Dyani White Hawk Returns to The Modern Art Notes Podcast
Tyler Green of The Modern Art Notes Podcast (MAN) hosts Dyani White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota) for episode No. 736. Green’s invitation coincides with “Dyani White Hawk: Love Language,” the Walker Art Center’s 15-year survey of the artist’s career. Like the exhibition, the conversation highlights White Hawk’s material practices and foregrounds Lakota relations, forms, and motifs to challenge prevailing histories and practices around abstract art.
Green begins by reflecting on the progression of scale in Love Language. Noting that the exhibition begins with smaller two-dimensional works and scales up to include a number of large three-dimensional works, Green asks White Hawk what scale enables. She recalls the sizes of her studios, having transitioned step-by-step from a low-ceilinged basement where only small works were possible to the expansive warehouse studios she works in today. For White Hawk, more space enables more play, imagination, and adventure. She also notes an important strategy in working big: to be adjacent and on the same scale as western art history’s canonical Euroamerican male abstractionists. She details how such proximity of artworks can invite curiosity towards intertwined histories and influences. For example, relations between Lakota and Indigenous abstraction through porcupine quills and trade beads on stretched animal hides to oil painting on stretched canvas.
When Green asks about Visiting (2023) – the tallest work in the exhibition at 10 feet – White Hawk directs attention to the people that make this scale of work possible. She speaks of her first large-scale work (8 x 14 feet), Wopila|Lineage (2022), commissioned for the 2022 Whitney Biennial. Wopila’s scale demanded that she invite more people to work in the studio with a focus on beading. When approaching Visiting (2024) – a double homage to artists Jim Denomie and George Morrison – she invited even more beaders into the studio, and, for the first time, to create their own designs. This led to unique individual beaded patches, which White Hawk brought together into a balanced collage to clad the 12 foot tall columnar form. She explains the title Visiting uplifts an Indigenous methodology so important to her family, tribe, and a practice at work during the pieces’ creation. The connection and care when visiting is considered a valuable way to spend time, between people, with ancestors, including intertribal and intergenerational connections (like between the studio’s beaders). Green mentions the interactive quality of the work in the context of the Walker exhibition, noting how visitors are always gathered around it, pointing to and discussing specific patchworks.
Moving on to the series Carry (2019 – ) – a sculptural series that also invites viewers to walk around it – Green describes its materiality including copper, leather, and glass beads, and asks to discuss the work considering classifications such as fine art, regalia, movement, and dance. White Hawk takes this opportunity to speak about how categorization and hierarchies – in art and art history, as in life – create and reflect imbalance. She stresses how Lakota art does not enforce notions of “less-than” and sees the myriad of art forms and practices as part of everyday living – to wear, to use, to beautify, to gift, to show love. White Hawk describes how copper is a purifying element sacred to Lakota people. With Carry, she adorns copper bucket and ladle forms with leather fringe in a way that honors the movement of the body and regalia in traditional women’s dances, as well as the movement of water which is an implied subject of Carry. White Hawk says, “We get to choose what our value systems are. What are we valuing in gifts from the land and each other? When oil has greater value than water, we create imbalance. When we decide extraction of gifts from the land is greater than the people living on it, we create imbalance.”
The next area of conversation delves into recurring motifs and techniques throughout Love Language. White Hawk speaks about kapemni, a motif of two triangles or cones that mirror when meeting in their centers, which reflects Lakota earth-sky/cosmos mirroring, and more broadly, relationships of balance and connectivity across all life. White Hawk says that kapemni is a practice; using it repeatedly reminds her to “come back to the teachers in a world off balance.”
When Green asks of trompe d’oeil, White Hawk notes that, as an abstractionist, techniques that create illusions of depth are invitations to viewers to enter the artwork and have space to move around. She relates this space to time, including ancestral and historical time of porcupine quill work and beading practices passed on within her culture, and also to the value given to the time it takes to employ these techniques – values that run counter to the pace of capitalism.
Printmaking is plotted throughout Love Language, and Green inquires about its role in White Hawk’s practice. They discuss her strategies with colorways, and printmaking’s reproductive nature as a generous form of sharing and relative affordability in comparison to White Hawk’s unique works.
The conversation concludes with Green inviting White Hawk to acknowledge specific aspects of influence within Native art history, from those who came before her to her contemporaries. She explains how time spent with Euroamerican abstractionists in graduate school inspired her to articulate colonial intersections with and inheritances from Lakota and other Indigenous forms of abstraction. She names her primary influence as the women who adorn regalia, from once-known Lakota artists whose work she meets in her collections research, to those whose work can be seen at powwows and other cultural gatherings across Indian country today. Green and White Hawk briefly acknowledge legacies of artists including TC Cannon, Fritz Scholder, and Truman Lowe (a mentor at University of Wisconsin–Madison), as well as White Hawk’s contemporaries including Brian Jungen, Christi Belcourt, Marie Watt, and Candice Hopkins.
The Modern Art Notes Podcast (MAN) with Tyler Green invites artists, art historians and authors to discuss their work. Dyani White Hawk has joined Green for Episode No. 736 (December 11, 2025) and Episode No. 610 (July 13, 2023). Love Language is curated by Siri Engberg and Tarah Hogue with Brandon Eng. The Walker-published exhibition catalogue is available for order.