NEW YORK — A light scent of wine and sweat filled the vast gallery as the chatter of art aficionados grew to an incessant murmur. A Black woman in a black-and-white coat posed in front of a 14-foot-wide abstract work constructed from a half-million glass beads — tiny gold, blue, gray, red, black and white bugle beads.
The coat's stripes formed a new pattern against the triangular designs of "Wopila | Lineage," by Shakopee-based artist Dyani White Hawk. Positioned at the fifth-floor entrance to the prestigious Whitney Biennial in New York City — a barometer of "who's hot" in American art — the piece greeted visitors while commanding them to look.
At the VIP opening party March 29, White Hawk's mom, Sandy, watched in amazement as fabulously dressed patrons wandered by.
"These people from L.A. came to check her out," she said, pointing at Esther Kim Varet, whose influential gallery Various Small Fires also has outposts in Seoul and Dallas.
"Varet, rhymes with carrot," she muttered, hunching over her smartphone as she frantically googled restaurants that might accommodate the artist's family, including husband Danny Polk and their daughters Nina, 19, and Tusweča, 8 ½.
White Hawk, who is Sičáŋgu Lakota, and Pao Houa Her, a Hmong-American photographer based in Blaine, are among 63 artists in this year's 80th edition of the biennial.
More than just representing the state, the two artists feel they can't make their work without their Minnesota communities.
Exposure at the Whitney Biennial was crucial for Twin Cities-based photographer Alec Soth, whose work was included in the 2004 edition.
"The show doesn't necessarily make or break careers, but in my case it made galleries and publishers look at me differently," he said. "The art world in the U.S. runs through New York … and the Whitney Biennial gave me the NYC art-world stamp of approval."
Dyani White Hawk on 'Wopila | Lineage'
"Wopila" is like a big thank-you. ... It is a moment of gratitude and recognition of the contributions of Indigenous women to the history of abstraction, and the generations of Lakota women but also women at large on this land base that have helped shape what we understand to be abstraction and art history. And a moment of gratitude for all they have contributed to where I get to play, in that lineage today.
This piece wouldn't exist if I didn't have 20 people from my community who helped. I started it in 2020 and it took about nine months to bead. I pull from the history of Western abstraction and easel-painting abstraction, as well, so recognizing all of those but also really strongly centering Lakota abstraction, Lakota symbolism, Lakota aesthetics in a space like this, is really important to me. Not all of my work is super direct in its references to Lakota art forms and aesthetics. It is if you know it, but it doesn't have to be if you don't know it or don't read up more.
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