Wikipedia

Dyani White Hawk

Dyani White Hawk Polk (born 1976) is an American contemporary artist and curator of Sicangu Lakota, German, and Welsh ancestry based out of Minnesota.[1][2][3] From 2010 to 2015, White Hawk was a curator for the Minneapolis gallery All My Relations.[4] As an artist, White Hawk's work aesthetic is characterized by a combination of modern abstract painting and traditional Lakota art. White Hawk's pieces reflect both her Western, American upbringing and her indigenous ancestors mediums and modes for creating visual art.

Dyani White Hawk
Born1976 (age 49–50)
Madison, Wisconsin
Alma materHaskell Indian Nations University, Institute of American Indian Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Websitedyaniwhitehawk.com

White Hawk's work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, the Ca' Foscari University in Venice, Italy, the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum in Santa Fe, and Minneapolis Institute of Art. Many of White Hawk's works have also been acquisitioned into the collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian and the Tweed Museum of Art.[5] In October 2023, she was named one of the MacArthur Fellows[1][6] to recognize her art "revealing the underrecognized yet enduring influence of Indigenous aesthetics on modern and contemporary art."[7] In April 2024, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts.[1][8]

Early life and education

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White Hawk was born and raised in Madison, Wisconsin. Her mother, author, speaker, and indigenous rights activist, Sandy White Hawk, was adopted from the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota to non-Native Wisconsin parents, and as a young child in Wisconsin, the artist had very little connection to her Rosebud family. It wasn't until she was a teen that she began learning about her Lakota ancestry and grappling with issues of heritage and identity. According to White Hawk "my life experiences have been a continual negotiation of both Western and Indigenous educations, value systems, and worldviews."[9]

White Hawk received her first undergraduate degree in 2003 from Haskell Indian Nations University. In 2008, she earned a BFA in 2-D Studio Arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), and in 2011 she graduated from University of Wisconsin-Madison with an MFA in Studio Arts.[10]

White Hawk credits her mother with encouraging her artistic talent at a young age, but the artist's first painting was completed as part of her IAIA admission portfolio. Her early artwork tends to borrow influence from popular culture and street art. White Hawk cites later influences ranging from abstract modernists such as Mark Rothko and Marsden Hartley, to Native history traditional tribal art forms. Although she tends to favor artistic traditions specific to her Lakota tribe, White Hawk has also found influence in other Native artistic traditions, such as Navajo weaving.[11]

Work

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White Hawk is known for her easel-sized paintings that depict abstract compositions emphasizing saturated colors arranged in symmetrical and asymmetrical patterns. She often privileges patterns and lines that replicate quillwork, beadwork, and textiles. In the painting Seeing (2010), for instance, the square canvas is divided into nine smaller squares to create a gridded composition. But the grid yields to deep blue sky peppered with cumulus clouds that appear to recede into the distance; this interruption to the grid is also contained by it, as the sky occupies the central cruciform shape of the composition. Appearing to overlap this firmament are four beige-and-blue striped squares that anchor the painting in each corner.[12]

Primarily through abstraction, White Hawk examines the relationship of traditional art making in Native American communities to more contemporary practices. Often, her work comments on the problematic minimizing of Native artists versus the recognition given to Western artists who take influence from Native art forms.[13] Moccasin toes, ledger drawings, blanket designs, porcupine quills, teepee forms and other Native American motifs often are the subjects of White Hawk's exacting oil paintings.[14]

Though thoroughly modern/contemporary in the expression of her ideas and themes, White Hawk, both as a curator and as an artist, explores her cultural heritage. She writes: "As a woman of Sicangu Lakota and European ancestry, raised among Native communities within urban American environments, my work is an investigation of communal and personal definitions. It is a journey into understanding the history of this land and our relationships with and within it."[15] White Hawk has exhibited work at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, and the Indian Arts and Culture Museum. Her work has been collected by the Akta Lakota Museum, the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Wisconsin Union Art Collection, the Robert Penn Collection of Contemporary Northern Plains Indian Art of the University of South Dakota[16] and the Minneapolis Institute of Art.[17]

