Artist Dyani White Hawk finds an affinity between indigenous, Western abstraction

The kapémni shape, an abstract Lakota symbol widely recognizable to native tribes of the Great Plains, consists of two mirrored triangles balanced in an hourglass shape at their centers. The lower represents the physical world, the upper the sky and the spiritual realm. The form was traditionally depicted in porcupine quill work, beadwork, and parfleche painting on garments and objects made by native women.

“The kapémni is truly a worldview based on Lakota philosophy and underlines our connection with all humanity, all plant life and all periods of life,” says Dyani White Hawk, a Minneapolis-based artist who is Sicangu Lakota, of the Rosebud Sioux tribe.

She has integrated the kapémni motif over the past fifteen years in various media and on an increasingly larger scale and innovation. “Using it in my own work serves as a personal reminder again and again to live our values.”

White Hawk, 48, has recently received a wave of recognition in the art world for her multidisciplinary work that brings abstraction long used by the Lakota people into active dialogue with elements of mid-20th century American painting, including abstract expressionism, color field, hard-edge and minimalism.

Awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 2023 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2024, White Hawk has high-profile commissions at Kennedy International Airport and Portland International Airport in Oregon, and her work has been collected by dozens of major museums, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Denver Art Museum and the Brooklyn Museum.

Walker exhibition

Now, in her hometown of Minneapolis, a midcareer survey has opened at the Walker Art Center called “Dyani White Hawk: Love Language,” on view through Feb. 15, featuring more than 90 paintings, works on paper, video installations, quill and beadwork objects, and several new sculptures and mosaics. It was organized in collaboration with the Remai Modern in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where the show will travel next year. The two institutions bridge the Plains homelands of the Oceti Sakowin cultural group, composed of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota nations whose territory long predates that national boundary.

“A driving force within what I do is ensuring that Indigenous voices are included, heard and celebrated in our mainstream public art spaces at the same level as all our counterparts in the field,” White Hawk said in a video interview.

She wants to remind people “of the artistic history that existed on this land base before colonization and the ways in which it has intertwined with other communities after colonization.”

Art history incomplete

Of mixed Lakota and European descent, White Hawk grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, where she was raised primarily by her mother, who was born on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Sandy White Hawk was adopted at 18 months by white missionaries, who moved with her to Wisconsin. As an adult, she reunited with her Lakota family and brought her children back to South Dakota for ceremonies throughout their childhood.

“My mother was in an era of often coerced, manipulated, very systematic removal of children,” says White Hawk, whose mother founded the First Nations Repatriation Institute and was an activist in reconnecting separated families.

White Hawk studied United States and tribal art and history from indigenous perspectives at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas, where she earned a degree in elementary education in 2003. She learned Native art history and took her first painting lessons at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she graduated in 2008 with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts.

After these tribal colleges, she described experiencing a “culture shock” when she attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There she was introduced to Western art history, where everything she had previously studied was left undiscussed. Independently, she researched names that came up in class, such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, and was instinctively drawn to their abstract language, she said. She wasn’t surprised to learn that they were influenced by indigenous art forms.

White Hawk was simultaneously “in love with Abstract Expressionism and disturbed by the story that abstract painting in the U.S. began in the 1940s and 1950s in New York at the Cedar Tavern,” says Siri Engberg, Walker’s senior curator and director of visual arts who co-organized the study with Tarah Hogue of the Remai Modern. From the artist’s student works to today, Engberg added, “Dyani is thinking about ways she can counter that narrative and, more importantly, foreground the legacy of Lakota abstraction.”

An artistic language

In her early work, White Hawk juxtaposed double artistic lines. She alternated stripes painted with gestures to evoke artists like Rothko, Sean Scully, or Frank Stella with stripes painted in neat rows of short, parallel marks to mimic the practices of Lakota featherwork and beadwork (sometimes with real spines and beads on the surface).

In her larger series “Quiet Strength,” begun in 2016, White Hawk captured expressionist brushwork in gold, silver or copper. On top of this, she painted thousands of vertical marks in horizontal bands, flowing together into the kapémni shape or other geometric Lakota symbols, the flicker of the underlying metallic pigments creating an aura of radiance and value.

“Dyani always says that beauty is healing,” says Hogue, associate curator of indigenous art at Remai Modern. “Through color, through the materials, she really opens up these rich and sometimes difficult conversations about what people know about art history and even the history of the country they’re in.”

“Infinite We,” White Hawk’s latest sculpture to make its debut at the Walker, realizes the kapémni form entirely in the round. The surface of the two conjoined cones is over three meters high and has a diameter of one and a half meters and is a mosaic of colorful triangles of enamel on copper that form optically moving pinwheels and embody the idea of ​​the kapémni as a whirlpool.

The motif will reappear in the guise of Oregon’s Mount Hood, depicted in a monumental mosaic to be unveiled at Portland International Airport next year. White Hawk’s design is 17.5 meters long and 2.5 meters high and presents the majestic mountain silhouette adorned with a cape with tribal beads, like a snowcap, and reflected in the sky. A striking horizon line separates sunrise and starscape.

“The whole composition is a kapémni,” said White Hawk, excited by the increasing opportunities she had to translate her work into permanent public installations. “I’m very grateful to be able to play so big and create something that honors that landscape, but also stays within the scope of my artistic language and the way I see the world.”

‘Dyani White Hawk: Love Language’

What: More than 90 paintings, works on paper, video installations and objects with quillwork and beadwork.

Where: Walker Art Center Galleries 1, 2, 3; 725 Vineland Pl., Minneapolis.

Tickets: Free – $18, available at walkerart.org

Accessibility: Elevators, lifts, wheelchairs and other services are available.