Hear Her: Works by Dyani White Hawk

Installation view of Dyani White Hawk work

November 4 – December 15, 2021
List Gallery/Lang Performing Arts Center Lobby

Recording of the 11/4/21 lecture can be viewed below:

Dyani White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota) merges modernist art strategies with Indigenous art forms, highlighting the intersections of artistic and national histories. Hear Her features mixed media paintings, photographs, and prints, as well as an eight-channel video installation titled LISTEN that introduces audiences to some of the Indigenous languages of this continent while illustrating the divide between the general American public and Native nations. The exhibition also presents Takes Care of Them, a suite of four large-scale prints inspired by the dentalium shell dresses worn by Northern Plains Native women. Individually titled Wówahokuŋkiya|Lead, Wókaǧe|Create, Nakíčižiŋ|Protect, and Wačháŋtognaka|Nurture, these prints celebrate Native women who nurture communities while also preserving tribal traditions and ecosystems. I Am Your Relative, a photo-sculpture of life-sized, double-sided photographs, highlights Lakota philosophy, which deeply values all life and honors the importance of our interconnectivity. The work promotes visibility and humanization as important factors in fighting the epidemic of disappearances and murders of Native women—and about the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives Movement (MMIWR) aimed at stemming the tide of this humanitarian crisis.

White Hawk earned an MFA from the University of Wisconsin. Recent museum surveys of her work include See Her, at the Lilley Museum of Art (2019), She Gives, at the Plains Museum of Art (2020), and Speaking to Relatives, a major ten-year survey exhibition of her art presented by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (2021). White Hawk's work is held by diverse distinguished museums, including the Akt Lakota Museum, Chamberlain, SD; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Walker Art Center and Minneapolis Institute of Art in Minneapolis, MN; Saint Louis Art Museum, St Louis, MO; The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. Her numerous awards and fellowships include the United States Artists Fellowship in Visual Art, the Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists; the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant; and the McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship. White Hawk has also been awarded artist residencies in New Orleans, Santa Fe, Australia, South Africa, Russia and Germany. She is represented by the Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis.

Hear Her: Works by Dyani White Hawk, was accompanied by an exhibition catalog with an essay by Nancy Marie Mithlo (Chiricahua Apache), who is a professor of gender studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, a senior curator and lecturer on Indigenous arts, and author of Knowing Native Arts (University of Nebraska Press: 2020).

Two Indigenous women speak in outdoor area

From I Am Your Relative, 2020, photo-sculpture created in collaboration with photographer Tom Jones (Ho-Chunk). Six two-sided archival pigment prints on Dibond, edition of four, each photograph: 70 1/2 x 38 1/2 inches, installation dimensions variable

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