Famed artist Dyani White Hawk’s new sculpture celebrates community and continuity

Before the beads clad artist Dyani White Hawk’s sculpture, before they caught curators’ eyes, they were held in her bead workers’ hands.

Her relatives’ hands.

If White Hawk, one of Minnesota’s most in-demand artists, were to bead one of her works alone, it would take years. So to create the big, intricately beaded pieces that are becoming her signature, the Sičáŋǧu Lakota artist has enlisted family members to work in her northeast Minneapolis studio. They include her mother-in-law, her cousin, her daughter. A sister-in-law, recruited while in town for a powwow. Friends who have become family, too.

They pluck the glass bugle beads from bags, thread them onto needles and weave them between strands of sinew pulled taut across looms. They think good thoughts. They take deep breaths. They razz each other a little.

On past paintings, including the massive, mesmerizing “Wopila | Lineage” a star of the 2022 Whitney Biennial, White Hawk outlined with detailed diagrams where each bead would go. “Beading-by-number,” as she put it.

But with this new sculpture, inspired by two Native American artists who came before her, White Hawk gave her crew only basic parameters. The designs were up to them.

Back in February, long before the sculpture had a name, White Hawk looked over Brendan Jose’s loom, where swaths of burnt orange beads led to thick blocks of white, red, teal. In the center, a surprise: two staccato strips of orange.

“That’s dope,” White Hawk said, drawing out the word, giving him a deep nod and a wide smile. “Those thin orange lines!” Jose blushed.

In the months ahead, when project deadlines and personal events piled up — A move! A daughter’s lacrosse injury! A case of shingles! — White Hawk kept returning to those swatches, so distinctive that she could look at one and name the person who made it.

The resulting 10-foot, pillar-like sculpture, on view at the Armory Show in New York City earlier this month, became a sign of trust in her crew and a test of her studio practice, its ethos radical within the art world but understood within Native American communities.

“There’s a lot of healing happening here,” said HoonMana Yazzie-Polk, studio and project lead and White Hawk’s sister-in-law.

White Hawk might have won the prestigious MacArthur Foundation grant, known as the “genius” award, but she resists the myth of the lone genius, squarely placing herself within cultural and artistic lineages.

The sculpture at the Armory Show made that explicit, standing between totems by two Minnesotan Ojibwe artists she admires: modernist George Morrison, who died in 2000, and painter Jim Denomie, who died in 2022.

“When I’m looking at it ... I’m seeing all the pieces in communication with one another,” White Hawk said, “and all these beautiful relationships that have been cultivated through family and community, both in the Native community and the arts community here in the Twin Cities, and the way that all those threads came together to make the piece possible.”

In late July, soft summer light streamed through the windows of the fourth-floor space in the historic Casket Arts Building in Minneapolis, where White Hawk has based her practice since 2021. It’s an upgrade: The old studio, not far from there, featured a slop sink, a mini fridge and Tupperware to keep the mice away. The newer space has a full kitchen, where on this day, the beading team ate lunch together.

Just a few years ago, White Hawk was working alone.

But for “Wopila | Lineage,” her first large-scale, fully beaded painting, her studio swelled. It had to. Some 18 people sewed a half-million tiny glass bugle beads into geometric swaths of color placed on 14-foot-wide aluminum panels in time for the prestigious Whitney Biennial in 2022.

These days, her studio employs 11 people who collectively bead White Hawk’s works bound for exhibitions across the country. The practice is rooted in tradition. “If you go to a powwow and you see someone’s dance regalia,” White Hawk said, “chances are that many family members contributed to that garment.”

Yazzie-Polk began beading when she was 9 years old, adorning dance regalia with intricate designs. Her mother, Helena Polk, 67, learned to weave at 9 and bead at 14. Brendan Jose witnessed his aunt beading a keychain at a powwow 16 years ago, asked his mom about it and discovered a family tradition he’d known nothing about: His mom and his sisters would put on a pot of coffee and bead into the night.

