Dyani White Hawk’s “Love Language” at the Walker Art Center was a formidable mid-career survey showcasing fifteen years of the Minneapolis-based artist’s multidisciplinary practice. White Hawk has garnered acclaim in recent years for major works that draw upon Lakota art forms and Western abstraction. A member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, the artist engages motifs indigenous to the Sičáŋgu Lakota across paintings, works on paper, photography, sculpture, and video installations that seek to reframe the history of modernism as fundamentally indebted to Indigenous aesthetics.
“Love Language” organized White Hawk’s early work and recent collaborations into four thematic sections that reflected Indigenous value systems—“See,” “Honor,” “Nurture,” and “Celebrate”—spanning three floors of the museum. Throughout, large-scale sculptures displayed her technical skill and amplified Lakota visual language and philosophy. Infinite We, 2025, which debuted at the Walker, was a ten-foot-tall, three-dimensional mosaic hourglass featuring the kapémni form—an Očeti Šakowiŋ (Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota) cosmological symbol comprised of two mirrored triangles that signify the values of relatedness between all forms of life. Historically, it was sewn and painted by Native women onto garments and objects. Here, WhiteHawk showcases the form through grand size and rich materiality, using patterned enamel on copper. (The kapémni is a recurring motif for the artist, whose 2022 Whitney Biennial commission, Wopila | Lineage, took the shape of a fourteen-foot-wide rendering of the design comprising hundreds of thousands of radiant glass beads.)
In a small room off the main gallery on the second floor, Braids, 2018, a video collaboration with artist Jovan C. Speller, paid tribute to hair braiding as an act of matrilineal care in Indigenous and Black communities. In another room furnished with couches, throw pillows, and blankets designed by the artist, the ongoing video series “LISTEN,” 2020–, played on a loop. Eight monitors presented footage of Native women filmed on their ancestral homelands while they were speaking their respective Indigenous languages without translation. The workconfronts US colonial and assimilationist policies from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries banning Native people from using their mother tongues, a trauma that impacted generations. Indeed, intersectional feminist ethics inform much of White Hawk’s work. Take the “Carry Series,” 2019– which draws inspiration from Lakota functional objects but plays up proportion and ornamentation to eclipse practicality: The artist renders these sculptural vessels at enormous scale, adorning them with glass beads and shining copper, and bestowing each with a train of dramatic buckskin fringe. “Carry” calls to mind colorfully beaded and quilled Christian Louboutin shoes by fashion designer Jamie Okuma (Luiseño/Shoshone-Bannock)—both artists blur the boundary between craft and fine art, function and couture—while implicitly drawing attention to works by Native artists and women of color historically relegated to anthropological or folk-art spaces within museums.
Monumental abstract paintings with sections of beading and brushstrokes that resemble Indigenous embroidering techniques established the flat planes of color and angular geometries one might associate with any number of AbEx, Color Field, or postwar Conceptual painting practices. She Gives (Quiet Strength VII), 2020, measuring ten feet wide, features thousands of short strokes that mimic the slender spines of porcupine quillwork and were applied here to form the two mirrored triangles of the kapémni in turquoise and black paint. White Hawk’s deployment of Lakota symbols in the language of modern painting (canvas, paint, brush) recasts the artists of 1940s and ’50s New York (Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, et al.) in relation to generations of Native makers whose aesthetics, beliefs, and techniques they appropriated with little understanding or acknowledgment. Curator Candice Hopkins, who did not work on “Love Language,” has observed in a text about White Hawk’s painting and printmaking that her melding of aesthetic traditions negotiates the “contingent, entangled, and relational” nature of Euro-American and Native abstract art histories, which share geography and formal language but have otherwise been kept separate. Seizing on these continuities, White Hawk interrogates deeply held cultural assumptions in layered visual language, honoring the labor of Indigenous women across generations and their contributions to the history of modernism. Visibility is an act of love.
