Dyani White Hawk is Minnesota Star Tribune’s Artist of the Year

To acknowledge and celebrate Dyani White Hawk as Star Tribune’s 2025 Artist of the Year, Alicia Eler reports on aspects of the artist’s life, studio practice, and recent achievements.

Featuring prominently is Sandy White Hawk – an author, activist, and the artist’s mother – reflecting on her daughter’s childhood creativity, her Sičáŋǧu Lakota identity, as well as their urban upbringing in Milwaukee and ongoing relationship with Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. 

Dyani White Hawk shares her pride of place in Minnesota where she has lived and worked since 2011, after graduating with arts degrees from Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, KS (2003), Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, NM (2008), and University of Wisconsin-Madison (2011). She applauds the significant support given to artists by the state.

Attention is given to Love Language, White Hawk’s 15-year retrospective at the Walker Art Center, which travels to Saskatchewan’s Remai Modern in 2026. Summarizing how White Hawk’s practice “foregrounds, uplifts and celebrates Lakota aesthetics,” Eler notes details of inheritance and continuity between materials and technologies of creating regalia, and painting and sculpting. Remai Modern curator Tarah Hogue (Métis Nation citizen), says “Her work is so beautiful, and it draws people to have important conversations, but through that offering of beauty.”

Throughout the article, Eler follows White Hawk’s commitment to centering Indigenous voices, and shares how the artist “hopes there will be more healing between Indigenous people and art institutions and changes in how cultural institutions and educational systems tell American history.” A number of relational stories from fellow artists and collaborators show how this is at the heart of White Hawk’s journey and studio practice. Currently employing ten Native artists as full time assistants, White Hawk says, “I love the idea that the studio can be a place where people can come in and work for as long as they need it, and that through working at the studio, they’ll have their own opportunities for personal and professional development…and then launch out of the need for that work and into their own adventures and careers.”

A selection of White Hawk’s recent awards are listed, including the 2023 MacArthur “genius” grant, a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2017 Native Arts and Culture Foundation Mentor Artist Fellow, as well as two public commissions to debut in 2026 at New York’s JFK International Airport’s Terminal 6 and at the Portland International Airport in Portland, Oregon.