White Hawk named 2023 MacArthur Fellow

Dyani White Hawk is among four artists named 2023 MacArthur Fellows. Along with María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Raven Chacon, and Carolyn Lazard, the Shakopee, Minnesota–based White Hawk is honored along with 19 others for “applying individual creativity with global perspective, centering connections across generations and communities,” in the words of Marlies Carruth, director of the MacArthur Fellows program.

In a MacArthur video, White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota) discusses her aim of creating conversation around the ways European and American history has undervalued some traditions while elevating others. Her multidisciplinary work arises from both an affinity for European abstraction and a personal lineage of Lakota abstraction. “Distilling complex ideas and thoughts down to the most graceful and poignant gestures, that’s a human practice,” she says. “I hope that people walk away from my work thinking about how our history has impacted Indigenous communities, thinking about our relatedness. Thinking about our interconnectivity. Thinking a bit deeper about how our lives are connected across the globe. “

For more, read the 2022 Bockley Gallery interview, in which she discusses how this thinking led to the creation of her 2022 Whitney Biennial commission, Wopila | Lineage (2022), a large-scale work comprised of more than a half million glass bugle beads.