Dyani White Hawk facts for kids

Dyani White Hawk Polk (born in 1976) is an amazing American artist and curator. She has roots from the Sicangu Lakota people, as well as German and Welsh ancestors. Dyani White Hawk lives and works in Minnesota.

From 2010 to 2015, White Hawk worked as a curator at the All My Relations gallery in Minneapolis. As an artist, her work is special because it mixes modern abstract painting with traditional Lakota art. Her art shows both her American upbringing and the ancient art styles of her Indigenous ancestors.

Dyani White Hawk's art has been shown in many important places. These include the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, the Ca' Foscari University in Venice, Italy, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Her artworks are also part of big collections at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian and the Tweed Museum of Art. In October 2023, she was given a special award called the MacArthur Fellowship. This award recognized her art for showing how much Indigenous art has influenced modern art. In April 2024, she also received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts.

Early Life and Learning

Dyani White Hawk was born and grew up in Madison, Wisconsin. Her mother, Sandy White Hawk, is an author and activist for Indigenous rights. Sandy was adopted from the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota by non-Native parents in Wisconsin. Because of this, Dyani didn't have much connection to her Lakota family when she was very young.

It wasn't until Dyani was a teenager that she started learning about her Lakota heritage. This helped her understand more about her identity. Dyani says that her life has been about balancing both Western and Indigenous ways of learning and seeing the world.

Her College Journey

White Hawk earned her first college degree in 2003 from Haskell Indian Nations University. In 2008, she got a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in 2-D Studio Arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). She then went on to get her Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Studio Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2011.

Dyani gives credit to her mother for encouraging her art skills from a young age. Her very first painting was made for her application to IAIA. Her early art was inspired by popular culture and street art. Later, she was influenced by abstract artists like Mark Rothko and Marsden Hartley. She also found inspiration in traditional Native art forms, especially from her Lakota tribe. She even learned from other Native art traditions, like Navajo weaving.

Her Amazing Artwork

Dyani White Hawk is well-known for her paintings that are usually the size of an easel. These paintings show abstract designs with bright colors arranged in balanced or unbalanced patterns. She often uses patterns and lines that look like traditional quillwork, beadwork, and textiles.

For example, in her painting Seeing (2010), the square canvas is divided into nine smaller squares. But in the middle, there's a deep blue sky with clouds that seem to go far away. This sky part is still held within the grid, making a cross shape in the center. Overlapping the sky are four striped squares in beige and blue, placed in each corner of the painting.

Connecting Past and Present

Through her abstract art, White Hawk explores how traditional Native American art connects with modern art. Her work often points out that Native artists sometimes get less recognition than Western artists who are inspired by Native art.

She often paints things like moccasin toes, ledger drawings, blanket designs, porcupine quills, and teepee forms. These are all important Native American symbols that she uses in her detailed oil paintings.

Even though her art feels very modern, White Hawk always explores her cultural heritage. She has said that her work is a way to understand the history of this land and our relationships with it. Her art has been collected by places like the Akta Lakota Museum and the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Awards and Recognition

Dyani White Hawk's painting won the "Best of Classification" award at the 2011 Santa Fe Indian Art Market. She also won First Place in painting at the 2011 Northern Plains Indian Art Market. She received a SWAIA discovery fellowship in 2012 and the McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship in 2013.

Dyani White Hawk is known for her art that celebrates Native American culture. She puts many messages into her artwork. For example, her piece "I am your Relative" (2015) shows eight Native women sharing their prayers and stories about their Native land. White Hawk has also participated in art programs in at least four different countries. She uses abstraction to bring American Indian traditions into a new, modern way.

She received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant in 2014. In 2015 and 2017, she was awarded a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Regional Artist Fellowship. She also received the 2018 Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists and the 2019 U.S. Fellowship for Visual Art.

In 2022, White Hawk was asked to create a large artwork called Wopila | Lineage for the Whitney Biennial. This piece is 14 by 8 feet and is made of half a million glass beads. "Wopila" is a Lakota word for deep gratitude. Dyani says the piece honors Lakota women and their contributions to abstract art. It also celebrates Indigenous women's art on this continent. She hopes her art helps people see how connected these art histories are.

Art Shows

Dyani White Hawk's art has been shown in many solo and group exhibitions.

Solo Exhibitions

• 2016 - Storied Abstraction, Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis, MN.
• 2015 - Dyani White Hawk, Shiprock Santa Fe Gallery, Santa Fe, NM.
• 2014 - Into the Light: Paintings and Prints by Dyani White Hawk, Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis, MN.
• 2013 - An Exhibition of Works by Dyani White Hawk, Gallery 110, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, SD.
• 2012 - Dyani White Hawk, Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis, MN.
• 2011 - Inseparable, Art Lofts Gallery, Madison, WI.

Group Exhibitions

• 2019-2020 - Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, a traveling show that visited the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Frist Art Museum, Renwick Gallery (part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum), and Philbrook Museum of Art.
• 2020 - Indelible Ink: Native Women, Printmaking, Collaboration. University of New Mexico Art Museum.