When artist Dyani White Hawk MFA’11 talks about the role of Indigenous peoples in art history, she doesn’t mince words.
“The way art history is taught today reflects how the contributions of Indigenous people to this continent are not recognized, honored, and celebrated as equal to their European and European American counterparts,” she says.
As one of the country’s most celebrated Indigenous artists, White Hawk is intent on changing that paradigm. She uses beadwork, quillwork, paintings, video, and installations threaded with ideas of community and ancestral relationships to land related to her Lakota heritage.
In 2023, she won a MacArthur Fellowship. The $800,000 stipend allows her the flexibility to focus on projects without financial pressure, but she’s also thankful for the network of “phenomenal thinkers” that the so-called genius grant allows her to interact with.
The Minneapolis artist boasts an impressive array of work, but her abstract paintings and beadwork are especially eye-catching. White Hawk often combines painting with bands of exacting, intricate beadwork shaped into geometric forms and patterns. Such intensive labor celebrates the under-recognized work of the many Indigenous women who made similar art throughout history.