MINNEAPOLIS, MN.- The Walker Art Center opened Dyani White Hawk: Love Language, a major mid-career survey featuring nearly 100 works from the past 15 years of the artist’s wide-ranging practice. Co-organized with Remai Modern (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada), the expansive exhibition features paintings, sculptures, works on paper, video installations, and objects that incorporate porcupine quillwork and lane stitch 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. It is especially meaningful that the artist’s largest and most comprehensive institutional survey to date opens in Minneapolis, where she has lived and worked since 2011.
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 the artist’s distinctive multimedia practice and examines ways that she honors Lakota artistic traditions while exploring the possibilities of new aesthetic, conceptual, and technical innovations. The exhibition design, which is being 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.
White Hawk has gained renown—including being named as a 2023 MacArthur Fellow—for foregrounding Lakota abstraction and placing it in active conversation with European and American geometric abstract painting. She draws from Indigenous teachings and histories embedded in materials and practices to reclaim knowledge, inspire emotion, and stir memory. In doing so, she merges traditional and contemporary approaches to create evocative new forms and expressions. To center Indigenous value systems significant to White Hawk’s practice within the exhibition, Love Language unfolds in a loose chronology around four guiding words—See, Honor, Nurture, and Celebrate—that reflect the importance of family, ancestry, community, language, and the land.
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. It will remain on view at the Walker through February 15, 2026, and then open at the Remai Modern on April 25, 2026. 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 Indigenous voices, providing a deeper exploration of White Hawk’s vision and work.
“Love Language speaks to Lakota artistic practices that represent love for family, community, the land, and life. The exhibition is an embodied love letter to our ancestors, our communities, family, and the people–all of humanity. It is also a calling, emphasizing the need for museums, institutions, governments, communities, and individuals to actively work to see, honor, nurture, and celebrate Indigenous people, cultures, communities, and contributions to our collective histories and our present lives,” comments White Hawk.
Curatorial team: Siri Engberg, Senior Curator and Director of Visual Arts; Tarah Hogue, Adjunct Curator of Indigenous Art at Remai Modern; with Brandon Eng, Curatorial Assistant, Visual Arts
