Dyani White Hawk creates works of art with many hands

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Many hands create the art of Dyani White Hawk. The Lakota artist from Minneapolis produces abstract sculptures of coloured glass and mosaic, and giant beadwork panels that require a large team of assistants to string thousands of beads. White Hawk talked to The Globe and Mail about her working methods, her identity and her inspiration – and explains why she is happy to be showing her work across the Canadian border at the Remai Modern in Saskatoon.

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You began your big beading projects for the 2022 Whitney Biennial. How did you get started on that scale?

In 2020, I had a visit with the curators of the biennial, Adrienne Edwards and David Breslin. I had a very large painting, a seven-foot by 10-foot painting done in the style where I’m mimicking porcupine quill work and lane-stitch beadwork. And then I also had a 48-by-48-inch mixed-media beaded painting. Adrienne Edwards pointed at the 48- by 48-inch beaded painting and asked me “Could you do that, but like this?” and then pointed at the seven foot by 10-foot painting. I laughed. Sure, in theory, but that’s crazy because the 48- by 48-inch works were already a tremendous amount of work, a lot of beadwork, and that was the largest I had done until that point. But it was the biennial and I couldn’t say no.

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Then the pandemic happened. I was at home, doing all the strategizing and bead sourcing. At the time I had one studio assistant. We figured that I could probably get away with four people to help me make this thing: eight feet high by 14 feet wide. It was a tremendous amount of bead sourcing, mapping and figuring out how to make the panel systems, mathematical calculations, a lot of planning on the front end. Then once we started beading, I would do some math and figure out we’re not going to make it on time. So, we would add a few more people, and that just kept happening until eventually 18 people contributed to the beadwork. Some of those contributions were small and some were deep and broad, and everywhere in between. People just pitched in and did what they could.

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It changed the format of my studio. There’s now 11 people that work there. After we finished the piece, eight people wanted to stay on, and we had new commissions and new work that was naturally being born out of this new process. All of a sudden, I had a studio team. That has really opened up possibilities for very ambitious beadwork projects, allowed me to dream big and think outside of what my two hands are capable of doing.

A lot of the workers in your studio are family members. Tell me about your family background.

I’m Sicangu Lakota, which is the Rosebud Sioux Tribe in south central South Dakota, an enrolled tribal member. That’s through my mother; my dad is German and Welsh American. I grew up in Wisconsin.

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I read that your mother [Indigenous activist and adoptee advocate Sandy White Hawk] was part of what in Canada we call the Sixties Scoop, although she was adopted in the 1950s. I thought that might be important to your work.

Mom was adopted off the reservation, at 18 months. Here it’s the Adoption Era, but it’s the same government efforts at assimilation and eradication, dismantling native culture and families and tribal life ways.

We were reconnected with our family in the late eighties. Mom found her way back when she was around 35 and I was about 11. So I spent my young teen years connected with my family, at what is a very formative age. I have a memory of when I was little, knowing that I was Indian and having the label but not having the context. And then, travelling back and forth to spend time with our family, knowing and understanding and connection were developed over time.

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My mom knew what it felt like to have the pain from knowing who she was, but not having family or culture or community. Like most folks in the Sixties Scoop and Adoption Era, she was adopted by white folks and, for her, by missionaries. It wasn’t a healthy upbringing; she suffered a lot. Luckily her response was to make sure that we were centred in our identities as Lakota people. We would go back and forth every year for powwow and hang out with our family.

There are 11 reservations in Wisconsin. Growing up in Madison, there’s a really healthy native population, and we were raised around an intertribal urban native community. The Twin Cities has a really big native population too: We have been blessed with living in urban areas that are very connected with native communities.

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Your exhibition Love Language was co-organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Why was it important to show at the Remai Modern in Saskatoon?

The U.S.-Canada border, which is not our border and not our making, creates a significant divide between our communities. We have Oceti Sakowin, the greater body of the Lakota, Dakota, Nakota peoples: We have communities both below and above the Canadian border. Historically our communities were moving throughout these spaces. That border has created a disruption in our ability to know one another, through travelling or work or powwow. I also felt that divide in our education and in our Indigenous arts field.

It was really exciting for me to have an opportunity to work with a First Nations curator [Métis curator Tarah Hogue] and to have my first exhibition in Canada. I was really grateful to be welcomed to the Remai and to be able to get to know some folks up there and to deepen relationships. It benefits not just me and my practice but our field at large. I hope that collectively we continue to work on these cross-border relationships.

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Can you define abstraction for me?

Abstraction has been practised across the globe for as long as humans have been creating visual expression. It has many different formats, contexts and goals throughout different communities, but I believe it is distilling complex ideas and belief systems into the most graceful, poignant gestures possible. It looks different in different communities across time, each of those communities is responding to something that is unique to their environment.

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One of the things that is problematic within art history is that we’ve been conditioned to understand that when we speak about abstraction, we’re speaking specifically about the practices of Western abstraction, Western-style easel painting on canvas, and minimalism, colour field and abstract expressionism. All these are beautiful, fantastic, phenomenal, but I believe abstraction happens in all communities. I was really educated within Indigenous abstraction before I was educated in Western abstraction, but I see that their histories are connected and have intersections. That’s the area that reflects my lived experience and that I’m excited about.

Love Language continues at the Remai Modern in Saskatoon to Oct. 4.

This interview has been edited and condensed.