Together
A conversation between Leslie Smith III and Dyani White Hawk

The public program of Bockley Gallery’s 40th anniversary exhibition, Together: Leslie Smith III & Dyani White Hawk, was an intimate artist exchange that illuminated the dynamic and oftentimes unexpected resonances within and between Smith’s multiform attunements and White Hawk’s geometric honorings. Spanning themes from friendship, ancestors, and access, to figuration, believability, and in-betweenness, the artists express their rigorous love for the practice and potentials of painting as they journey within the complex histories and futures of abstraction. 

RCI don’t know if folks in the audience had a lot of time before our conversation to look at what’s in this and the next room. Dyani is well-known here but Leslie is probably new to people in the Twin Cities, so it’s really great to have his work here now. Often on resumes, these events are called two-person shows, but I see them as duets. I am noticing as I look around how the work is interacting visually, as objects, and in terms of how you put things together. There’s a give and take, a call and response that shows you are on similar wavelengths. So, I want to start out by asking: How did you come to know one another and why is it important to show together?

LS I met Dyani as a visiting artist at University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW). She was the first person I met in Madison during my few days’ visit there in March of 2010. I was totally enamored with the depth of painterliness that was pushing out of her studio. She helped me navigate that space, and I felt like I really made a friend.

DWHSo I’ll tell my side of it, which is the same, but with more context. I was a graduate student. Leslie was coming in and doing the guest lecture as a visiting artist because he would soon be hired as a professor.

LSWell, I didn’t know that then! (Audience laughter)

DWHRight, and my job was to be a student liaison and take care of all the visiting artists – pick them up from the airport, take them out to lunch, and take care of them while they were in town. Leslie and I hit it off immediately and had a lot of fun together. He was hired as a painting professor during my last year and had a studio down the hall from my studio, so we got to nerd out over painting regularly. We just clicked on a personal level, but also it’s rare when you get to meet a fellow artist, especially somebody who’s working in the same medium as you, that you connect with on a studio level. It’s just really a treat to just get into the depths of conversations around the things you’re excited about. So that’s something I’ve always really appreciated about our friendship.

LS Thank you. It was pretty obvious to me from the beginning. To come across someone that’s trying to do a very similar thing – responding to their life, their history, and doing it in a medium that comes with a set of expectations that I think a lot of people are very familiar with. Then we try to subvert that somehow and create an alternative outcome or a set of alternative expectations for an audience. And I don’t think back then I would have been able to talk about it in those terms, but I think part of what drew me to your work was just feeling that you’re trying to solve this in your own way and I’m over here trying to solve this in my own way, and somehow or another we ended up at the same place and same time. And what better place to have a conversation about how to achieve it and why to do it in the first place?

RCSo what is the “it”? You’re talking about solving “it”, and you’re talking about as you were coming up there was an awareness of a particular kind of tradition while also being aware of multiple traditions that don’t often get tied together or intersect or get allowed to play together often. So for you, what does that mean?

LSOh boy. I mean, it’s big. There’s the history of everything we draw correlations to, relative to abstraction. The “it” for me, back then, was working through how to navigate past the cultural expectations to paint within the space of social realism. I was asking to pull from it what was inherently entrenched in me as a person but relay it within the forms of abstraction. I thought a lot about how I understood and engaged with abstraction. And then feeling that, somehow or another, my hands were pretty tied to representational painting. That was somehow or another a cultural expectation.

RCDid you start off making representational images?

LS I did. I was, yes.

RCWhat were you doing?

LSA lot of political paintings. A lot of paintings that dealt with themes of war and injustice, things of a social-political nature.

RC[to Dyani] Was he doing that work, or was he past that work, when you met him?

DWH[to Leslie] You were in a transitional phase.

LSYes.

