The long, golden rays of autumn’s afternoon light filter through the glass ceiling at Mercury Mosaics, a handmade-tile studio in Northeast Minneapolis, falling on thousands of multicolored clay tiles that have been painstakingly arranged on the cement floor. There are tiles the colors of the spume and foam of the sea—greens and whites—organized in long, sharp diamond shapes, and tiles the colors of the flora and fauna of the forest—blacks and grays and browns—arranged in undulating waves of little fingers.  

This 14.5-foot-by-30-foot-9-inch mosaic is entitled Nourish. The name comes from its creator: painter and multidisciplinary artist (and MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient) Dyani White Hawk. The Whitney Museum of American Art commissioned the mosaic from White Hawk after her piece Wopila | Lineage (Wopila is a Lakota word that expresses tremendous gratitude), an 8-foot-by-14-foot fully beaded work on aluminum panel, became one of the stars of the 2022 Whitney Biennial, the museum’s showcase of the most exciting voices in the contemporary global art world. Wopila | Lineage’s repeating triangles of browns, blues, whites, and greens are reminiscent of the same forms in Nourish. White Hawk keeps returning to these shapes and colors whether she’s working in tile mosaic, large-scale beadwork, or painting that represents porcupine quillwork, her artistic process pulling from the two histories of abstraction she’s most connected to—the traditions of both Lakota artwork and European easel painting—an effort that she hopes will reframe and expand the definition of abstraction itself. 

In a couple months, Nourish will be installed in the soaring building on the High Line in Manhattan that the Whitney calls home, but for now, the mosaic rests on the floor, ready to be packed up and shipped. While my mind is certain that the more than 30,000 pieces of cut and baked and glazed Mississippi River clay are lying perfectly still, my eyes are fooled: The whole thing appears to be moving. 

I’m getting this pre-grout peek because my wife, Maggie Morrison, is the head of production at Mercury Mosaics—a woman-owned-and-run tile studio. And working on this project, with this level of ambition and with an artist with the stature and presence of White Hawk, has been a highlight of Maggie’s tile-making career. White Hawk, who is in her first foray into tile mosaic at this scale, says her shared vernacular with the Mercury team was forged immediately. 

“You come in with your expertise,” she says, “and you’re working with another set of experts, and you have to trust each other to create this vision together.” 

White Hawk, who lives with her husband and their children in Shakopee and works out of her studio in another historic Northeast space, the Casket Arts Building, just a couple blocks from Mercury Mosaics, explains that before she moved into Casket Arts, her studio was even closer. She would constantly bump into Mercury’s owner, Mercedes Austin, and they would dream about someday doing something together. 

“And when this Whitney commission came through,” White Hawk says, “I told them I wanted to create a ceramic mosaic, and I wanted to work with Mercury because I think it’s really important to bring people with to share opportunity—and in this case, it was an opportunity for me to work with a Minneapolis-based artist-owned business and a neighbor.” 

White Hawk says that the art world is so “coastal-centric” that sometimes when she’s asked where she’s based and she says “Minneapolis,” the person will literally follow up with, “Why?”

“People who are rooted in these art-world centers are either from there and don’t know much else,” she says, “or they just can’t wrap their heads around working somewhere else.” 

This isn’t how White Hawk’s brain works. For instance, White Hawk understands Nourish will be placed in the Whitney’s new eighth-floor cafe, where people might just be looking to recharge while processing what they’ve seen in the rest of the museum, so she wanted the piece to feel “welcoming and for people to feel embraced and warmed.” 

But she acknowledges that some viewers will get different things out of the experience. 

“I wanted to make this piece to center Indigenous abstraction, which is part of the history of abstract practices on the continent in the Whitney Museum,” she says. “The work is embedded in Lakota symbolism and worldviews—that’s my personal and cultural center and driving force—but I am by no means trying to convert people.” 

She says Lakota people or others familiar with Plains art “will love to walk in and be like, I see this, I see that, I see this. Amazing.” And for the rest of the public, she’s unwilling to spell out the specific symbolism, but she does share its overarching theme, which is, “All life is related, and our health and well-being are inextricably connected to one another.” 

A couple of weeks later, I visit White Hawk’s Casket Arts Building space. It’s MEA weekend, and her two daughters, Tusweca and Nina, are hanging around out on the larger studio floor as a handful of White Hawk’s employees are quietly beading what will become another piece in the Wopila series. White Hawk shares a smaller office with her studio manager, Sara Tonko, their two small white desks separated by a big radiator. 

White Hawk is dressed like a painter: She’s wearing a green work shirt that’s untucked over black trousers and a pair of shell-toed white Nikes. Her hair is pulled back to accentuate her black-rimmed glasses and beaded earrings. She is thoughtful but intense. 

