Dyani, you’re an artist, and one of these years you’re going to believe me,” Dyani White Hawk’s mother would say as she saw her daughter constantly drawing and crafting in her youth. “Creating has just always been my favorite thing to do,” says the multidisciplinary visual artist. “I remember being young and going to a museum and seeing an abstract painting. I had no idea what it was; I just remember seeing it and craving it, and being like, ‘Whatever that is, I want to do that.’”
Decades later, with works in the Museum of Modern Art and the National Museum of the American Indian, White Hawk has very much become the artist her mother foresaw. Her artwork, which includes painting, sculpture, installation, performance, video, and photography, is shaped by a reverence for her Lakota heritage. Her 2021 solo exhibition at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri, presented 10 years of work exploring the way the Lakota tribe embraced abstract art, including I Am Your Relative, a 2020 series of six life-size photos of Native women wearing shirts that together spell out the sentence “I am / more than your desire / more than your fantasy / more than a mascot / ancestral love prayer sacrifice / your relative.”
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The 2022 Whitney Biennial included White Hawk’s work titled Wopila | Lineage, an 8” x 14” installation for which she and her team of mostly Native artists affixed more than half a million glass bugle beads to aluminum panels to create a vibrant, geometric image that draws from Lakota beadwork traditions. It was the highest-profile moment in her career to date, but White Hawk, 46, says she was initially fearful about presenting the work in the esteemed show, as she hadn’t seen mainstream art institutions embrace overtly Native works like hers. “Basically all the things art history has told me is that what I wanted to make wouldn’t necessarily be celebrated or supported or uplifted and honored in the way that other work might be,” she says. “I decided that it was not in my best interest to buy into that fear or to make what I thought might be well received, but to really make what was important to me.”
Building her career in Minneapolis, close to where she was raised in Wisconsin, was intentional. The city has one of the largest urban Native populations and a thriving arts community. She sees her presence there as a way of pushing back on the notion that to be taken seriously as an artist, one must live in New York or L.A. “It’s ridiculous that there’s an expectation that to be a thriving artist, you have to follow a script,” she says. “I want to be grounded in a place that makes sense for me and to be a participant in a greater arts community. I don’t feel like I should have to choose.”
ELLE is proud to be one of 12 Hearst magazines partnering with the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York to amplify the voices of female artists in honor of International Women’s Day 2023. For this historic collaboration, each artist contributed a piece she feels speaks to the name of the initiative: “The Art of Moving Forward.” Women are not just surviving but thriving, moving ever forward to lead, define, and shape a challenging world, and these artists exemplify that.
This program is being presented in partnership with Johnnie Walker, which has awarded more than $1 million in grants to women-owned businesses and is helping women overcome historical barriers by showcasing stories of their progress.
This article appears in the March 2023 issue of ELLE.
Adrienne Gaffney is the features editor at ELLE and previously worked at WSJ Magazine and Vanity Fair.
