The kapémni form, an abstract Lakota symbol broadly recognizable to Indigenous tribes of the Great Plains, consists of two mirrored triangles balanced in the center at their tips in an hourglass shape. The lower one represents the physical world, the upper one the sky and spiritual realm. The form was traditionally rendered in porcupine quillwork, beadwork and parfleche painting on garments and objects made by Native women.
“The kapémni really is a worldview based in Lakota philosophy that underscores our connectedness across all humanity, all plant life, all life period,” said Dyani White Hawk, a Minneapolis-based artist who is Sicangu Lakota, of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe.
She has integrated the kapémni motif in different media and at increasing scale and innovation over the last 15 years. “Utilizing it in my own work serves as a personal reminder over and over again to live by our values.”
White Hawk, 48, has recently received a surge of recognition in the art world for her multidisciplinary work that puts abstraction long used by the Lakota people in active conversation with elements of mid-20th century American painting including abstract expressionism, color field, hard-edge and minimalism.
Awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 2023 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2024, White Hawk has high-profile commissions in progress at Kennedy International Airport and Portland International Airport in Oregon, and her work has been collected by dozens of major museums, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Denver Art Museum and the Brooklyn Museum.
Strips of beadwork at Dyani White Hawk’s studio in Minneapolis, Sept. 22, 2025. White Hawk incorporates strips of bead, and other beadwork, into many of her pieces (Ben Brewer/The New York Times)
Walker exhibit
Now, a midcareer survey has opened in her hometown, Minneapolis, at the Walker Art Center called “Dyani White Hawk: Love Language,” on view through Feb. 15, with more than 90 paintings, works on paper, video installations, objects incorporating quillwork and beadwork, and several new sculptures and mosaics. It was organized in collaboration with the Remai Modern in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where the show will travel next year. The two institutions bridge the Plains homelands of the Oceti Sakowin cultural group comprising the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota nations whose territory long predates that national boundary.
“A driving force within what I do is about making sure that Native voices are included and heard and celebrated in our mainstream public art spaces to the equal level of all our counterparts in the field,” said White Hawk in a video interview.
She aims to remind people “of the artistic history that existed on this land base before colonization and the ways that that has been intertwined with other communities after colonization.”
Art history incomplete
Of mixed Lakota and European ancestry, White Hawk grew up in Madison, Wis., where she was raised predominantly by her mother, who was born on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Sandy White Hawk was adopted at 18 months by white missionaries, who moved with her to Wisconsin. As an adult, she reunited with her Lakota family and brought her children back to South Dakota for ceremonies throughout their youths.
“My mom was in that era of often forced, manipulated, very systematic removal of children,” said White Hawk, whose mother founded the First Nations Repatriation Institute and has been an activist in reconnecting separated families.
White Hawk studied art and United States and Tribal history from Indigenous perspectives at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas, where she received a degree in elementary education in 2003. She learned native art history and had her first painting classes at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, graduating in 2008 with a bachelor of fine arts.
After these tribal colleges, she described experiencing “culture shock” when she began graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There she was introduced to Western art history that omitted discussion of everything she had studied before. Independently, she researched names that came up in class, such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, and was instinctively drawn to their abstract language, she said. She was not surprised to then learn they had been influenced by Indigenous art forms.
White Hawk was simultaneously “falling in love with abstract expressionism and troubled by the narrative that abstract painting in the U.S. began in the ‘40s and ‘50s in New York at the Cedar Tavern,” said Siri Engberg, the Walker’s senior curator and director of visual arts who co-organized the survey with Tarah Hogue of the Remai Modern. From the artist’s student works to today, Engberg added, “Dyani is thinking about ways that she could counter that narrative and, more importantly, foreground the legacy of Lakota abstraction.”
The artist Dyani White Hawk works at her studio in Minneapolis, Sept. 22, 2025. Motifs of repeated patterns are frequently part of White Hawk’s work. (Ben Brewer/The New York Times)
An artistic language
In her early work, White Hawk juxtaposed dual artistic lineages. She alternated stripes painted gesturally to summon artists like Rothko, Sean Scully or Frank Stella with stripes painted in neat rows of short, parallel marks to mimic the practices of Lakota quillwork and beadwork (sometimes incorporating actual quills and beads on the surface).
In her larger “Quiet Strength” series, begun in 2016, White Hawk laid down expressionistic brushwork in gold, silver or copper. On top, she painted thousands of vertical marks in horizontal bands, coalescing into the kapémni shape or other geometric Lakota symbols, with the flicker of the underlying metallic pigments creating an aura of radiance and value.
“Dyani always says that beauty is medicinal,” said Hogue, adjunct curator of Indigenous art at Remai Modern. “Through color, through the materials, she really opens up these rich and sometimes difficult conversations about what people know about the art history and even the history of the land that they’re on.”
“Infinite We,” White Hawk’s newest sculpture making its debut at the Walker, realizes the kapémni form completely in the round. Rising 10 feet tall and five feet in diameter, the surface of the two conjoined cones is a mosaic of colorful triangles in enamel on copper that optically form shifting pinwheels and embody the idea of the kapémni as a vortex.
The motif will reappear in the guise of Oregon’s Mount Hood, represented in a monumental mosaic to be unveiled next year at the Portland International Airport. Stretching 55 feet long and 9 feet high, White Hawk’s design presents the majestic mountain silhouette adorned with a tribal beaded cape, like a snow cap, and mirrored in the sky. A striking horizon line separates sunrise and starscape.
“The whole composition is a kapémni,” said White Hawk, excited by the increasing opportunities she’s had to translate her work into permanent public installations. “I’m really grateful to be able to play this big and create this thing that honors that landscape but also stays within the realm of my artistic language and the way I see the world.”
‘Dyani White Hawk: Love Language’
What: More than 90 paintings, works on paper, video installations and objects incorporating quillwork and beadwork.
Where: Walker Art Center Galleries 1, 2, 3; 725 Vineland Pl., Minneapolis.
Tickets: Free-$18, available at walkerart.org
Accessibility: Elevators, lifts, wheelchairs and other services are available.
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