Dyani, you’re an artist, and one of these years you’re going to believe me,” Dyani White Hawk’s mother would say as she saw her daughter constantly drawing and crafting in her youth. “Creating has just always been my favorite thing to do,” says the multidisciplinary visual artist. “I remember being young and going to a museum and seeing an abstract painting. I had no idea what it was; I just remember seeing it and craving it, and being like, ‘Whatever that is, I want to do that.’”
Decades later, with works in the Museum of Modern Art and the National Museum of the American Indian, White Hawk has very much become the artist her mother foresaw. Her artwork, which includes painting, sculpture, installation, performance, video, and photography, is shaped by a reverence for her Lakota heritage. Her 2021 solo exhibition at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri, presented 10 years of work exploring the way the Lakota tribe embraced abstract art, including I Am Your Relative, a 2020 series of six life-size photos of Native women wearing shirts that together spell out the sentence “I am / more than your desire / more than your fantasy / more than a mascot / ancestral love prayer sacrifice / your relative.”
The 2022 Whitney Biennial included White Hawk’s work titled Wopila | Lineage, an 8” x 14” installation for which she and her team of mostly Native artists affixed more than half a million glass bugle beads to aluminum panels to create a vibrant, geometric image that draws from Lakota beadwork traditions. It was the highest-profile moment in her career to date, but White Hawk, 46, says she was initially fearful about presenting the work in the esteemed show, as she hadn’t seen mainstream art institutions embrace overtly Native works like hers. “Basically all the things art history has told me is that what I wanted to make wouldn’t necessarily be celebrated or supported or uplifted and honored in the way that other work might be,” she says. “I decided that it was not in my best interest to buy into that fear or to make what I thought might be well received, but to really make what was important to me.”
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