“I’m working against a very fast-approaching deadline, so it’s best if I can talk and work,”says award-winning painter and mixed-media artist Dyani White Hawk, a brush in her hand and the phone on speaker. Gearing up for an exhibition at Shiprock Santa Fe, she doesn’t stop painting while she talks about coming into her own both as an artist and as a mixed-heritage Lakota woman.
Whether she’s intricately painting hundreds of minuscule beads on oversize canvases or painstakingly incorporating actual beads and porcupine quills in mixed-media pieces, White Hawk’s exacting detail and dynamic contemporary spin on age-old indigenous elements — blanket patterns, moccasins, the four directions — are hallmarks of her work. Unique in their abstraction and striking in their color, the pieces can often be read variously as landscape or object, pattern or figure. Visually, they stand out from the crowd; mentally, they plumb familiar depths in a highly personal way.
“My work embraces the dilemmas and contradictions as well as the joys and blessings of a cross-cultural existence,” White Hawk says in an artist statement that suggests as much about her keen intellect as it does about her artwork. “As a woman of Lakota and European ancestry, my life experiences have been a combination of both Western and indigenous educations, causing a continual negotiation of value systems and worldviews. Through the amalgamation of abstract symbols and motifs derivative of both Lakota and Western abstraction, my artwork examines, dissects, and patches back together pieces of each in a means to provide an honest representation of self and culture.”
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