On October 18, the Walker Art Center will open Dyani White Hawk: Love Language, a major mid-career survey featuring nearly 100 works from the past 15 years of the artist’s wide-ranging practice. Co-organized with the Remai Modern (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada), the expansive exhibition features painting, sculptures, works on paper, video installations, and objects that incorporate porcupine quillwork and lane stitch beadwork, as well as several new large-scale sculptural pieces and mosaics making their debut in the exhibition. Together, the depth of works highlights White Hawk’s ongoing commitment to formal and material experimentation. It is especially meaningful that the artist’s largest and most comprehensive institutional survey to date opens in Minneapolis, where she has lived and worked since 2011.
White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota, b. 1976) is recognized for her dynamic visual language and approach to image making. Grounded in a celebration of Lakota forms and motifs, White Hawk’s work challenges prevailing narratives and histories of abstraction and amplifies the influence of Indigenous cultural production on modern and contemporary art. Love Language engages viewers with White Hawk’s distinctive multimedia practice and examines the ways in which it has continually evolved to embrace new aesthetic, conceptual, and technical possibilities. Through a remarkable array of works, the exhibition highlights how White Hawk honors Lakota culture while also expanding its expression through new forms and innovations. The exhibition design, which is being developed in close collaboration with the artist and community members, emphasizes a sense of welcome, bringing a core grounding from White Hawk’s work into the physical space of the show.
The exhibition is co-curated by Siri Engberg, Senior Curator and Director of Visual Arts at the Walker and Tarah Hogue (Métis), Adjunct Curator of Indigenous Art at Remai Modern, and further supported by Brandon Eng, Curatorial Assistant, Visual Arts at the Walker. It will remain on view at the Walker through February 15, 2026, and then open at the Remai Modern on April 25, 2026. Love Language is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, assembled in close collaboration with the artist. The 350-page monograph offers new scholarship and platforms Indigenous voices, providing a deeper exploration of White Hawk’s vision and work.
White Hawk has gained renown—including being named as a 2023 MacArthur Fellow—for foregrounding Lakota abstraction and placing it in active conversation with European and American geometric abstract painting. She draws from Indigenous teachings and histories embedded in materials and practices to reclaim knowledge, inspire emotion, and stir memory. In doing so, she merges traditional and contemporary approaches to create evocative new forms and expressions. To center Indigenous value systems significant to White Hawk’s practice within the exhibition, Love Language unfolds in a loose chronology around four interconnected themes—See; Honor; Nurture; and Celebrate—that reflect the importance of family, ancestry, community, language, and the land.
White Hawk comments:
“Love Language speaks to Lakota artistic practices that represent love for family, community, the land, and life. The exhibition is an embodied love letter to our ancestors, our communities, family, and the people–all of humanity. It is also a calling, emphasizing the need for museums, institutions, governments, communities and individuals to actively work to see, honor, nurture and celebrate Indigenous people, cultures, communities, and contributions to our collective histories and our present lives.
Centering Indigenous voices in the Walker, on Dakota homelands, is an action of agency and assertion of belonging. Through the creation of a welcoming space guided by Indigenous value systems, a nurturing environment will be provided for all. Love Language is an opportunity to celebrate Indigenous art, strengthen critical thinking on institutional and national histories, and share in the reciprocal practice of creation and engagement. Art is a gift. When we share the truths of our lived experiences and take the time to listen to learn about one another we are better equipped to practice compassion. Through this exchange, we collectively embark on building healthier models for the future.”
The exhibition opens with See, which introduces audiences to White Hawk’s aesthetic language, lived experience, and worldviews. It features early paintings that include the Lakota practices of porcupine quillwork and lane stitch beadwork, as well as other works in which the artist depicts these techniques through painted marks. Additionally, this section includes a selection of works on paper—including prints, drawings, and mixed media works using 1800s ledger paper—brought together for the first time in an exhibition. Featured throughout the galleries are examples from White Hawk’s celebrated Carry series, oversized beaded sculptural vessels that reference highly adorned functional objects of Lakota culture and the ways that adornment signifies value systems. The Carry series challenges the hierarchies often imposed in academic and museum spaces between fine art and craft.
Works in Honor and Nurture embrace female strength and connectivity across generations. The section is anchored by White Hawk’s LISTEN (2020), an 11-channel audio and video installation, produced with cinematographer Razelle Benally (Oglala Lakota/Diné), that features Indigenous women speaking their Native languages on their homelands. Through a merging of sound and cadence, the installation asserts the range and diversity of Native languages spoken on this land base. Also included, among other works, are Braids (2018), a video work by White Hawk and fellow artist Jovan C. Speller, produced with filmmaker Elizabeth Day as an homage to hair braiding in Indigenous and Black communities as an act of care, and examples from her acclaimed Quiet Strength series (2016—), a body of abstract paintings in which the artist’s meticulously painted vertical brushstrokes—references to quillwork and beading—amass to create expansive fields of color and texture, honoring the women who gifted and upheld these art forms over generations.
The final section, titled Celebrate, focuses on White Hawk’s most recent innovations and is anchored by a grouping of large-scale, multi-panel beaded paintings, including the monumental Wopila|Lineage (2022). These works, laboriously produced with the artist’s team of studio beadworkers, emphatically frame Indigenous aesthetics and making in the space of contemporary art. The paintings invite audiences to linger and to appreciate their beauty and complexity, while accompanying interpretive materials encourage visitors to uncover complicated layers of meaning and history embedded within the works. These paintings are complemented in the exhibition by Relative (2023), a room-scaled environment that includes video and sound, produced with filmmaker Leya Hale (Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota and Diné) and musician Talon Bazille (Crow Creek Dakota and Cheyenne River Lakota). The installation visually echoes the geometries of White Hawk’s beaded paintings and includes mirrored surfaces that bring the viewer into the work, creating a powerful sense of connection.
