Dyani White Hawk is a Minneapolis-based visual artist whose studio practice is rooted in painting and beadwork, as well as installation, video, and photography. As a woman of Sičangu Lakota and European-American ancestry, she pulls from a complex personal and national history to create honest works that speak to the Indigenous experience in the U.S. In the studio, she combines a love of painting with the rich tradition of Lakota art forms like beadwork, porcupine quillwork, and painted parfleche.
Her solo show last spring at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, “Speaking to Relatives,” coincided with her inclusion in the Whitney Biennial in New York. There, anchoring the fifth-floor entrance, was White Hawk’s dazzling eight-by-fourteen-foot Wopila | Lineage (2021), made from loomed glass bugle beads on aluminum panels, woven into a pattern of interlocking triangles in vibrant colors. This work and others—like her “Carry” series, featuring copper vessels covered in buckskin, glass beads, and brass sequins—challenge Eurocentric ideas around the origins of abstraction, while recognizing communal support, the influence of a lineage that is still ongoing.
Ahead of debuting her newly commissioned work at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Art’s “Rising Sun” exhibition, opening in March 2023, White Hawk shared with Whitewall why her work is not about the conservation of Indigenous art, but rather the continuation of it.
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