DWHWe were in a transitional phase. We were doing things that were fairly similar, only stylistically different. [Leslie: Yes.] You were working with abstracted figures in an airplane. [Leslie: Yes.] And they were these arched figures that were similar to the moccasin arched figures that I was doing in my studio, although, but we didn’t know each other at that point.  [Lelise: Uh-huh.] So you were already abstracting your figures, and I was abstracting my figures, and we were both trying to get to a point of being able to still speak about the context and the conversations that were embedded in those, but pulling it farther and farther away from the specificity of the human form.

LSYeah, exactly. For me, it was a bit of a shifting in artistic identity and just a kind of self-awareness relative to cultural presence, and questioning how you capture that and share it with someone if you’re not attaching it to an image or an object or a scene or a narrative. Is it possible to make those overtures of narrative through an expression of color, form, and things of this nature?

RCDo you remember the point when either you became frustrated or you felt like you weren’t moving the needle for yourself with representation, or did you feel as though you saw a space that you hadn’t yet explored but everything in you was telling you to go that way?

LS[to Dyani] You want to take this? (Laughter from panel)

RC[to Leslie] Since Dyani and I have talked about this before, we’re just going to ask you. (Audience laughter)

LSFair enough, fair enough. I think there’s only so many images you can create that subvert peoples’ expectations of what it means to paint an image of a person; no matter how much you reduce the figure, no matter how much you strip away things that could be falsely interpreted as signifiers to try to get to some purer sense of what you want. Yet if you do that enough, you can end up with no figure, no form, no space. You’re left with just the process of painting, and the object of the painting. And that’s it. When I got to that space, those paintings were wild, because they were gestural, and they had the essence of figuration without figures. They had a depth of foreground, middleground and background – the tropes of spatial painting – but they didn’t really amount to things that were super identifiable. That’s when I started realizing these are abstractions, you know? I’m painting an empty room with color. How can I form that? How can I bend it? How can I kind of take the painting out of being a window, and explore this in another way by thinking about abstraction?

RC[to Dyani] And I wonder if it begins for you with the Quiet Strength series, or at least it begins with Untitled (Quiet Strength I) in 2016? Or maybe just before that, when you worked to determine how to make abstraction meaningful in your own voice, by expressing your experiences and ancestral heritage. I know that you’re also calling on these multiple threads of artistic practice that really meant something to you, and that you found meaning in, but you hadn’t seen put together before. Would you say that that’s where it began, or would you say that you’d have to back up?

DWHWhere what began? A departure from representation?

DWHI have only done a few representational pieces in my life for very specific reasons. Representation has almost always been in response to requests for specificity of the Lakota creation story or narrative. Then, there’s been a few times that I’ve made representational paintings for myself. One I did in grad school is a whole other story. And I got really serious about figure drawing as a graduate student, which is usually undergraduate work, but I wanted it in my toolbelt. I just knew that I wanted to perfect that form, and there’s a ton that I have learned that I utilize in my abstraction. I think coming from a place of drawing from cultural artistic heritage that is so deeply rooted in abstraction, representation has never been my first approach. It was more interesting to learn how to do this thing, and then call it in for specific reasons. When we met, I was utilizing these moccasin shapes out of a desire to have a stand-in figure or a being or an entity in the painting that held agency, that could be emotive, that could have emotional qualities and allude to a person without being tied down to age, gender, and all of the things that get affixed to a human body. I didn’t want any of that; I wanted it to just be a being, you know? And so, I was searching for how to do that, and that’s when I started using that arched form with the moccasin shape, and later that became the arched forms that pulled even farther away from moccasins. In the first work in the Quiet Strength series that you mentioned, I pulled all the way away from utilizing even those central forms. Even though there is no central figure, they’re really speaking about generations of humans. So there’s a whole lot of people packed into the narratives of those pieces, but without painting all of those people.

RC I sense that you both have figured out how to have that be embedded in what you’re doing now. [To Dyani] One thing I’m curious about, and have never heard you talk about before, is what you learned by doing figure drawing and how it shows up.

DWHLight!

RCLight? Ok!

