Join us for a great opportunity to have a FREE guided tour of this new exhibition which just opened on October 18.. Please join us for another exciting tour with our knowledgeable and talented guide, Billy. You are welcome if you have toured with us before and we welcome all new participants too!
Rooted in intergenerational knowledge, Dyani White Hawk’s (Sičáŋǧu Lakota, b. 1976) art centers on connection—between one another, past and present, earth and sky. By foregrounding Lakota forms and motifs, she challenges prevailing histories and practices surrounding abstract art. Featuring multimedia paintings, sculpture, video, and more, Love Language gathers 15 years of the artist’s work in this major survey.
The exhibition unfolds across four sections named by the artist to speak to Indigenous value systems: See, Honor, Nurture, and Celebrate. See introduces visitors to White Hawk’s worldview. Opening with early pieces that combine quillwork, beadwork, and painting, the artist examines, dissects, and reassembles elements of her own Sičáŋǧu Lakota and European American ancestries. Visitors will encounter Lakota forms and teachings that inform her practice, alongside works addressing urgent issues of settler colonialism and oppression.
In Honor and Nurture, White Hawk uplifts family, ancestors, and community. Her acclaimed Quiet Strength series honors the labor of Indigenous women by referencing Lakota quillwork in the form of large abstract paintings. The multichannel video installation LISTEN (2020–ongoing) features contemporary Indigenous women speaking in their Native languages on their homelands. I Am Your Relative (2020), with photography by Tom Jones (Ho-Chunk), presents life-size photographic portraits carrying powerful language: “I am / more than your desire / more than your fantasy / more than a mascot / ancestral love prayer sacrifice / your relative.”
The exhibition’s final section, Celebrate, marries traditional techniques with outsize scale, paying homage to small gestures that hold great meaning. Featured here are a new series of glass mosaics, beaded sculptures, and White Hawk’s monumental Wopila | Lineage paintings. Made in collaboration with a skilled team of studio beadworkers, these shimmering expanses of pattern and color invite close inspection of both their material construction and their historical underpinnings.
Visitors are encouraged to engage with Love Language as a community space. The galleries offer lounging areas with interpretive materials, educational resources, and cushions and blankets designed by the artist.re complicated and our notions of reality less fixed. Ways of Knowing prompts us to consider what happens when artists step into territories of knowledge production traditionally associated with disciplines like anthropology, science, or history, opening new possibilities for how knowledge can be understood, represented, and disseminated through contemporary art,” says Güiraldes. “To create the exhibition, we looked to the practices of artists, allowing for shared strategies to inform and construct the thematic framework. The result is an exhibition rich in ideas, experiences, and expressions that resonate deeply with the current moment.”
Curatorial team: Rosario Güiraldes, Curator, Visual Arts; with Brandon Eng, Curatorial Assistant, Visual Arts.
Through her practice, Minnesota artist Dyani White Hawk brings Lakota artistic practices like bead and quill work into conversation with European and American abstract art lineages, tearing down hierarchies and offering new ways to understand the intersection of Western and Indigenous aesthetics.
As a curator, White Hawk served as the Gallery Director and Curator for the All My Relations Gallery in Minneapolis from 2011-2015. In her career as an artist, meanwhile, White Hawk has participated in international residencies, won national fellowships and grants, and showed her work in museums and galleries across the U.S.
VERY IMPORTANT: If you sign up, please put this on your calendar right away, and if a conflict arises, please be sure to update your reservation at least a week before to give another interested person the chance to use the limited number of spots. There are no last minute cancellations! Please make sure you check comments on this event frequently for notices and reply promptly to host inquiries or confirmation requests.
