Dyani White Hawk is Minnesota Star Tribune’s Artist of the Year

Sičáŋǧu Lakota artist Dyani White Hawk is known for her intricate, abstract large-scale beadworks.

White Hawk ― arguably the busiest and most generous artist in town and a role model for many in Indigenous communities and beyond ― is the Minnesota Star Tribune’s 2025 Artist of the Year.

The internationally recognized artist and MacArthur “genius” grant winner has a 15-year retrospective of her work on exhibition at the Walker Art Center, recently installed an eight-panel stained glass work at the University of Minnesota’s Chemistry Undergraduate Teaching Lab and received a 2025 Vision Award from the Northeast Minneapolis Arts District.

Over lunch at the Walker’s Cardamom restaurant in late November, her friend Kip Spotted Eagle from their alma mater, Haskell Indian Nations University, swung by the table and, teary-eyed, congratulated her on her 15-year retrospective Walker exhibition “Love Language.” He asked her to sign the catalog. She happily obliged.

“That’s what she did when she was a young kid ― everything was very intricate,” Sandy said. “When I saw it here in her artwork, as that developed, I was like, ‘Check that out!’”

Earlier that morning, White Hawk, 49, gave a tour of her show to Indigenous students and faculty from Sinte Gleška University. They had traveled to Minneapolis from the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

Minnesota has been White Hawk’s full-time home since 2011. She lives in the suburbs of Minneapolis with her husband Danny Polk (San Carlos Apache, Quechan and Diné), 46, their daughters Nina, 23, and Tusweca, 12, her mom and other family.

Minnesota supports artists, and it’s possible to live here as an artist and have a good life, White Hawk said.

“I really appreciate living here,” she said. “I appreciate being able to tell people when I travel, because people in the art world very much consider us flyover country ― they’re so coastal-centric.”

She grew up in Madison, Wis., in an urban intertribal community, and it was there she first learned beadwork. She is of Sičáŋǧu Lakota, German and Welsh ancestry.

White Hawk was raised by her mother, a Sičáŋǧu Lakota adoptee from the Rosebud Reservation. Growing up, Dyani, her brother John and her mom regularly traveled to Rosebud to spend time with relatives.

White Hawk works with 10 Native and two non-Native community members in her northeast Minneapolis studio.

In her art, White Hawk foregrounds, uplifts and celebrates Lakota aesthetics. Viewers will notice the reflective, diamond-like shape of the triangular kapemni, which means “to twist” or “to spin.” It is a symbol of mirroring the earth and the sky, representing balance and harmony.

The moccasin top or “vamp” is another symbol that recurs throughout her work.

“Her work is so beautiful, and it draws people to have important conversations, but through that offering of beauty,” said Remai Modern Curator Tarah Hogue (Métis Nation citizen), 39.

White Hawk cites the Lakota philosophy of Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ, which means “we’re all related.”

Her art is in collections at the Guggenheim, MoMA, Whitney Museum of American Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art and more. She was in New York’s prestigious 2022 Whitney Biennial, a barometer of “who’s hot” in American art.

Moving forward, she hopes there will be more healing between Indigenous people and art institutions and changes in how cultural institutions and educational systems tell American history.

In the darkened Bentson Mediatheque at the Walker Art Center in November, visitors eagerly absorbed an artist talk about White Hawk’s exhibition.

White Hawk was among them.

Instead of delivering a typical one-time artist talk, she invited artists, friends and relatives to speak. That evening, graphic designer Sadie Red Wing (Spirit Lake Dakota and Cheyenne River Lakota nations), and artists Jennie Kappenman (Red Lake Ojibwe) and Cole Redhorse Taylor (Mdewakanton Dakota) took the stage.

Red Wing, 35, a doctoral candidate in graphic design at the U, first encountered White Hawk’s work at their alma mater, the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, N.M. She studies Native histories of adornment, beading and quilling.

“Reflection in our visual language is extremely important because it could speak to many things ― balance, equality, the spiritual world is the world we walk in,” Red Wing said.

Redhorse Taylor, 31, met White Hawk at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2013 when he was an undergrad. He was one of two Native students.

“The Native community is super small and we all know each other and we see each other as relatives,” said Redhorse Taylor, who lives in the Prairie Island Indian Community in Welch, Minn. “I don’t get that with non-Native artists, there’s not that communal connection. As Native artists, we just get each other.”

He’d never seen anyone take beadwork designs and put them into a fine-art context. Beadwork in clothing and regalia, he said, is an artwork in itself.

Regalia is culturally, spiritually and personally significant clothing worn during ceremonies, dances and other important events.

Brooklyn Park-based artist Kappenman, 35, stood near White Hawk’s large-scale 2020 photography installation “I Am Your Relative,” a collaboration with Ho-Chunk artist Tom Jones that seeks to dispel harmful stereotypes about Indigenous women and humanize their stories.

Kappenman calls her chance meeting with White Hawk more than 10 years ago their “pow wow love story.”

She zoomed in on White Hawk, who was wearing the finest, most “beautiful quillwork I’ve ever seen ― like quilled regalia,” she said.

When she and White Hawk connected, Kappenman asked White Hawk if she could teach her and her sister how to do porcupine quillwork.

At the time, Kappenman was going through a tough time in her culinary career and her relationship.

In 2017, White Hawk and Kappenman received a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Mentor Artist Fellowship. White Hawk taught Kappenman how to do tack-down stitching, and together they learned from Ojibwe quillwork artists. Acclaimed Ojibwe artist Melvin Losh taught them quill box style.

Kappenman has worked with White Hawk on many projects since, including the “Carry” sculptures, copper buckets and ladles wrapped in buckskin, with painted and beaded designs and long fringes of buckskin flowing onto the floor.

“I’ve never not seen her authentic,” said Kappenman about White Hawk. “Usually people reveal inauthentic behaviors. I’ve never seen her be a weirdo.”

This year was big for White Hawk, and 2026 promises to be even bigger.

Bringing White Hawk’s work to the Remai Modern in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, connects the Oceti Ŝakowiŋ homelands — an alliance of seven Dakota, Lakota and Nakota groups.

“There is a lot of conversation and work to be done in that cross-border space, which is part of the reason why we wanted to bring Dyani’s exhibition to Remai Modern,” Hogue, the curator, said.

White Hawk “definitely has a lot of fans here in Canada,” she added.

In 2026, White Hawk also will debut commissions at New York’s JFK International Airport’s new Terminal 6 and at the Portland International Airport in Portland, Ore.

At JFK, she will have a medallion mosaic 16 feet in diameter, drawing from Lakota art and teachings, with messages reminding travelers of the interconnectedness of the cosmos, bodies, land, water and life. Through honoring our relatedness, she believes, we can build healthier futures.

In Portland, she’ll install a 55-by-9-foot glass tile piece inspired by Mount Hood, water, morning and night skies, the landscape, and Lakota and Pacific Northwest tribal nations art forms.