DWHYeah! There was an amazing figure drawing teacher when I was at UW. He’s not there anymore, and I’ve forgotten his name, but he was really good! When you’re learning how to do figure drawing in a really meticulous manner, you’re learning all about the various planes, and how to render the various planes of a human body, and how the light travels across those so that we understand it as a three-dimensional figure in space. So having in your toolbox how to render or play with space, and light, and shape applies outside of the human form, no matter what you’re doing. Ever since then, I’ve told students that even if they’re never going to draw a figure, learn figure drawing. There’s just so much that you are forced to learn when you have to convince people, especially because we have the human body memorized. You can walk up to a painting or a drawing and you know immediately, even if you’re not an artist, like “oooh that’s off.” (Audience laughter) So you have to convince people that this body is in space the way that a body would be, and all of that applies to or can be applied to other things.

RCI see exactly what you’re talking about with the abstract painting behind you – Walk With Me (2024). (Dyani laughs) For sure.

DWHAre you being silly?

RCNo! I see it!

DWH(Laughing) I hope so.

RCI hope you’ll know when I’m being silly.

[To Leslie]: Does any of that resound for you?

LSAbsolutely. I mean, I was brought to UW to teach life drawing.

DWHI didn’t know that. That’s wild!

LSYeah, shortly after teaching that class, for me, the shaping of the canvas became the figure. And so, the transition for me is knowing the form, knowing the figure, knowing how to render something in space, knowing how light reflects off of objects. Those are all principles that allow readability to happen, to allow naturalism to happen, right? I mean, so much of figurative painting, from my vantage, is more naturalistic than it is realistic, and the difference in there is believability. Was the artist able to convince you of your relationship to that image? Your relationship to those antagonists and protagonists in that composition? And it’s those principles of space and dimension that I like to play with relative to how these shapes interact with each other – the noise that they make, the tensions that happen between them. They’re visual narratives of how we exist right here in different capacities, you know, if we were really in it.

DWHExactly!

RCIf we made a human pyramid it would be different. Not suggesting we do that…I’m just saying…

DWHI mean, we could! (Laughter from all)

But what you said, Leslie, is exactly spot on. I love that about believability, even when you’re working with abstraction. I mean, one of my favorite things to do is to play with the shallow planes. I’m never usually trying to do infinite space, three-point perspective, the illusion of outdoors. But I am always thinking about playing with the relationship between these spaces. If you don’t know how to paint in a way that gets across those relationships, well, you can’t convey what you’re trying to, and yeah, it’s not believable. You could paint a shadow, but people could still decode it as, “Oh, that failed. I see what they were trying to do.” (Audience laughter).

LSAnd you deny folks that vantage of access. I’m still a formalist when it comes to composition in many ways. I still want to afford folks a way into the painting, and a way out of the painting, even if they’re super flat, even if they’re much more schematic, or move pictorially very top to bottom. There’s still a rhythm or a theme and variation that allows for a way into the painting, a way out of the painting, in hopes that viewers will find themselves a participant within the painting.

DWHYes! See — this is why he’s my friend. All those things are things I’m thinking about in the studio. That’s why I think we hit it off so easily in the beginning – these shared conversations. They may come up totally differently, but there’s just, you know, desires around  the medium behaving in particular ways.

LSI want paint to do something that paint doesn’t want to do. And I want people to believe in it. I want to have it try to emote something and then folks almost forget that it’s painting and just want to dwell on what it’s doing for them, you know. I can’t account for that, but I can account for what it does for me, and for me it’s just liberating. It’s liberating to dwell in the world of green, you know, for four or five paintings, and unpack that in a time and place where folks are like, “Why are you making green paintings?” and I’m like, cuz it feels good. It feels right, you know? So yeah, paint as a material, I mean, just by its essence – it’s an object. It’s malleable. I enjoy engaging with the structural tensions between textures, and what makes painting painting.

