Dyani White Hawk: Love Language

Following critical and public acclaim during its run at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Dyani White Hawk: Love Language opens at Remai Modern, Saskatoon, on April 25. The major mid-career survey features nearly 100 works from the past 15 years of the artist’s wide-ranging practice. 

Co-organized by Remai Modern and the Walker, the expansive exhibition features paintings, sculptures, works on paper, video installations, and objects that incorporate porcupine quillwork and lane stitch and loomed beadwork, as well as several new large-scale sculptural pieces and mosaics making their debut in the show. Together, the depth of works highlights White Hawk’s ongoing commitment to formal and material experimentation. 

White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota, b. 1976) is recognized for her dynamic visual language and approach to image making. Grounded in a celebration of Lakota art forms and symbols, White Hawk’s work challenges prevailing narratives and histories of abstraction and amplifies the influence of Indigenous cultural production on modern and contemporary art. Through a remarkable array of works, Love Language engages viewers with White Hawk’s distinctive multimedia practice and examines the ways the artist honours Lakota artistic traditions while exploring the possibilities of new aesthetic, conceptual, and technical innovations. The exhibition design, which has been 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.

To centre Indigenous value systems significant to White Hawk’s practice within the exhibition, Love Language unfolds in a loose chronology around four guiding words—See, Honour, Nurture, and Celebrate—that reflect the importance of family, ancestry, community, language, and the land.

The exhibition opens with See, which introduces audiences to White Hawk’s aesthetic language, lived experience, and worldview through a series of early works informed by her experiences as a woman of Lakota and European ancestry, her knowledge of Indigenous and Western art histories, and her converging educational experiences. Works in this section combine Lakota techniques, such as porcupine quillwork and lane stitch beadwork, with methods of painting on canvas. 

Works gathered in Honour showcase a group of paintings that depict recognizable forms, such as moccasins and quilts, which the artist begins to visually distill into abstraction, celebrating their sophisticated geometries and bold colours. Featured here and throughout the galleries are examples from White Hawk’s acclaimed Carry series, oversized beaded sculptural vessels that reference highly adorned functional objects of Lakota culture and ways that adornment signifies value systems.

The works featured in Nurture embrace female strength and connectivity across generations. The section is anchored by White Hawk’s LISTEN (2020–ongoing), a multichannel audio and video installation, with cinematography by Razelle Benally (Oglala Lakota/Diné), which features Indigenous women speaking their Indigenous languages on their homelands. Through a merging of sound and cadence, the installation asserts the range and diversity of Indigenous languages spoken on this land base. Also on view are examples from White Hawk’s acclaimed Quiet Strength series (2016–), a body of abstract paintings in which the artist’s meticulously painted vertical brushstrokes—references to quillwork and beadwork—that honour 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, multipaneled beaded paintings, including the monumental Wopila | Lineage (2022). These works, labouriously produced with the artist’s team of studio beadworkers, emphatically frame Indigenous aesthetics and making in the space of contemporary art. These paintings are complemented in the exhibition by RELATIVE (2023), a room-scaled environment that includes video and sound, with video assembly and editing by Leya Hale (Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota/Diné) and sound composition by Talon Bazille Ducheneaux (Crow Creek Dakota/Cheyenne River Lakota).

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 Infinite We (2025), in the form of a three-dimensional kapémni, is sheathed in patterned enamel on copper. The piece provides visitors with an immersive experience with this important Očeti Šakowiŋ (Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota) cosmological symbol expressed visually with two triangles, joined at the tips to form a twisting, hourglass-like shape. The kapémni signifies the values of relatedness, and balance between the worlds of the cosmos and the earth, and the need for harmony between human beings and the natural world. Working with glass fabricator Franz Mayer of Munich, White Hawk has also created a new series of glass mosaics that build on motifs established in her paintings. 

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.

Screening in Remai Modern’s SaskTel Theatre at select times during the exhibition is Braids (2018), a video work by White Hawk and artist Jovan C. Speller (US, b. 1983), with videography by Elizabeth Day, an homage to hair braiding in Indigenous and Black communities as an act of care, and a window into the connected yet unique impacts of colonization on Black and Indigenous communities.

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. 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 a range of Indigenous voices, providing a deeper exploration of White Hawk’s vision and work.

Dyani White Hawk: Love Language is co-organized by Remai Modern, Saskatoon and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Lead support is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.