections,” from 2015, glass beads make up the details. In later works, including “Untitled (All The Colors)” and “Untitled (black and gold),” from 2020, the vamp is a totally abstract shape assembled from thousands of bugle beads in dazzling, gridlike patterns that take White Hawk as long as months to complete.
The scale, vibrant color and graphic quality of these works have the impact of Pop art, but their purpose is totally different. Pop art is ironic and cool; White Hawk’s larger-than-life images are created to show respect for the power and heritage of what to many may seem a lowly shoe, but in Plains culture is an item of artistry and living connection to the land itself.
“It was an intentional move on my part to create art at that scale,” White Hawk said in a recent interview. “I really wanted to create a powerful presence to honor my ancestors in a way they haven’t been honored before (within the arts).” As Powers notes in the catalog essay, “White Hawk views the moccasin as a representation of a figure without human characteristics.”
Read full review at kcstudio.org.