RCOne of the things we talked about when we met up earlier this week is, “Who do you have in the studio with you?” One of the things I think about a lot that never ceases to amaze me is  that while we’re here together right now, it took all of the people behind us to get us to this moment. I know you both think about that a lot, whether it’s our ancestors or people who have helped us along the way – how they continue to be with us. So, when you’re in the studio, are there certain people that you feel are with you? I bring this up in particular because of Dyani’s work, Visiting (2024), which is in this show. When it was first shown weeks ago at Armory in New York, it was shown in relation to a George Morrison totem and a piece by Jim Denomie. You knew of this meaningful juxtaposition as you were making it – who its companions would be, how and where it was going to be first shown, and the interaction it was going to have. That’s just really powerful to me, especially having known Jim and being completely enamored with George’s work, his career trajectory, and getting to know members of his family. I wondered if you would share a little bit about what it meant to be in that juxtaposition? And for both of you, in your studio, are there certain people that you feel like are with you?

DWHI’ll try and tell this story quickly but it will get long anyway. George Morrison was an Ojibwe artist from Grand Portage in Minnesota who was born in 1919 and passed in 2000. Hopefully you all are well-versed and if you’re not, do your homework – you’ll be grateful for it. He is a canonical artist in the Native art field, and somebody I studied and deeply admire and look to. I’m so grateful for his legacy. And our dear friend, Jim Denomie, is an Ojibwe artist who most of you must already know. Jim made a totem piece in 2016 in response to George’s totem sculptures. Jim is predominantly a painter but does sculptural work too. This was his first big sculpture, and he did it in honor of George. I saw it when it was exhibited at Minneapolis Institute of Arts (Mia). When Jim and I were at Mia together I told him, “Oh man, Jim, that is so awesome. I love it so much. It’s so beautiful!” And I was also like, “I wanna do one!” And so we laughed about it, then conversed more seriously about it. Jump eight years later to now, when Todd asked me what I might want to take to The Armory Show in New York this year, I thought that it might be the right time. I would make it in honor of Jim, and in honor of George. Todd supported that idea. (Pause) It’s emotional for me to talk about especially being here, in this space – a lot of memories. For those of you who didn’t know Jim, he was a…is a beautiful human being. He passed two years ago. He was so much to me, including a painter friend, similar to Leslie. I only have a few of those that you can like, get into the studio with and just sit and nerd out about painting, and art, and life. Jim would pop by the studio and visit with me, and we would just talk about painting, and commiserate about how awkward it is to be a working artist, and how hard this stupid application was, and how desperately we needed help for this administrative work. He was just my buddy in that way, and so when I said that I wanted to make this piece, I told Todd, “I wish we could bring Jim’s piece.” And Todd was like, “Well, we can.” And I was like, “What?!” Because it had been in the McKnight Foundation for years; I thought it was theirs. Todd explained they were caretaking and the piece wasn’t placed yet. And I was like, “Ok, that’s amazing! I wish we could bring a George.” And he was like, “Well…” 

I don’t know if Briand is coming tonight, but George’s son Briand Morrison and his ex-wife Hazel Belvo, who help manage George Morrison’s estate with Todd, hold George’s plans for editions for select work. Todd wondered if it was time to refer to these plans, and said he’d speak with the family. They were excited and agreed. What followed was so beautiful. Heaps of folks came together to make that happen in a really good way. 

I made it through the Armory weekend without crying but now it’s coming out. It was so meaningful to me to be able to make a piece that not only drew from the lineage of Lakota artists and the lineage of contemporary Native artists within our field, but also those from Minnesota including our dear friend, Jim, and an ancestral art mentor like George, whom I never got to meet. To be able to bring their works to a place like New York and the Armory and put them in the space of the mainstream art world they so deserved to be was so special. And then curate with the Bockley Gallery team a booth of all three of our works, and to be able to share all of that with all who supported our being there. We’re talking about people in the studio, the people that George is drawing from, the people that Jim is drawing from, the people that got them there and supported them. There are such intergenerational conversations in everybody’s work.