He begged to learn, and she taught him how to loom.

Jose, who is Quechan, started at the studio last year, after meeting White Hawk through her brother-in-law. He’d been struggling to find full-time work in Arizona, where he had a part-time gig at an Amazon warehouse. A month after arriving in Minneapolis, amid a major deadline for a second “Wopila | Lineage” painting, his father died. White Hawk didn’t hesitate. She encouraged him to go home, to take whatever time he needed. “You always have a job here,” he remembers her saying. “You always have a home here.”

Beading here, in White Hawk’s studio, he thinks about the scene his mother described to him, growing up. “I never thought I would get a job like this,” he said. “Essentially, I’m sitting at a table with like a family, getting to bead. ...”

White Hawk, too, began beading as a teenager, at a weekly potluck for Native folks in Madison, Wis. Her mother had been adopted off the reservation by white missionaries when she was 18 months old, at a time when that was common: Before Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978, a third of Native children were removed from their families and adopted into mostly non-Native homes.

White Hawk’s mother “worked really hard to make sure that we were connected to family and culture, because she knew what it was like to be disconnected, right?”

“A lot of what my artwork has helped me do is continue to ground myself in who I am as a Lakota woman,” she said, “and the connection to culture and cultural practices has been so profoundly developed through my artistic practices.”

Her studio, too, is rooted in those cultural practices, those familial values.

“I’ve been very intentionally trying to cultivate a studio practice that feels like an extension of community and cultural practices that already feel good to us,” she said. “So sitting around and beading and sewing and visiting and laughing and having fun is something we already do. If you can show up at work and do that and get paid for it, awesome.

“That is a really healthy way to work the system.”

After a new, large-scale ceramic installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art and with a major Walker Art Center exhibition in the works, White Hawk is in demand, creating project pile-ups. But she’d been wanting to create this sculpture since seeing Denomie’s 12-foot painted totem, topped by a trickster rabbit, which he’d made in response to Morrison’s own column.

“I thought it was so brilliant and so beautiful,” White Hawk said of Denomie’s 2016 sculpture. “And I remember telling him at the time, ‘Oh, man, Jim, that’s so cool. And now I really want to make one. ...” They laughed about it.

Years later, the idea came to her again. “And I got to thinking about how I would want to make a piece that would be in conversation with Jim’s work and with George’s work, honoring their work and their legacies, but also adding an element of my work to the conversation.”

Earlier in the summer, the sculpture seemed too much to take on. Too much for the studio, too much for her health. White Hawk called Todd Bockley, of the Minneapolis-based Bockley Gallery, which represents her: “I am not going to make a deadline for the first time in my career.” For two days, she accepted that fact. Then, she woke up with a realization, “People!

“If I had a whole bunch of people, I think we could get it done.”

One afternoon in late July, just 10 days before the deadline for the Armory Show, the studio was calm.

White Hawk looked over a long panel that would soon become one of the sculpture’s four sides. In recent days, she’d been plotting strips of beads across them, making “powerful sense out of chaos,” as Bockley later put it.

Some strips drew on Lakota symbols White Hawk has used in other works, including kapemni, an hourglass shape that speaks to the mirroring between the Earth and sky, the human and spiritual. But other beaders from other backgrounds brought their own symbols, their own styles.

“I’d like some more of the royal blue,” she said, tracking that color’s movement across the panel with her hand.

Bead workers quietly sewed at their stations — adding, subtracting or finishing off lines of beads so they’d fit within White Hawk’s collage. One woman listened to Eminem via earbuds. Another watched “my soaps.” Others chatted: “These loops are testing me today, Hooni,” said Liliahna Harris, a new recruit, holding a batch of beadwork up to the light. “They want to fight.”

Yazzie-Polk, who goes by “Hooni,” moved between stations, awl in hand, solving riddles left in sinew.