White Hawk's work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, the Ca' Foscari University in Venice, Italy, the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, and the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum in Santa Fe.[10] White Hawk is currently represented by Shiprock Santa Fe and Bockley Gallery.[9]

White Hawk's painting earned the "Best of Classification" award at the 2011 Santa Fe Indian Art Market and a First Place in painting at the 2011 Northern Plains Indian Art Market. She was a SWAIA discovery fellowship recipient in 2012.[18] In 2013, White Hawk was the recipient of the McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship.[14]

White Hawk is known for her art that represents the Native American culture.[1] White Hawk included several messages in her artwork. "I am your Relative," was created to depict eight Native women sharing their prayer and personal stories related to their Native land."[19] White Hawks art is located in many different museums and she also has participated in cross-cultural residences in at least 4 different countries.[20] White Hawk used "abstraction to bring American Indian tradition into a dynamic contemporary context."[21] This is depicted in her artwork "I am your relative." White Hawk was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant in 2014.[22] In 2015 and 2017, the artist was awarded a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Regional Artist Fellowship.[23][24] She is also a recipient of the 2018 Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists and the 2019 U.S. Fellowship for Visual Art.[20][25]

White Hawk was commissioned to create Wopila | Lineage (2022), a 14-by-8-foot work composed of a half million glass bugle beads, for the 2022 Whitney Biennial.[3][26][27] The piece's title references the Lakota word for deep gratitude. The piece, she states, is "meant to honor and show gratitude for the lineage of Lakota women and their contributions to abstraction, for Indigenous women at large and their contributions to art on this continent, for the generations of practiced abstraction that helped nurture and guide the work of the Western artists that were inspired by their work and brought that back into their studios with them as they created easel paintings. I'm pulling from those histories—from my own very specific history of Lakota abstraction, from Indigenous abstract practices at large, from abstract easel painting practices—and hoping to create opportunities for conversation around how connected those histories are and the fact that one doesn't happen without the other."[28]

Following up on her 2020 work, I Am Your Relative, which looked at stereotypes and violence again Indigenous women and girls,[26][29][30] White Hawk created a video series with Razelle Benally, Listen.[29] Listen is a series of videos of Indigenous women speaking their native languages.[29][30][31] Lacking any subtitles, the intent of the video series was to raise awareness of the sounds of Indigenous languages.[29][32]

White Hawk was The Minnesota Star Tribune's artist of the year in 2025.[33][34] Additionally, White Hawk will debut work at both JFK International Airport in New York and the Portland International Airport.[1][33]

Solo exhibitions

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  • 2025 - Love Language, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN[1][31][35][36]
  • 2022 - Dyani White Hawk: Speaking to Relatives, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Denver, CO[25][29]
  • 2016 - Storied Abstraction, Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis, MN[37][38]
  • 2015 - Dyani White Hawk, Shiprock Santa Fe Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
  • 2014 - Into the Light: Paintings and Prints by Dyani White Hawk, Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis, MN[39][40]
  • 2013 - An Exhibition of Works by Dyani White Hawk, Gallery 110, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, SD
  • 2012 - Dyani White Hawk, Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis, MN[41][40][42]
  • 2011 - Inseparable, Art Lofts Gallery, Madison, WI