DWHAnd then to quickly speak to the making of Visiting. There’s eleven people that work in my studio regularly. Can everybody here who works at the studio and/or came in to help with this piece raise your hands? (Audience applause, Dyani counts hands out loud). Sara Tonko, my Studio Manager is here as well. Over twenty people made this piece together and they will all be wearing corsages tonight so you can identify them and ask them what strips they designed and beaded. I’m always blown away thinking about the many people in my life that got me to a place where I’m able to make works like this. And all of the people that have supported every single person that showed up into my studio that was able to help make works like that. And then I’m thinking about the people in Japan that are making beads, the people in the Czech Republic that are making beads. The people that are in foundations that give us the financial support to be able to do what we do. It goes out and out. The people who make the sinew. The people who make the thread, crafted my panels, the person who came along last minute to craft the base for us, and the structure. The network of people– we can’t even wrap our heads around it. It cannot come together in its wholeness without that huge network of people.

RCThank you, Dyani. That was beautiful. Leslie — who is in the studio with you?

LSThat question has haunted me. There are the internalized historical figures, there’s some family, there are the beings that make us feel whole, that you know when you’re amongst their presence. When we think about them they give us that extra motivation and that sense of place of being in the studio. In addition to that, there are the mechanics of all the people that have directly impacted my access that wasn’t necessarily afforded to, say, my parents, or their parents, or their parents, and the intersectionality of that. And I would have to agree that it is quite a vast network of folks that I work amongst in the studio, some of which I don’t even know. I spend a lot of time thinking about artists who chose abstraction over social realism, you know, like Alma Thomas, Howardena Pindell, Jack Whitten, the folks that made the conscious effort to pave a road that was just less traveled, while trying to understand where I might fit-in in terms of building with that. The fruits of their labor are still being discovered and reintroduced into communities. In my most recent works I think about the amount of sewing that’s happening that goes a bit beyond the sewing that’s present in these exhibited works. And just the lineage of quilting, specifically West African strip quilting, that’s been a pillar of my mother’s side of my family, and how that comes together in the work. And then I’m being inspired by the process and aesthetic of North African, especially Moroccan, mosaic and tile setting .I’m coming to these realizations while learning more of my personal history but not really putting it together at the same time as figuring out how to bridge these two palpable gaps in my studio: How to make color physical? How to make the physical essence of color just as dense as it is perceptually deep? A better way to say it is how to transition and translate the saturation and depth of color into something dimensional, you know, and then discover. I think my ancestry is super enmeshed in how I create. It’s just one of those things – an amalgamation.

RCIs there anything you two want to ask one another before we turn it over to questions from the audience? Are there things that you’ve seen in one another’s work that you’ve always wondered about? Are there things about accounting that you want to ask one another? (Audience and panel laughter)

LSYeah, there’s something. The first thing that I recognized when I came in and saw these two sculptures was the space in-between the beaded strips on the panels. I’ve been getting really into how to make sense of where one thing stops and one thing begins. And I’ve been thinking about how in-between spaces are like rolling edges – they kind of roll into each other. They take on architectural sensibilities. But in these works, you almost adorned that space in between, in what looks like a gilding of grout, or a gilding of…what is that called, solder? I’m curious how your treatment of the in-between came about as a solution.