White Hawk, who turned 47 on Halloween, grew up in Madison, Wisconsin—a creatively energetic young person whose artistic interests were encouraged by her mother. “I always loved making things,” she says. She started with making cars out of cardboard boxes, with plastic wrap for windows. By the time she was a teenager, she was a snowboarder and a raver whose taste leaned toward the conscious hip-hop of artists like A Tribe Called Quest, but she was obsessive about drawing, and she was learning how to bead at the Wil-Mar Neighborhood Center, the gathering place of Madison’s close-knit intertribal community. 

White Hawk’s mom is Sičáŋǧu Lakota. She was adopted by a white family, so while White Hawk grew up aware she was Native, she wasn’t reconnected to her Lakota family on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota until she was 13.

“My mom works with child welfare issues in the Native community,” White Hawk says. “She is an adoptee, so the work she does is focused around healing and reunification, working with tribes, social workers, and judges around issues of adoption and foster care.”

Before the Indian Child Welfare Act was passed by Congress in 1978, more than a third of all Native children were adopted out into non-Native homes. “So, her work is advocating for families to keep Native kids in Native homes and helping guide people through reunification.” 

When White Hawk’s mom reconnected with her own family, trips out to Rosebud became a regular thing. White Hawk remembers a month spent living with her uncle and their family. 

“My mom made sure that we were embedded within community as much as possible—I think in response to the fact that she didn’t have that and knows what that separation meant for her,” she says. 

And her mom encouraged White Hawk to go to a tribal school for college. Her mom had visited Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas, and had taken a picture of the sign near the entrance of the college. “She had hung it on the fridge,” White Hawk remembers. “And she said, ‘That’s where you’re going.’” 

White Hawk spent five years down in Lawrence, three of those enrolled at Haskell studying elementary education, and while Haskell didn’t offer a BFA, she took as many painting and photography classes as she could, eventually earning her AA degree. “I thought, Maybe I’ll teach art someday,” she says.

After Haskell, she attended the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. It was at IAIA where she studied with the Osage painter Norman Akers and immersed herself in the study of Indigenous art of the Americas, including Mesoamerican and North American Plains art. She earned her BFA there before returning to Madison to pursue an MFA at the University of Wisconsin. Her early work from this period leans toward densely populated narrative work, full of references to the widespread traditions of Indigenous art and the graffiti and street art that she grew up with in Madison.

“When you’re just starting, you’re inevitably going to reflect what you’re taking in,” she says. 

But from the beginning, she manifested ideas challenging the commonly held definition of abstraction. 

“Because I went to two tribal colleges, we learned art, national history, and tribal and federal government relations from an Indigenous perspective,” she says. “I didn’t have the same undergraduate education and art history that my peers who went to American mainstream institutions did.” She felt so frustrated and unprepared that she nearly dropped out. White Hawk remembers a phone call with her mom. “She told me, ‘What you’re dealing with is culture shock.’ And I was like, ‘But Mom, I grew up here.’ And she said, ‘Yes, but you didn’t grow up attending the university.” White Hawk’s frustration began to transform into outrage at the circumstances that had created the dichotomy in the first place. “They had not learned the same history that I had learned, and I had not learned the same history they had learned,” she says. “The fact that most of the folks there were fairly oblivious to Indigenous art history, which is the land we stand on, says something extremely significant.” 

White Hawk says this obliviousness is implicit to how the art world regards the history of abstract painting. 

“Everybody’s supposed to know that Abstraction, with a capital A, means abstract easel painting on stretched canvases done by European and European American men,” she says. “And that’s just not the truth.” 

White Hawk says the idea of distilling an idea into a “poignant gesture” is a universal practice. She was immediately drawn to abstract painting, and it took her time to realize that her attraction was related to the Lakota traditions that she grew up with, and she was discovering that the European and American painters she loved were looking to the same Indigenous sources. 

“The message isn’t to take away from the beauty of this particular art history or their accomplishments,” she says. “I feel like I’m a part of that history myself—my dad’s German and Welsh—but my issue is the way that it’s been presented.” 

She excuses herself to vent a little bit. 

“And here’s where the hesitation on answering your early questions about my biography comes from,” she says. “Because the norm is for people to want to talk about the romanticized version of my biography instead of my work—and it’s fucking old.” 

She says it’s her biography that drives her work, that she wants to dig into and hold tight to who she is, because who she is was almost ripped away from her. 

“And, of course, I want to be able to respond to the bullshit of our colonial history,” she says. 

But her ideas are big, and she’s trying to broaden definitions and concepts, not reduce them further.

