Artist Talk: Dyani White Hawk
March 27, 2025 | 6:30 pm–7:30 pm
FREE
Advance Insider tickets available Friday, February 28, 7 PM (space is limited)
General tickets available Monday, March 3, 7 PM
We strongly recommend claiming a ticket to ensure your seat. This in-person program is expected to be at capacity.
Questions? Email Hirshhornexperience@si.edu.
Hirshhorn Insiders, email HMSGdevelopment@si.edu.
Sičáŋǧu Lakota artist Dyani White Hawk joins Hirshhorn curator Anne Reeve for a discussion on White Hawk’s expansive practice, which singularly fuses Indigenous abstraction with European and American abstraction.
White Hawk’s 2022 work Untitled (Red and Orange) recently entered the Hirshhorn’s collection and is currently on view in Revolutions: Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960. Her paintings are rooted in Lakota and Plains visual language; in Untitled (Red and Orange), she uses short, repeated brushstrokes to suggest porcupine quillwork, a form of textile embellishment. Western museums have long elevated Eurocentric abstraction while failing to acknowledge the rich history of Native abstraction—a history that influenced the work of several well-known artists working in America, including Josef Albers and Jackson Pollock. White Hawk underscores how these histories of abstraction have informed each other as exchanges have evolved through colonization, trade, and time.
Among her many accolades, White Hawk was the recipient of a 2023 MacArthur Fellowship and has used her art and platform to elevate Native voices in public art spaces.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Dyani White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. White Hawk earned an MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison (2011) and a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico (2008). She served as gallery director and curator for the All My Relations Gallery in Minneapolis from 2011 to 2015.
Support for White Hawk’s work includes the 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2024 Creative Capital grant, 2023 MacArthur Fellowship, 2021 Anonymous Was a Woman Award, 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, 2013 McKnight Foundation Fellowship, 2020 Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Minnesota Art Prize, 2019 United States Artists Fellowship in Visual Art, Eiteljorg Contemporary Art, Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, Forecast Public Art Mid-Career Development Grant, 2018 Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists, 2017 and 2015 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Fellowships, and 2014 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. She has participated in residencies in Australia, Russia, and Germany.
Her work is in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum; Brooklyn Museum; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art; Walker Art Center; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum; Denver Art Museum; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian; Tweed Museum of Art; IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts; and Akta Lakota Museum, among other public and private collections.
If you have questions or a request for access services or accommodations that can make your experience more inclusive, please contact hirshhornexperience@si.edu. One to two weeks’ advance notice is recommended but not required.
Image credits: (Left) Portrait of the artist. Photo: Jaida Grey Eagle. (Right) Dyani White Hawk, Untitled (Red and Orange), 2022. Acrylic, oil, thread, and 24k gold seed beads on canvas. Gift of Akio Tagawa, in honor of the Hirshhorn’s 50th anniversary, 2023. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Photo: Rick Coulby