Group exhibitions

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References

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  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Sheets, Hilarie M. (16 October 2025). "Finding Affinity Between Native and Western Abstraction". The New York Times (published 19 October 2025). pp. F.6. ProQuest 3262777667. Archived from the original on 26 October 2025. Retrieved 29 March 2026.
  2. ↑ "Dyani White Hawk - Native Arts and Cultures Foundation". Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. 21 October 2015. Archived from the original on 4 June 2025. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
  3. 1 2 Ross, Jenna (15 September 2024). "With many hands, art magic is created: Dyani White Hawk celebrates community with new sculpture". Minneapolis Star Tribune. pp. E.1. ProQuest 3104852712.
  4. ↑ Abbe, Mary (10 March 2015). "Ace gallery director Dyani White Hawk Polk resigns AMRG post". Minneapolis Star Tribune. Archived from the original on 4 December 2024. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
  5. ↑ "Dyani White Hawk Polk". First Peoples Fund. 2015. Archived from the original on 7 November 2025. Retrieved 12 May 2020.
  6. ↑ "Dyani White Hawk - 2023 MacArthur Fellow". MacArthur Foundation. 4 October 2023. Archived from the original on 27 August 2025. Retrieved 24 March 2026.
  7. ↑ "Awards > Fellows > Dyani White Hawk". MacArthur Fellows Program. MacArthur Foundation. 2023. Archived from the original on 7 February 2026. Retrieved 5 October 2023.
  8. ↑ Sparber, Max; Cipolle, Alex V. (11 April 2024). "Three Minnesotans announced as Guggenheim Fellows". MPR News. Archived from the original on 9 November 2025. Retrieved 16 April 2024.
  9. 1 2 Joseph, Dana (17 December 2015). "Dyani White Hawk". Cowboys & Indians. Archived from the original on 7 August 2025. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
  10. 1 2 "Dyani White Hawk". Elmhurst Art Museum. 2015. Archived from the original on 17 January 2017. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
  11. ↑ White Hawk Polk, Dyani (24 April 2014). "Dyani White Hawk Polk Interview". Native Report (Interview). Interviewed by Stacey Thunder. Duluth: WDSE/WRPT PBS. Archived from the original on 5 October 2023. Retrieved 24 March 2026 – via YouTube.
  12. ↑ "Painting - dyani white hawk".
  13. ↑ Hopkins, Candice. "Dyani White Hawk." McKnight Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists, 2014-2015.
  14. 1 2 Abbe, Mary (16 January 2014). "Last picture show for McKnight Foundation". Minneapolis Star Tribune. Archived from the original on 17 January 2017. Retrieved 5 January 2016.
  15. ↑ Deats, Suzanne (2012). Contemporary Native American Artists. Principal photography by Kitty Leaken (First ed.). Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith. ISBN 978-1423605591. OCLC 855023293. Retrieved 24 March 2026 – via Google Books.
  16. ↑ "Artists :: Dyani White Hawk". Bockley Gallery. Archived from the original on 2 August 2021. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
  17. ↑ "Art: Untitled (Quiet Strength I), 2016, Dyani White Hawk". Minneapolis Institute of Art. Archived from the original on 17 November 2025. Retrieved 9 November 2019.
  18. ↑ "2012 SWAIA Fellowship Recipients - Discovery Fellows". Southwestern Association for Indian Arts. 2012. Archived from the original on 11 June 2012. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
  19. ↑ "Exhibition: Dyani White Hawk: Speaking to Relatives". Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. 10 November 2020. Archived from the original on 29 March 2026. Retrieved 14 April 2021.
  20. 1 2 "HP Editions: Dyani White Hawk". Highpoint Center for Printmaking. Archived from the original on 26 August 2024. Retrieved 14 April 2021.
  21. ↑ "Tamarind Highlights Lithograph by Dyani White Hawk". Federal News Service. 8 February 2021. ProQuest 2487066653.
  22. ↑ "Announcing 2014 Recipients of Painters & Sculptors Grants". Joan Mitchell Foundation. 17 December 2014. Archived from the original on 3 August 2025. Retrieved 5 March 2016.
  23. ↑ "Dyani White Hawk - 2015 Regional Artist Fellowship". Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. 21 October 2015. Archived from the original on 4 June 2025. Retrieved 29 March 2026.