“I want the work to be recognized for the strength of the work,” she says. “And I think it’s extremely important that it is recognized that its strength comes from the strength of a very long history of work and that that’s not coming from nowhere and it’s not an individual thing.” 

She points to the lineage of beadwork artists and quillwork artists and parfleche painters, as well as to the history of abstract easel painters. 

“They were making all of this well before I showed up.” She sighs. “The message isn’t about ‘my greatness.’ But I do work extremely hard to make excellent work.”

Nevertheless, for someone so proud to come from a collective tradition, the greatness of Dyani White Hawk is very much a pertinent topic in the art world right now. She was just awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called “Genius Grant”; she has the huge mosaic collab with Mercury that’s being installed at the Whitney; she has another massive glass mosaic, a collaboration with the German glass designer Franz Mayer of Munich, which will be installed in a science building at the University of Minnesota next year; and the Walker is putting together a survey show that will be installed in 2025 in the 11,000-square-foot gallery space that hosted the massive Pacita Abad show. 

So, why has the art world decided that Dyani White Hawk’s moment is right now? And is this question fair to her? Is it fair to the Native artists—artists like Mary Sully, Fritz Scholder, and Jim Denomie, all of whom White Hawk admires and has closely studied—that have preceded her? 

The poet and artist Heid Erdrich was White Hawk’s predecessor running All My Relations Arts Gallery—the head curator position at the gallery on Franklin Avenue was White Hawk’s first job after graduating from Madison and moving to Minneapolis—and it was Erdrich who curated White Hawk’s first solo show at the Bockley Gallery in 2012. She thinks that White Hawk has always had a clear vision for her work, and the rest of the country is just now catching up to it. 

“The idea that people innovate based on where and when they are in the world is interesting,” Erdrich says. And she thinks the way that White Hawk works within Native traditions highlights that Native artists have been doing this for a long time. “And that helps inform the American identity. So, I think, in a way, it’s also the American search for identity that brings Dyani’s work and the work of other Native artists into the foreground.” 

The curators working at our two largest and most important cultural institutions consider White Hawk an essential artist. Siri Engberg at the Walker is in the beginning stages of putting together that 2025 survey show on White Hawk’s entire career, and she admires both the conceptual richness in White Hawk’s work and the clarity of her design sensibility. Engberg points to the Walker’s recent acquisition of White Hawk’s multimedia piece Listen, an eight-channel video installation featuring short filmed pieces of women speaking their native languages. 

“It’s both a landscape and a portrait simultaneously,” explains Engberg. “And it’s meant to make these languages present and acknowledged.” 

Robert Cozzolino at Mia is impressed with the way White Hawk’s “multiplicity of consciousness” can hold together separate artistic traditions in conversation within the same work. He points to White Hawk’s Untitled (Quiet Strength I), which is on view at Mia right now.

“First of all, I’m a sucker for a meticulous process of technique and seeing somebody who’s really skillful just showing their chops,” he says. Cozzolino admires how each careful brush stroke on the surface of Untitled (Quiet Strength I) is actually a slightly different shade and color. “And to know that one of the things that she was doing is referring to practices of quillwork makes it mean something that no other artist really could’ve made it mean.”

Cozzolino wonders if White Hawk’s command of the language of abstraction could be going over the heads of what can be a lazy and consumptive art world. 

“Because Dyani isn’t working with narrative, it’s possible her work is hitting in the art world in a different way,” he says. “I think her works reference complex historical issues, but maybe the more impatient segments of the art world feel as if they don’t have to burden themselves with understanding these things in order to have access to it.” 

This is, in fact, one of White Hawk’s fears. When she was initially approached by the Whitney to make something for the Biennial, she wanted to build on the abstraction of Quiet Strength, and while it inspired Wopila | Lineage, it did feel like a risk. 

“The political conversations are embedded in there, but it’s not the first thing you see,” she says. “And I felt it was a risk to put something in the Biennial that wasn’t overtly political.” 

She sees a trend of BIPOC artists being rewarded for spoon-feeding politics, and she sees an audience desperate to stand in front of works that make a big, pointed statement because the proximity makes people feel good about themselves. Her abstract work resists this impulse, both on the part of the artist and the viewer, but it can risk being dismissed as being “craft” or being “women’s art” or just being “beautiful.” But she says, “Just the gamble of putting something so overtly Lakota in the Biennial and being like, ‘This is the statement,’ that was what was important.” 

And now, with Nourish, her work will be a more permanent part of this conversation. 

“There hasn’t been consistent valuing of our contributions to this artistic history,” she says. “And hopefully, we’re at the beginning of substantial change for that, and hopefully, it will stay.”