2021 McKnight Visual Artist Fellow: Dyani White Hawk

This is the fifth in a series of articles profiling the seven distinguished artists chosen as 2021 McKnight Fellows in Visual Arts, a grant program for mid-career artists in Minnesota that is administered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. The 2021 cohort includes David Bowen, Mara Duvra, Ben Moren, Rotem Tamir, Dyani White Hawk, and Dream The Combine (Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers).

As their two-year fellowship comes to a close, five of the artists will be participating in an upcoming Discussion Series as well:

• Jasmine Wahi in conversation with Rotem Tamir, David Bowen, and Mara Duvra on Thursday, April 6, 6:30 pm at Mia. 
• Gregory Volk in conversation with Ben Moren and Dyani White Hawk on Thursday, April 20, 6:30 pm at Mia. 

 

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Photo by Rik Sferra

 

Standing at the very center of Modern Art lore are five nude women from 1907, rendered oversized and angular in swirling pink triangles: Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon. And quite often in art history textbooks, staring back at them from the facing page is a black-and-white photo of an African ceremonial mask — the direct inspiration from which Picasso drew some of the faces of this abstraction and many more that followed. In the textbook I used in my college Western Survey class, the mask in question is from the Etoumbi region of the Congo, part of a Swiss museum collection. Other scholars present other examples, almost interchangeably. What generally stays constant is their effect on the painter, and his effect on art history. “Because of its revolutionary approach to space and its psychological power,” my textbook's author, Laurie Schneider Adams, writes, “the Desmoiselles represented the greatest expressive challenge to the traditional, Classical ideal of beauty and harmony since the Middle Ages.” Unless, of course, you count the African masks and the artists who made them…

Perhaps I shouldn’t pick on the survey book too hard; any text trying to span Western art history from the Venus of Willendorf to Cindy Sherman in a cool 500 pages is going to necessitate some skimming. But from that sort of shorthand — especially in the story of modern painting — a hierarchy emerges, and the heroic (typically white, typically male) artist stands at the top, turning the meager sparks of their cultural antecedents into thunderbolts by the genius of their very hand. As Kenyan scholar Simon Gikandi puts it, African art is at once acknowledged by art historians and then “dispatched to the space of primitivism, a place where it poses no danger to the purity of modern art.”

Another critical cultural elision happens again, thirty-six pages and forty years later, as the titan of Abstract Expressionism Jackson Pollock describes his affinity for working his canvases on the floor. “This way I can walk around it, work from the four sides, and literally be in the painting,” he writes. “This is akin to Indian sand painters in the West.” With no accompanying reference photo and no critical explication, this quotation likely registers as barely a blip on many art history students’ radars — certainly on mine at the time — but it hints at a cultural relationship that was in fact much larger and much deeper than many pupils of American art probably realize. Dyani White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota) would like to change that.

“The reality is, abstraction has been being practiced on this continent well before European folks showed up, and simultaneously to the time that those painters were developing their practice,” she says. “So it's impossible to pull those histories apart.”

An artist and curator, White Hawk’s own practice is rooted in painting as well, drawing on both her interest in Lakota artistic history as well as European and European-American modern and contemporary art. “I come from a long line of abstractionists,” she says. “Lakota art forms are abstract art forms, and I'm drawing directly from the history of Lakota beadwork, quill work, and parfleche painting — all of which are abstract art forms. And I'm also drawing from the history of easel painting abstraction.”

 

Top: Wopila | Lineage (installation view at Whitney Biennial), 2022. Acrylic, glass bugle beads, synthetic sinew on aluminum panel, 96 x 168". Bottom: Detail.

 

How she ties those two abstractionist threads together was on grand display at last year’s Whitney Biennial, in the form of a gorgeous, eight by fourteen foot, hand-beaded artwork titled Wopila | Lineage. The piece is serious, even borderline severe in its scale, precision, and composition, but it is not at all cold. Quite the opposite, actually. Over half a million vertical glass beads make up the monumental work, shimmering in the light as you move past the piece, creating an image that feels both uncomplicated in its structure and maximalist in its detail. Fourteen tall isosceles triangles line the picture plane, almost touching point to point in the center where they meet like spear-tips at a thin crimson boundary, their two-tone colors inflecting there like light rays through a lens. Cutting horizontally between the two-inch-tall strips of beadwork are thin stripes of gold paint on an aluminum panel underneath, like streaks left by a printer low on ink. These golden zips break up the composition and make the vivid, jewel-toned colors of the beads dance with each other instead of simply standing shoulder to shoulder. The thin stripes also give White Hawk the sly excuse to call the piece a painting.

“I kind of don't know what else to call it yet,” she laughs. “Is it beaded sculpture? I don’t know.”

Despite working across a variety of media — sculpture, mixed media assemblage, printmaking, and video — she remains a painter at heart. Though, she says, the beads actually came first. “I learned how to do beadwork as a teenager before I learned how to paint. And really, the combination of those things [in my work] comes from the combination of my experiences and my affinity for both. I love to paint and I love to bead.”

