Acclaimed Sičáŋǧu Lakota artist Dyani White Hawk is transforming the traditional museum experience with her groundbreaking exhibition "Love Language" at the Walker Art Center. The MacArthur Fellowship recipient's comprehensive show spans 15 years of artistic work and represents a homecoming celebration for both the artist and her community in Minnesota.
White Hawk has reimagined even the smallest details of the museum experience to create a more welcoming environment. Museum guards, typically known for their stoic presence, now wear friendly "Hello" shirts and special enamel pins featuring "háu/háŋ mitákuyepi" - meaning "hello my relatives" in Lakota. "I want every person that walks into this space to feel like we're happy to see you, even if it's just a smile and a nod," White Hawk explained. Her goal is to make the space beautiful for the Native community, believing that this beauty will be felt by all visitors.
The exhibition showcases nearly 100 artworks spanning White Hawk's diverse artistic practice. The collection includes her smaller solo pieces, monumental beadworks created collaboratively with community members, recent glass mosaic works fabricated in Germany, and collaborative video installations. This comprehensive display was co-curated with the Remai Modern in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where it will travel in April, reflecting White Hawk's desire to locate her practice within the Oceti Sakowin homelands that cross the imposed Canada-U.S. border.
White Hawk's abstract geometric works draw primarily from Lakota women's art forms and frequently incorporate the Lakota kapemni, an hourglass-like symbol made of two triangles. Her artistic inquiry explores the intersection between European easel painting history and Indigenous art traditions, examining how these histories influence each other. Walker Senior Curator Siri Engberg recognized the need for a larger exhibition after acquiring White Hawk's 2020 video installation "Listen," a collaboration with filmmaker Razelle Benally that features Native women speaking their languages on their homelands without English subtitles.
The timing proved perfect for a major retrospective as White Hawk's career reached new heights. She began working with a glass studio in Germany, her work was featured in the prestigious 2022 Whitney Biennial, and she had several public artworks in development. "We want people to be able to see our creative communities, to understand our histories, to understand our contemporary existence, to acknowledge that we're here, and the ways that we've been affected by colonization - and the ways we've continued to thrive," White Hawk said.
The exhibition is thoughtfully organized into four overlapping sections: See, Honor, Nurture, and Celebrate. Each section features a video with a Native community member discussing that particular concept, bringing their personal knowledge and experience to the interpretation. Every artwork tells its own story, like "Untitled, Blue and White Stripes (The History of Abstraction)" from 2013, a 12-by-12-inch square featuring white stripes, blue stripes, and beaded black-and-white stripes that challenges traditional art historical narratives.
White Hawk's educational journey shaped her artistic mission significantly. After studying at Haskell Indian Nations University and the Institute of American Indian Arts, she pursued a Master of Fine Arts in painting at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was suddenly immersed in Eurocentric art history. Missing her beadwork practice but reluctant to create traditional pieces that would require constant defense, she began incorporating quillwork forms into her paintings. She observed how white male Abstract painters like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman drew inspiration from Native artists without proper credit or acknowledgment.
Collaboration has become central to White Hawk's practice over time. Her 2022 Whitney Biennial work "Wopila" involved eighteen people sewing half a million tiny glass bugle beads into geometric patterns on 14-foot-wide panels. Writer Heid Erdrich, who owns White Hawk earrings from her Četáŋ Ška jewelry line, noted this evolution: "It's a natural progression for an artist who was never really interested in individual expression, or didn't continue in that vein. To expand, understand community through working with community - these are beautiful things."
Accessibility remains a priority for White Hawk, whose work appears in collections at the Guggenheim, MoMA, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Visitors can purchase her jewelry and quilts in the Walker gift shop, and her quilts produced with Faribault Mill offer comfort and welcoming touches throughout the gallery space. The exhibition runs through February 15, with tickets ranging from $9-18, though admission is free for Tribal Nations citizens and members.
White Hawk envisions long-term healing between Indigenous people and art institutions, along with fundamental changes in how American history is told. While acknowledging these are ambitious goals requiring time, she maintains an optimistic perspective: "But if you come here and you're just super happy about color, that's amazing as well. Joy. I hope for joy." The Walker Art Center is open Wednesday, Friday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Thursday from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., with free admission on Thursday evenings from 5-9 p.m.
