Dyani White Hawk: Love Language

A landmark mid-career survey for the famed Lakota artist known for her monumental geometric paintings and installations incorporating traditional quillwork and beadwork

Rooted in intergenerational knowledge, the art of Dyani White Hawk centers on connection--between one another, past and present, earth and sky. By foregrounding Lakota forms and motifs, she challenges prevailing narratives surrounding abstract art. Accompanying White Hawk's major mid-career survey exhibition, this publication gathers new scholarship examining 15 years of the artist's work across multimedia paintings, sculpture, video, works on paper and more.
Opening with early pieces that combine quillwork, lane stitch beadwork and painting, the artist examines, dissects and reassembles elements of her own Sicángu Lakota and European American ancestries, putting these in active conversation with histories of abstract painting. In other works, she marries traditional techniques with outsize scale, highlighting her ongoing commitment to formal and material experimentation. The book features a new group of these works, from her monumental Wopila Lineage paintings to a new series of towering columnar sculptures made from loomed beads, assembled in dizzying arrays of pattern and color. Made in collaboration with a skilled team of studio beadworkers, these shimmering surfaces invite close inspection of both their material construction and their cultural and historical underpinnings.
Dyani White Hawk (born 1976) was raised in Madison, Wisconsin, and received her BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has been the recipient of prestigious awards, most recently including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2024), Creative Capital grant (2024) and MacArthur Foundation Fellowship "Genius Grant" (2023). Her work has been exhibited at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Denver Art Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others. She lives and works in Minneapolis, Minnesota.