In Lakota, “wopila” translates as deep gratitude, and the "lineage" in question is multi-faceted, including both Lakota artistic practices and 20th century abstract easel paintings. When I visit her studio on the top floor of the Casket Arts Building in Northeast Minneapolis, her team is already well into the next big piece. At this point, she tells me, she has a crew of nine, four of whom are hard at work on small beading looms as we speak, including her brother-in-law Noah and her mother-in-law Helena. Noah, White Hawk's sister-in-law Hooni, and her daughter Nina were also among the eighteen family members and friends White Hawk enlisted over the eleven months it took to bead the Whitney piece. The lineage, clearly, is literal as well.

Hanging on the studio wall is the work in progress, though when I visit large chunks of the composition are empty. Each team member’s name is written on a post-it note stuck to the blank sections of the wall they are working to fill — Noah, Helena, Jennifer, Eloise, et cetera — underscoring the importance of each person to this process and to the meaning of the final piece itself. Up close, the beadwork is exquisite, combining a variety of colors and sheens of 11mm bugle beads from the Czech Republic that have been carefully stitched together into long, two-inch-tall strips. As more strips are finished, the team can stand back and assess any “surgeries” that need to be made, replacing broken beads or altering the spacing to fit the composition. All of these ornate details add up, at a distance, to a shimmering spectacle of hard-edge abstraction.

 

A section of beaded strips in production on a new piece at White Hawk's Casket Arts studio. Photo by the author.

 

In a profile piece for First American Art Magazine, heather ahtone, PhD (Choctaw/Chickasaw Nation) writes, "Drawing upon Lakota aesthetics, Dyani has formulated an interpretation of the customary Lakota designs that is familiar yet uniquely her own. In reference to the geometric system that codes Lakota knowledge, her compositions avoid mimicry of specific cultural presentations, thus protecting the sanctity of the cultural knowledge, which allows her to experiment and cultivate her artistic voice.” This is no exercise in dogma or pastiche; White Hawk is not just perpetuating those Lakota traditions but building on them, a key aspect of maintaining any lineage.

Of course, those traditions were never static to begin with; the introduction of European glass and ceramic beads, for instance, influenced Indigenous artistic traditions immensely, allowing artists to evolve their practices because of newly available materials. It should be no surprise then that Native artists had an equal influence on the European-American artists as well. In a 1988 article for Art Journal, W. Jackson Rushing writes, “In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the ‘myth-makers’ of the New York avant-garde, including Adolph Gottlieb, Jackson Pollock, Richard Pousette-Dart, and Mark Rothko, made paintings that referred to atavistic myth, primordial origins, and primitive rituals and symbols, especially those of Native American cultures.” (There’s that word “primitive” again.) Rushing goes on to describe the color field painter Barnett Newman’s fascination with Kwakiutl artwork in particular: “Newman focused intently on Northwest Coast Indian ritual art because he perceived it as a parallel to his own art and to that of his contemporaries.” Newman even curated a show of these Native paintings as the opening exhibition of the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York. Parsons, later called the “den mother of Abstract Expressionism,” would go on to represent Newman, Pollock, Rothko, and Clyfford Still, among others.

“When I got to grad school,” White Hawk tells me, “I had this wealth of knowledge on Indigenous art history, and I was really lacking in the areas of art history that all my peers had been introduced to. I started digging into the history of easel painting. The eras that I felt most attracted to were color field and Abstract Expressionism. And then I kept running into instances where these folks, who are some of the key players in these eras, were collecting Indigenous art or living near Indigenous communities or talking about their intersections with Native art and communities. I'm like, well, of course I love your work. Your work is to some extent informed by our work. So it's this continuous reflection upon the history of art making on this land base, but it's not written into art history in that way.”

The cross-pollination was inevitable and organic; White Hawk is not looking for purity in the artist. She’s looking for honesty and transparency from the historians and curators.

“Native artists just have not been given the same kind of platform and honoring and support as other artists,” she says. “Native work has not been written into American art history with the kind of credit, recognition, and equality that other art forms have.”

 

Top: Untitled (Pink and Blue), 2022. Acrylic, oil, glass bugle beads, 24K seed beads, sinew, thread on canvas, 48 x 48". Bottom: Untitled (White, Grey, and Gold), 2019. Acrylic, oil, glass beads, thread on canvas, 30 x 30".

 

Floating above this whole conversation about modern American art is the fallacy of the solitary genius, divorced from cultural context by the sublimity of his works. White Hawk is eager to pop that balloon. It reminds me of that moment in 2019, when, as one Bust headline hilariously put it, “Twitter Drags Thoreau, Whose Mom Brought Him Sandwiches to Walden Pond.” No man is an island, especially when his mother still does his laundry for him, too. And the same holds true for the mid-century European and European-American painters, as well.