  24. ↑ "Dyani White Hawk - 2017 Mentor Artist Fellowship". Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. 18 April 2017. Archived from the original on 28 May 2025. Retrieved 29 March 2026.
  25. 1 2 Trice, Emilie (16 March 2022). "Review: Dyani White Hawk: Speaking To Relatives at MCA Denver". Southwest Contemporary. ISSN 2766-3000. Archived from the original on 17 February 2026. Retrieved 29 March 2026.
  26. 1 2 Mothes, Kate (1 October 2025). "Lakota and Western Art History Converge in Dyani White Hawk's Vibrant Works". Colossal. Archived from the original on 7 January 2026. Retrieved 29 March 2026.
  27. ↑ "Whitney Biennial 2022: Dyani Whitehawk". Whitney Museum of American Art. 20 May 2022. Archived from the original on 16 December 2025. Retrieved 2 November 2022.
  28. ↑ Schmelzer, Paul (6 October 2022). "Beauty Is Medicinal: Dyani White Hawk on her Whitney Biennial Artwork". Bockley Gallery. Archived from the original on 3 November 2024. Retrieved 2 November 2022.
  29. 1 2 3 4 5 "Exhibitions - Dyani White Hawk: Speaking to Relatives". Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. 2022. Archived from the original on 30 March 2026. Retrieved 29 March 2026.
  30. 1 2 "Exhibitions: Dyani White Hawk Hear Her". Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art. College of Charleston. 2022. Archived from the original on 15 February 2026. Retrieved 29 March 2026.
  31. 1 2 Dickinson, Sheila (27 January 2026). "For Dyani White Hawk, Love Is an Act of Resistance". Hyperallergic. Archived from the original on 19 February 2026. Retrieved 29 March 2026.
  32. ↑ Roberts, Isabel (22 November 2022). "White Hawk Reflects on Resilience". Rhode Island School of Design. Archived from the original on 14 October 2025. Retrieved 29 March 2026.
  33. 1 2 Eler, Alicia (19 December 2025). "Dyani White Hawk is Minnesota Star Tribune's Artist of the Year". The Minnesota Star Tribune (published 21 December 2025). pp. E.1. ProQuest 3285815082. Archived from the original on 20 December 2025. Retrieved 29 March 2026.
  34. ↑ Roy, Lisa (December 2025). "Dyani White Hawk Continues to make international news". Northeast Minneapolis Arts District. Archived from the original on 30 March 2026. Retrieved 29 March 2026.
  35. ↑ Cipolle, Alex V. (18 October 2025). "New Dyani White Hawk show at the Walker is a 'love letter' to community". MRP News. Archived from the original on 19 October 2025. Retrieved 29 March 2026.
  36. ↑ Regan, Sheila (22 October 2025). "Radiant 'Love Language' at Walker Art Center puts Lakota design in contemporary spotlight". MinnPost. Archived from the original on 9 January 2026. Retrieved 29 March 2026.
  37. ↑ "Exhibitions: Dyani White Hawk - Storied Abstraction". Bockley Gallery. 2016. Archived from the original on 24 October 2016.
  38. ↑ "Events - Storied Abstraction - Dyani White Hawk". MPLSART.COM. 2016. Archived from the original on 17 October 2016. Retrieved 29 March 2026.
  39. ↑ Abbe, Mary (20 June 2014). "Into the Light". Minneapolis Star Tribune. pp. E.16. ProQuest 1540550065.
  40. 1 2 "Exhibitions". Bockley Gallery. Archived from the original on 30 October 2016.
  41. ↑ Riddle, Mason (30 March 2012). "Art spotlights: Sharon Louden, Dyani White Hawk and '365D'". Minneapolis Star Tribune. pp. E.16. ProQuest 962405259.
  42. ↑ "Dyani White Hawk" (PDF). Bockley Gallery. 2012. Archived from the original (PDF) on 16 November 2016.
  43. ↑ Greeves, Teri (2019). "Beadwork Conversations: Dyani White Hawk and Graci Horne". Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists. Curated by Jill Ahlberg Yohe and Teri Greeves. Minneapolis, MN: Minneapolis Institute of Art. pp. 205–210. ISBN 9780295745794. OCLC 1057740182.
  44. ↑ Hoska, Dakota (2019). "Seven Sisters: Native Women Painters Connected through Time by Medium". Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists. Curated by Jill Ahlberg Yohe and Teri Greeves. Minneapolis, MN: Minneapolis Institute of Art. pp. 293–296. ISBN 9780295745794. OCLC 1057740182.
  45. ↑ "Exhibition - Indelible Ink: Native Women, Printmaking, Collaboration". University of New Mexico Art Museum. 2020. Archived from the original on 14 November 2025. Retrieved 31 March 2021.
  46. ↑ "Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection". BAMPFA. 21 March 2024. Retrieved 23 April 2026.
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