Three years ago, so sick with COVID-19 that she lost 80 pounds, the strength to walk and her ability to work, Yazzie-Polk started looming for White Hawk, getting paid by the strip. Beading healed her: “It was my therapy, my outlet, my PT.” It has helped keep her sober, too. She was taught to be thoughtful of her energy while beading, because it would transfer to the work.

“So if you feel sick, your beadwork is probably going to come out a little wonky. ...” said Yazzie-Polk, who is part of Diné Nation, Quechan and San Carlos Apache Nations. “And because we have that teaching, and because we have the other teachings of smudging, I had to really, really think about that while I was beading.”

Yazzie-Polk’s duties include ordering supplies, training new bead workers and handling everyday tasks so White Hawk doesn’t have to. On a recent afternoon, she took White Hawk’s younger daughter, Tusweca, who was getting antsy, out for ice cream.

White Hawk’s daughters weave in and out of this space.

Nina, 22, who grew up in her mom’s studios, is the fastest beader of the bunch. Tusweca, 11, is more interested in Legos, still, but for this sculpture’s collage, she contributed her own small swatch: two rows of beads, teal and gold.

In the center of the brightly lit Javits Center in New York City, three tall sculptures rose in a triangle, far enough apart for people to pass between them.

Morrison’s brick-red “Totemic Column,” with its waves of wood, knit together. Denomie’s “Totem Painting,” stacked with colorful spirit animals. Between them, White Hawk’s “Visiting,” its patchwork pattern and vibrant colors further linking the two men’s works.

The title of White Hawk’s sculpture came from a conversation with her cousin on the final day of its creation, about the simple act of stopping by to visit. How important it is, especially in Native communities, how life-sustaining it can be. White Hawk thought of Denomie, “one of the few artists that would just, like, pop by my studio.”

They’d talk about painting and commiserate about everything that wasn’t painting: the grant applications, the administrative work. They strategized together, encouraged each other.

White Hawk got to thinking about the sculptures, how they were in communication with one another. “It felt like this lineage of visiting, and intergenerational forms of communication, which is really how art movements are built, right?” she said. “You’re responding to the people who came before you, and then the folks that come after you respond to what you have done.”

More artists should acknowledge that sort of lineage, said Eugenie Tsai, formerly of the Brooklyn Museum, who curated the Armory Show’s large-scale installations.Seeing the trio in person was “kind of a revelation,” she said.

During the art fair’s first day, White Hawk started most conversations with curators, collectors and artists by introducing Morrison and Denomie. But every once in a while, someone knew their work.

Curator Candice Hopkins got close to the sculptures, then stepped back, taking in the trio. Then she stepped close again.

“This generational dialogue ... ” Hopkins, executive director of Forge Project, a Native-led arts nonprofit in Hudson Valley, N.Y., told White Hawk. “I hope that this constellation of works can be part of a longer-term exhibition, because I can tell that everyone’s really poured all of their heart into it.”

White Hawk’s eyes welled with tears. She placed her hand on her heart.

“This feels like a historic moment,” Hopkins said.

White Hawk led the influential collector Komal Shah around the piece, pausing to hug Briand Morrison, George Morrison’s son, who gave the project his OK. White Hawk told them about the concept, the process, the bead workers.

“This one is my sister-in-law,” she said, pointing to one panel. “My mother-in-law,” pointing to another. “This ... this is my daughter Nina.” As she gently touched another swatch, her face lit up, as if she were looking into the eyes of the person that beaded it.

“Nina did this one, too. Isn’t that gorgeous?”

Together: Leslie Smith III & Dyani White Hawk

What: A gallery show with new works by Leslie Smith III and Dyani White Hawk, including White Hawk’s “Visiting” sculpture.

When: Sept. 20 to Nov. 2. Opening reception 6-8 p.m. Sept. 20. Artist conversation 5 p.m. Sept. 20.

Where: Bockley Gallery, 2123 W. 21st St., Mpls.