White Hawk accepting a 2025 Vision Award at the Hollywood Theater. (Lisa Roy)
Dyani White Hawk has spent the past two decades creating art that reckons with lineage, authorship and care.
She was recently named Artist of the Year by the Minnesota Star Tribune, received a Vision Award from the Northeast Minneapolis Arts District, was featured among ArtNet’s top artists to watch and was celebrated through a major midcareer retrospective at the Walker Art Center.
White Hawk, a member of the Sičáŋǧu Lakota Nation, was raised between Madison, Wisconsin and South Dakota’s Rosebud Reservation. Her initial experience with beadwork, learned through family and community, would later become central to her artistic language. After earning a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she settled in Minneapolis at the Casket Arts Building, where her practice expanded into painting, beadwork, mosaic, installation and large-scale collaboration.
For White Hawk, abstraction has always been there, embedded in Lakota visual systems, beadwork patterns, quillwork and ceremonial objects long before the Western art world claimed the language as its own.
White Hawk’s studio in the Casket Arts Building, 681 17th Ave NE, functions as a site of shared labor and mentorship. She employs Indigenous artists and makers with a particular focus on equitable pay and visible credit. The studio’s work, White Hawk has said, is never just about the final object; it’s about the relationships that make the object possible.
That ethos is grounded in the Lakota concept of Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ — “we are all related.” It’s a principle that frames everything from her studio model to the design of her exhibitions.
This year’s Walker Art Center exhibition, “Dyani White Hawk: Love Language,” brings together nearly 15 years of work across media. Organized conceptually, the exhibition develops through four interconnected values: “See,” “Honor,” “Nurture,” and “Celebrate.” Together, they form a framework for understanding art as an act of care for materials, histories and people.
Paintings echo the geometry of beadwork. Monumental textile-like surfaces radiate with thousands of hand-placed glass beads. Video and sound elements encourage moments of pause and reflection. The galleries are welcoming by design, with seating, accessible interpretive materials and Lakota language integrated into the space. White Hawk treats the exhibition as a gathering that pays tribute to ancestors while making room for future generations, rather than a traditional retrospective.
“Wopila | Lineage” by Dyani White Hawk displayed at the 2022 Whitney Biennial. (Provided)
This work consistently challenges the art-historical narrative that frames abstraction as a European or American modernist invention. White Hawk’s practice insists that Indigenous abstraction is not derivative, but foundational.
That insistence reached a national audience with her 2022 Whitney Biennial commission, “Wopila | Lineage,” a monumental work composed of approximately half a million glass beads. The piece honors the transmission of Lakota knowledge across generations. The Whitney is also home to her expansion into mosaic work with Nourish, a collaboration with Minneapolis-based Mercury Mosaics spanning over 30 feet.
White Hawk remains deeply connected to Minnesota’s arts ecosystem. In 2025, when she accepted her Vision Award from the Northeast Minneapolis Arts District, she noted that she is proud to say she is based in Northeast Minneapolis. White Hawk has received many other accolades throughout her career, including a 2023 MacArthur “Genius” Grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship last year.
Dyani White Hawk’s work invites the viewer into a living language, one capable of holding grief, joy, responsibility and love. Her achievements this year feel like a recognition of work that has been long in motion.