With Wopila | Lineage (2022)—her 14-by-8-foot contribution to the 2022 Whitney Biennial—Dyani White Hawk wanted to make a statement: “I wanted to position Lakota aesthetics in the Whitney Biennial. Native people have not been able to walk into public spaces and see our lives validated, reflected, honored, and uplifted in the way that other folks have. So they’re the first audience I want to address.”

Beyond that, though, she wanted to use beauty—through the meticulous application of more than a half million shimmering glass beads—to open up a conversation with visitors. “‘Wopila’ expresses deep gratitude,” she tells me in a just-published interview.” And "‘Lineage,’ like much of my work recently, is meant to honor and show gratitude for the lineage of Lakota women and their contributions to abstraction, for Indigenous women at large and their contributions to art on this continent, for the generations of practiced abstraction that helped nurture and guide the work of the Western artists that were inspired by their work and brought that back into their studios with them as they created easel paintings. In these pieces I’m pulling from those histories—from my own very specific history of Lakota abstraction, from Indigenous abstract practices at large, from abstract easel painting practices—and hoping to create opportunities for conversation around how connected those histories are and the fact that one doesn’t happen without the other.”

She acknowledges there’s a critique embedded in the work:

It’s recognizing the bullshit that it has been, and the way that it’s been taught so far is extremely racist and sexist and ageist. Without a doubt, it’s a critique of how it has been presented to us and taught to us so far. But I don’t want to just sit in a place of anger. I want to sit in a place of: this is the BS that has existed; now how do we move towards a healthier future?

Read “Beauty Is Medicinal: Dyani White Hawk on her Whitney Biennial Artwork”