DWHI love your idea of thinking about the in-between. I’m thinking about the in-between all the time. For me, it comes from when I was in graduate school trying to figure out my own voice and how to bring paint and painting into the conversations I was having within my work and myself around the practices of porcupine quillwork, beadwork, and Lakota artforms. One of the first paintings that I did that really merged those practices was this huge triptych measuring 60 inches high by 90 inches wide. I stitched porcupine quills into the painting, and it took a very, very long time. I had to figure out how to bring all of that forward but do it faster according to the timelines of graduate school. That’s when I started translating quillwork and beadwork into paint. I began thinking about the space in between the quillwork or beadwork rows – in between those lanes is a really important part. I did a high realism painting of porcupine quillwork, and I was thinking about the space that would usually be the hide that reveals itself between the rows. Or in the case of a fully beaded vest or dress or leggings or something else, I was looking at the way Lakota people bead in the lane stitch manner in which rows are stacked on top of each other, so even if you don’t see the hide, there’s a shadow in between all of the rows. Then as I continued to paint, my linework felt like it was honoring both the practices of quillwork and beadwork. I brought that space in-between with me. When I started making the Quiet Strength series that you referenced, Bob, I did the underpainting in gold. I wanted to play with the hierarchies of the artworld that have taught us about Western monetary value systems. So gold, marble, bronze and oil paint are more valuable, supposedly, than natural fibers or beads or quills or anything that people of color and/or women make art with. Of course this is false. But we’re taught a particular hierarchy and, surprise! – this certain material is associated with certain-bodied people. It’s all a load of garbage. So, after I painted the underpainting in gold, I buried it in porcupine quillwork and beadwork, which is an Indigenous women’s art form. The underpainting and use of gold as the in-between is something I’ve since done in a lot of different paintings including the 8×14 foot Wopila for the 2022 Whitney Biennial. The in-between is a way to ground and bring forward the language of the motifs established in the paintings.

LSSometimes as an artist, you can’t see outside of the problems that you’re trying to solve, and so you seek the answers in the other work that you find. It’s like, what an interesting way to deal with how things meet that reflects the reason they’re there to begin with.

DWHI figured that out through looking at work I admired. I was looking at the work of Lakota beadworkers and quill workers. Their “underpainting” – the material or substrate it’s done on – is part of the composition. Where those materials repeatedly meet becomes part of the geometry of the composition. So that was the exact same thing – looking to their work to think about how I wanted to create the geometry and play in my own work.

Ok, my turn for a question to you, Leslie. I was really excited when the Bockley Gallery team sent me images of the works that you had available for this show because you were in the middle of this body of work when I was visiting with you in Madison. I just happened to be in the studio when you were making the painting Together and I think you might have been working on Still Blue too. I was really excited about that green in Together, and because you were sewing with an industrial sewing machine. I have been wanting to buy an industrial sewing machine for a long time, but also just loved the connection since I have been stitching beadwork to my canvases for years. You had already been working with shaped canvases, but at what point did you decide you needed to start sewing, stitching, and piecing together in that way?

LSYeah! It’s a similar conversation, in a way. Because my first shaped canvases were singular, and they had, you know, simple edges. There’s this one painting assignment I would give to undergraduate students called “Make a Painting that has Six Different Edges.” Edges meaning where two colors come together, and meet. I needed to see at least six different approaches to how you solve that problem within your painting. Oftentimes, after the third solution, things get really challenging. I can make an edge by wiping something away. I can bring in tape, and so on and so forth. Edges four, five, and six get really experimental. I weirdly backed myself into the same corner as my students because I had taken the singular shape and broke it into two, bringing them both together. Not a new thing, but it was very new to what I was trying to achieve at the time, which was a sense of movement. I wanted to communicate that the piece itself had potential energy. It could move. If these two pieces were once arranged this way, and they shifted up or down, you could maybe imagine them put them back together, and you could also see it as not put back together at the same time. Your consciousness of that would expand the experience of that painting. And thinking in this way created more and more modular shapes, resulting in a lot more edges. I also realized that depending on the scale of the painting and how many of those breaks happened, I needed different levels of, hmmm, what’s the word? I needed to distinguish between them all. Like, not every edge could be a canvas bolted next to another canvas. I needed something that reflected the other motifs of a painting. Sewing became this solution. If you think about scaling down some of the larger junctures such as in the smaller works –- what becomes a line and an edge is more subtle than the hardness of that bolted-together edge. So it speaks to a more subtle line or demarcation. It became more nuanced. The sewn edge also references the fragility of graphite and drawing in a way I like. There might be graphite or colored pigment on raw canvas, which to me speaks to a certain level of grace, a grace that is also mirrored in the relationship of how these colorfields interact. But that only came afterward. The sewing, in the beginning, was really a solution to try to mystify how these were made, because as shapes needing to be stretched with canvas, it was a totally different concept that I’m still very much, you know, in love with. Stretching these in a very traditional way, in that I want to hold on to the expectation of what I think a painting could be or should be, and then make them move beyond that in kind of impossible ways. And the way to do that is to think about making these more upholstered objects, which means contouring canvas to a shape. So I started sewing in extra material to ensure the canvas would wrap completely around all the curvilinear edges. And in order to do that, you just gotta start somewhere and when it doesn’t work, you have weird seams that happen inside the space of the painting, and you’re like, “Well, am I gonna work with that? No, but I wanna maybe challenge that with some drawn image.” So yeah, so that’s what brought me to that.

