New Dyani White Hawk show at the Walker is a 'love letter' to community
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What does a shared infinity look like? What shape could hold connections across existence, time, land, the cosmos and beyond?
For artist Dyani White Hawk, who is Sičáŋǧu Lakota, it’s the kapemni, an hourglass-like symbol composed of two triangles common in Lakota philosophy. The kapemni is a form that ripples through White Hawk’s decades-long career.
Standing in front of the towering new work "Infinite We” — a ten-foot-tall mosaic sculpture of colored enamel, copper and brass — White Hawk said this is the first time she’s transitioned the symbol to three dimensions.
“The kapemni form is a representation of really deep philosophies and generational knowledge and wisdom and worldviews boiled down to its most graceful, poetic artistic expression,” White Hawk said. “Taking that two-dimensional form and doing my best to represent that in three dimensions is a new artistic exploration.”
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“Infinite We” makes its debut in the exhibition “Dyani White Hawk: Love Language,” opening Saturday at the Walker Art Center. The show is White Hawk’s largest to date, a milestone in an already distinguished career that includes MacArthur “Genius” and Guggenheim fellowships, and acquisitions by the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art in New York and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington D.C.
An Artist’s Language Unfolds
“Love Language” is a big and bright kaleidoscopic show, an expansive mid-career survey spanning 10,000 square feet of the Walker and the last 15 years of the Minnesota artist's career.
“This is kind of a perfect moment to be exploring the work, looking back, seeing how she has really pushed innovation in the work in a really, really interesting way,” said Walker curator Siri Engberg. “I love the story that the work tells about the development of an artist's language.”
That language includes working across mediums of glass beads, porcupine quills, paint, buckskin, copper, brass, glass and video. White Hawk uses these mediums in service of celebrating, and adding to, a rich history of abstraction in Lakota art and craft — including the kapemni — and the Native women who innovated that visual language.
White Hawk said art history has cast European and European white men as the inventors of abstraction.
“Which is simply not true. Abstraction is a human practice, and abstraction was being practiced here, by my ancestors and by other Indigenous women, and other Indigenous artists, well before these lands were colonized,” White Hawk told MPR News in a 2023 interview.
The exhibition tracks the development of White Hawk’s visual language, and a reeducation around abstraction in art, across four themes titled “See,” “Honor and Nurture” and “Celebrate,” from early paintings to the collaborative works for which White Hawk has become known in printmaking, video installation and large-scale two and three-dimensional artworks, such as “Infinite We.”
A Hall of Language
Engberg said the catalyst for the exhibition is a video series called “LISTEN,” which the Walker acquired in 2020. For “LISTEN,” White Hawk traveled with filmmaker Razelle Benally across the country to capture Native women speaking their languages, outside, on their homelands, from Dakota and Ojibwe here in the Midwest, to Cocopah in Arizona, Seneca in New York and many more.
In the “Honor and Nurture” section, video of these women loop on large screens in a long narrow gallery filled with couches (and throw pillows designed by White Hawk in collaboration with Faribault Woolen Mills). White Hawk said the series is meant to prompt visitors to consider how many languages they can identify by sound. Most Americans, she points out, can identify languages like Spanish, French, German, even if they can’t understand them.
“Then it conversely asks people to consider how many Indigenous languages to this continent they could identify by sound and, for a lot of people, that number will most likely be zero,” White Hawk said. “It's a really profound illustration of the impacts of colonization and of how that legacy is ongoing.”
Tarah Hogue, a curator of Indigenous art at the Remai Modern museum in Saskatoon in Canada (where the exhibition will travel in April 2026), curated “Love Language” with Engberg.
“I'm Métis and my language is Michif and that's not something that I was raised listening to,” Hogue said. “It is really special to enter museum space like the Walker and hear such a richness and diversity of languages that are connected to this land base.”
The Infinite We
Beyond the video galleries, new works by White Hawk are presented in the “Celebrate” section in the last galleries of the exhibition, which show a shift in scale and collaboration. Here hangs the 2022 beaded 8-foot by 14-foot “Wopila|Lineage,” a pivotal work that White Hawk made with her studio team for the 2022 Whitney Biennial.
“‘Wopila|Lineage’ is the first really ambitiously sized beadwork piece,” White Hawk said. “This is the beginning of having a studio team. Eighteen people ended up helping with the beadwork with this work.”
“Infinite We” follows, which White Hawk made with fabricators in Germany and Italy. And then comes the “Visiting” sculptures, White Hawk’s homage to two Minnesota Ojibwe artists, the painter Jim Denomie, who died in 2022, and George Morrison, the late 20th-century Modernist who helped shape the Abstract Expressionist art movement (who currently has his first solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York). The soaring beaded sculptures reference totems made by Morrison and Denomie.
White Hawk said she wanted to honor her friendship with Denomie and “the profound legacy of George Morrison and his contributions to abstraction, and the importance of his position as a Native abstractionist.”
White Hawk wanted the sculptures to be beaded like a “crazy quilt,” pulling pieces of beadwork from each of the artists that work in her studio practice. This is the first time she asked her teammates to create their own designs, instead of adhering to a design composition by White Hawk.
“The gift in that has been watching their evolution,” White Hawk said. They have created “some of the most complicated, beautiful, phenomenally designed strips of beadwork.”
“There is this real moment, this real resurgence of beadwork artists across the continent that Dyani’s work speaks to, supports and makes visible in these really important ways,” Hogue said.
A ‘Love Letter’ to Lineage
The exhibition, which is up at the Walker through Feb. 15, is a “love letter” to White Hawk’s community that she wants everyone to experience.
“To our ancestry; to the lineage of artists that have upheld artistic practices that we all get to participate in today; to the communities that have raised me and every single person that has helped contribute to bring this work to life and to our local communities and to Native people at large, this is really a love letter to Indigenous people who so seldomly have had the opportunity to really see their lives, their communities, their relatives, celebrated in our nation's major public art museums,” White Hawk said.
“I really, truly believe that if the exhibition feels really good for Native people, that means it inevitably feels really good for everyone.”
