Dyani White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota) strives to create inclusive works that draw from her breadth of life experiences: Native and non-Native, urban, academic, and cultural education systems. Working across media, White Hawk’s painting and sculptural practice commonly foregrounds aesthetic and relational histories between Lakota art forms and what is called modern art; her works in performance, video, and photography caringly and critically consider Indigenous language, intergenerational knowledge, and the protection of life to, as she puts it, “encourage conversations that challenge the lack of representation of Native arts, people and voices in our national consciousness while highlighting the truth and necessity of equality and intersectionality.”
Featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, White Hawk’s art has been the subject of numerous solo shows, most recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2022), the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art (2022), and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (2021). Her work is widely collected, including Akta Lakota Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, and the Walker Art Center.
Recently acknowledged with the Anonymous Was a Woman Grant and McKnight Visual Artists Fellowship (both 2021), White Hawk also received the Bemis Alumni Award (2020) and United States Artists Fellowship in Visual Art (2019), among many other honors. Gallery director and curator for the All My Relations Gallery in Minneapolis from 2011 to 2015, White Hawk holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2011) and a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe (2008).
White Hawk is based in Minneapolis.

acrylic, glass bugle beads, synthetic sinew on aluminum panel
96 x 168 inches
installation view of Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
photo by Ron Amstutz

acrylic on canvas
84 x 120 inches
collection Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts

acrylic, bugle beads, thread and synthetic sinew on canvas
48 x 48 inches
collection Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art

acrylic, bugle beads, thread and synthetic sinew on canvas
48 x 48 inches
collection Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art

acrylic on canvas
60 x 48 inches
private collection

acrylic on canvas
60 x 48 inches
collection Chrystal Bridges Museum of American Art

buckskin, synthetic sinew, antique glass beads, brass sequins, canvas, acrylic, dyed feathers
approx. 110 x 15 inches
collection Eiteljorg Museum

buckskin, synthetic sinew, glass beads, brass sequins, copper vessel, copper ladle
approx. 122 x 12 x 10 inches
collection Walker Art Center, gift of Russell Cowles, 2020

acrylic, oil, bugle beads, synthetic sinew, thread on canvas
30 x 30 inches
collection Aktá Lakota Museum and Cultural Center

acrylic, oil, bugle and seed beads, synthetic sinew, thread on canvas
30 x 30 inches
collection Davis Museum at Wellesley College