In her fantastic 2016 essay “Let’s Talk About the Universal (White, Male) Artist,” Andrea Carlson (Ojibwe) writes, “Modernist abstraction was, and still is, an undying savior which shields a number of artists in any MFA program from expressly addressing race and gender in their work. Their creed: no preconceptions — just raw materials and action and, therefore, art… A conversation about race and gender around Abstract Expressionism (and its offshoots) is an unwelcome guest; it undermines the man of action. This is not, in itself, a bad thing; indeed, it’s an enviable privilege, for there are many who crave just that freedom and find it denied them. Many of us can’t shed the context of our identity so readily; we are actively denied the ‘universal’ lens that makes such content-less expression possible.”

White Hawk’s embrace of her own cultural specificity, by contrast, is a large part of what gives her work its power. Wopila | Lineage is undeniably and proudly Lakota, though if you skip the didactic on a piece like that, you may miss much of the context. “I was not spoon-feeding the subject matter,” White Hawk says. “It's there, but you’ve got to work for it.”

If you don’t, the worst case scenario is you’re left with a beautiful object, and for the artist, that is still a great place to start. “I do work really hard to intentionally make my work beautiful, because that's an offering that I want to give. It's a gift to the viewer; it's important for me to offer that to the audience. I want the work to fill them up. I want the work to be something that feels regenerative. I want it to operate like that; I just don't want it to stop there.”

When I marvel at the amount of labor and rigor that the work seems to celebrate, she quickly interjects with a correction: “the amount of intention and love.” 

“When I'm referencing historic beadwork,” she explains, “these works are an intense amount of work. All that love and all that care that goes into clothing somebody or adorning somebody or celebrating somebody — there's so much love that goes into what it takes to do this thing over and over and over and over and over again, to offer this gift.”

 

Top: Untitled (Quiet Strength VIII), 2023. Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48". Bottom: Detail.

 

By that metric, she has put a lot of love into her work over the years. Prior to these large-scale beaded works, White Hawk focused primarily on painting, using controlled brushstrokes and geometric patterns to create equally mesmerizing works. For those of us steeped in the Euro- and Euro-American-centric pedagogy, they call to mind the boldness, austerity, and vibrancy of other abstract painters like Bridget Riley, Agnes Martin, Frank Stella, and Sean Scully. For White Hawk, they are rooted first and foremost within the history of Lakota painting, beadwork, and quill work. In a recent 48 x 48” piece, little squiggles of tan, gray, pink, and lavender dance next to each other in long, imperfect rows like hand-painted human genomes. They are intricate, exquisite mosaics in acrylic, painted by hand by the artist herself. “I cover entire canvases in size 1 liner brushes,” she says with a laugh.”People come in and they're like, What do you use that brush for? I'm like, Oh, I'll cover a seven foot by ten foot painting — only with that brush.”

Other canvases feature both the brushstrokes and the beadwork, also to excellent effect. White Hawk has a keen sense of color and surface, finding combinations that can sing or whisper, jump out or lie flat. The works are intensely elaborate, clearly requiring countless hours alone at the easel. At the same time, her collaborative streak runs deep, spanning not only the beading team at Casket Arts but several years as Gallery Director of All My Relations Gallery and multiple projects in video and photography — departures from abstraction that have focused on centering Indigenous languages with Understanding Her(e) and Listen, and explicitly celebrating Indigenous humanity — and combating the erasure and violence enacted upon Indigenous people — with I Am Your Relative. 

As Carlson writes, “The idea of the ‘vanishing colonized’ is part and parcel of the end-of-the-trail allegory: the drawn conclusion of Manifest Destiny in its third act, in which the noble savage knows exactly when to gracefully exit off the stage of the American Dream. Only that isn’t our allegorical fantasy, and we need not apologize for showing up to the discourse uninvited.”

Before I leave her studio, White Hawk lets me look through her bookcase, taking note of several texts on traditional and contemporary Indigenous American art history. The scholarship is there across many tribes and traditions, but there is always work left to do. “I don't know that anybody has written the book yet, the definitive text, on abstraction as a global practice, or painting as a human practice,” she says. “That's the book I'm waiting for.” 

In the meantime, as the fools and fascists are actively working to ban books and blur histories, it's on the rest of us to be mindful of the stories we've been taught about purity, power, and our place in the world. Picasso made paintings that changed the course of our cultural history, but he could not have done it without the creative labor of other people from other cultures with other histories that live on to this day. The same goes for the mighty Modernists and the sandwich-starved philosophers, and really all artists, musicians, makers, and thinkers — swapping stories and rubbing elbows like a thousand little brushstrokes stuffed onto a single canvas. The erasers may be out in force right now, but so are the looms and liner brushes. ◼︎

 

I Am Your Relative, 2020.

 

To see more of the artist's work, visit dyaniwhitehawk.com or follow her on Instagram @dwhitehawk.

Banner image: She Gives (Quiet Strength V) (detail), 2019. Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 48". All images courtesy of the artist unless otherwise noted.