White Hawk’s ongoing processes of translating and transforming Lakota iconography and materials finds new context and form with her newest sculptural works. The columnar sculpture Visiting (2024) stands 10 feet tall and is wrapped in patchworks of intricately beaded strips. Another large-scale work, in the form of a three-dimensional kapemni (2025), is sheathed in patterned enamel on copper, and presents two stacked cone-shaped elements, their tips touching. On view for the first time in this exhibition, the piece provides visitors with an immersive experience with the Lakota symbol, representing balance and connection, in the round. Additionally, working with glass fabricator Franz Mayer of Munich, White Hawk created a new series of glass mosaics for Love Language that build on motifs established in her paintings.
“Vibrant, dynamic, and rich with meaning, White Hawk’s work is generous, welcoming, and celebratory. Guided by Lakota values, her practice is thriving and maturing as she pushes into new conceptual and formal realms, conjuring moments of joy and awe as well as a deep thinking about the construction of history,” said Engberg and Hogue. “The exhibition and its catalogue invite audiences to experience anew the depth and intricacy of White Hawk’s practice. It is an exciting and fresh opportunity to connect with an extraordinary range of works and to engage in dialogue on the many ideas and histories they conjure.”
The exhibition design and interpretation for Love Language is being developed to ensure a sense of belonging for the Indigenous community and for all of the Walker and Remai Modern’s many visitors. The gallery environment includes ample seating featuring the artist’s dynamic blanket and cushion designs made with Faribault Woolen Mills and Ginew. The installation also includes a range of interpretive audio and videos exploring the artist’s working process and featuring Indigenous voices. In-gallery touch kits, developed in collaboration with the artist’s studio team, also allow visitors to explore materials such as quills, beads, and other items used in White Hawk’s works. More details regarding public programming will be announced closer to the exhibition opening.
ABOUT DYANI WHITE HAWK
Dyani White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is the recipient of numerous awards, fellowships, and grants, including the 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship; 2024 Creative Capital grant; 2023 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; 2021 Anonymous Was a Woman Award; Academy of Arts and Letters Award, 2021; 2019 United States Artists Fellowship in Visual Art; 2017 and 2015 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Fellowships; and 2014 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, among others. She has participated in residencies in New Orleans, LA, Santa Fe, NM, Australia, Russia, and Germany.
In addition to her participation in a breadth of solo and group exhibitions, 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, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Baltimore Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum, National Gallery of Canada, 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.
White Hawk earned an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2011) and BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico (2008).
EXHIBITION TOUR
Walker Art Center: October 18, 2025 – February 15, 2026
Remai Modern: April 25 – September 27, 2026
PUBLICATION
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue assembled in close collaboration with the artist. Co-published by the Walker Art Center and Remai Modern, the 350-page publication offers new scholarship and platforms Indigenous voices, providing a deeper assessment of White Hawk’s practice.
Commissioned texts for the volume include essays by heather ahtone, PhD. (Chickasaw Nation; Senior Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, First Americans Museum); mary v. bordeaux, Ed.D (Sičáŋǧu Oglala Lakota; Assistant Professor in American Indian Studies at Black Hills State University; co-owner and creative director of Racing Magpie, Rapid City, South Dakota); Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota; poet, author, and activist); and Joyce Tsai, PhD., (Executive Director, Clyfford Still Museum, Denver). The catalogue also includes an overview essay by exhibition co-curators Tarah Hogue (Métis) of Remai Modern and Siri Engberg of Walker Art Center; and a roundtable conversation, moderated by Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation; Executive Director and Chief Curator, Forge Project), between Dyani White Hawk and artists Christi Belcourt (Métis, b. 1966), and Marie Watt (Seneca Nation, b. 1967).
The publication is coordinated by the Walker’s in-house publications and editorial team and designed by Kathleen Sleboda (Nlaka’pamux and a member of the Coldwater Indian Band of Merritt, British Columbia) of Draw Down Books. The catalogue will be available through the shops at Walker Art Center and Remai Modern and distributed by Distributed Art Publishers (D.A.P.).
ABOUT THE WALKER ART CENTER
The Walker Art Center is a renowned multidisciplinary arts institution that presents, collects, and supports the creation of groundbreaking work across the visual and performing arts, moving image, and design. Guided by the belief that art has the power to bring joy and solace and the ability to unite people through dialogue and shared experiences, the Walker engages communities through a dynamic array of exhibitions, performances, events, and initiatives. Its multiacre campus includes 65,000 sq. ft. of exhibition space, the state-of-the-art McGuire Theater and Walker Cinema, and ample green space that connects with the adjoining Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. The Garden, a partnership with the Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board, is one of the first urban sculpture parks of its kind in the United States and home to the beloved Twin Cities landmark Spoonbridge and Cherry by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Recognized for its ambitious program and growing collection of more than 16,000 works, the Walker embraces emerging art forms and amplifies the work of artists from the Twin Cities and from across the country and the globe. Its broad spectrum of offerings makes it a lively and welcoming hub for artistic expression, creative innovation, and community connection.
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Acknowledgements
Dyani White Hawk: Love Language is co-organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and Remai Modern, Saskatoon. Lead support is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
The Walker Art Center’s presentation is made possible with major support from Martha and Bruce Atwater. Additional support is provided by Lewis Baskerville. The exhibition catalogue is supported by Girlfriend Fund.