DWHRight on.

LSJust a process of elimination.

DWHI love it. I love that you need to break down our conceptions about what this is or should be, and still need it stretched perfectly.

LSThey still need to be stretched!

DWHI’m still a painter!

LSDon’t forget it’s a painting! (Audience laughter)

The public program Together took place at Bockley Gallery in Minneapolis on September 20, 2024, on the occasion of the gallery’s 40th anniversary exhibition opening. The conversation was recorded and edited for clarity by its participants and Erin Robideaux Gleeson.

Leslie Smith III was born in 1985 in Silver Spring, Maryland, and is based in Madison, Wisconsin. He holds an MFA from the Yale University School of Art (2009) and BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (2007). Recent solo exhibitions include Reaching for Something High, CHART Gallery, New York, NY (2023); The Depth of Thoughts, Galerie Isabelle Gounod, Paris, France (2022); Stranger Days, Maus Contemporary Gallery, Birmingham, AL (2022); and The Passage, Saint-Tugdual Chapel, as part of L’Art dans les Chapelles, Bretagne, France. Recent group exhibitions include Moreover: 50 Paintings, curated by Michelle Grabner, Green Gallery, Milwaukee, WI (2024), and OFFSITE, James Fuentes Gallery, New York, NY (2022). Smith’s work is collected by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, VA; Birmingham Museum of Art and Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts, Birmingham, AL; and FRAC, Auvergne, France, among others. Among numerous awards, he has received Fellowships from the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2022) and the American Academy in Rome (2009). Smith is a Professor of Art and Art Department Chair at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Dyani White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota) was born in 1976 in Madison, Wisconsin, and is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2011) and BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico (2008). Featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, followed by a permanent commission at the Whitney Museum of American Art, White Hawk’s art has been the subject of numerous institutional solo shows, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2022), the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art (2022), and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (2021). In 2025, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and Remai Modern, Saskatoon, will present the survey exhibition Dyani White Hawk: Love Language. Collections include the Aktá Lakota Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Denver Art Museum, Gochman Family Collection, Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. White Hawk is the recipient of generous recognitions and awards, most recently, the Guggenheim Fellowship and Creative Capital Grant (both 2024), and MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2023). 

Robert Cozzolino is an independent curator, art historian, and critic based in Minneapolis. He curates collaboratively, in partnership with artists, colleagues, and broad communities. “Starting where you are” is critical to his practice—knowing the immediate context and deeper history of the place in which he works. Although he has worked on topics from the 19th and 20th centuries, he regularly works with contemporary artists in examining history. He considers himself a curator of fluid time, not bound to the labels and bins imposed on the field. He has curated over 40 exhibitions, including Reimagining Native/American Art (2023-24), Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art (2021-22), World War I and American Art (2016-17), Peter Blume: Nature and Metamorphosis (2014-15), David Lynch: The Unified Field (2014),The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making Their World (2012), George Tooker: A Retrospective (2008), Art in Chicago: Resisting Regionalism, Transforming Modernism (2006), Vik Muniz: Remastered (2005) and many others.