Dyani White Hawk

Dyani White Hawk

Dyani White Hawk (Sicangu Lakota) (b. 1976) was born in Madison, Wisconsin and resides in St. Paul, Minnesota. She received a MFA in painting from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her painting earned the “Best of Classification” award at the 2011 Santa Fe Indian Art Market and a First Place in painting at the 2011 Northern Plains Indian Art Market.

White Hawk’s exactingly executed paintings often combine the Lakota art of quill work with strong lines that echo blanket and moccasin patterns. Often the scale of her work, large canvases as well as small or “extreme close-ups”, creates an interesting confusion between landscape and object or between pattern and figure. Her care in using her abstraction to bring American Indian tradition into a dynamic contemporary context reveals a powerful intellect and a remarkably original artist.

“My work embraces the dilemmas and contradictions, as well as the joys and blessings of a cross-cultural existence. As a woman of Lakota and European ancestry my life experiences have been a combination of both Western and Indigenous educations causing a continual negotiation of value systems and worldviews. Through the amalgamation of abstract symbols and motifs derivative of both Lakota and Western abstraction my artwork examines, dissects, and patches back together pieces of each in a means to provide an honest representation of self and culture.” Dyani White Hawk

Dyani White Hawk is represented by Shiprock Santa Fe in Santa Fe, NM.
Her work is in the collection of the Akta Lakota Museum, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin Union Art Collection and the Robert Penn Collection of Contemporary Northern Plains Indian Art of the University of South Dakota.