Standing before any one of the nearly 100 works in the collection—one of White Hawk’s paintings, or a beaded sculpture, or a large video installation—you’ll first grok her philosophically decolonizing critique, reclaiming abstract art for Native voices. Then you’ll be taken in emotionally by her use of mind-blowing colors and textures and by her celebration of beauty, craft, and kinship. Then you’ll circle right back into the decolonizing critique—so yes, a whirlwind.
“It’s true, and it’s all those things because that’s life, right?” White Hawk says. “That’s the human experience.” We’re sitting in the smaller of the two studio rooms she rents in Northeast Minneapolis. A golden kapémni dangles from the necklace she’s wearing over the black T-shirt she’s paired with russet-colored mid-calf slacks and Adidas sneakers. She says she’s been painting the kapémni since she was an undergraduate at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas, or maybe even since she was filling drawing notebooks as a kid in Madison, Wisconsin.
“It’s a core symbol in Lakota creation,” she says. “And it really symbolizes the idea of balance—this give-and-take of life and death, and joy and pain—it’s all part of it.”
Ever since she won a MacArthur “genius” grant and appeared in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, White Hawk’s career has been on such a heater that often when friends or family members ask where they can see her work, she names some faraway museum. But now they’ll be able to see it at the Walker.
“It’s so damn important to me that our community can have access to the work,” she says.
White Hawk is hoping to reap her own whirlwind by sharing this collection. “If my work can just incrementally move somebody in a direction where they’re making decisions from compassion, then I’ve done what I can to make my contribution while also fulfilling my own need for creation, which fills my heart and makes me joyful and allows me to be a better human in relationships with the people I share space with.”
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