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Collection Spotlight: Dyani White Hawk, They Gifted (Day) and They Gifted (Night)

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Artist: Dyani White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota / American, born 1976, Madison, Wisconsin)
Titles: They Gifted (Day) and They Gifted (Night)
Date: 2024
Medium: Color screenprint on Lanaquarelle watercolor paper
Dimensions: 58 x 28 ½ inches each
Credit Line: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Julie and Lawrence Bernstein Family Art Acquisition Fund purchase, 2025.7.1, 2025.7.2

From November 12 to December 14, 2025, Dyani White Hawk’s prints They Gifted (Night) and They Gifted (Day) (2024) will be on view in The Living Room at The Block Museum of Art.

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Dyani White Hawk, a Sičáŋǧu Lakota artist based in Minneapolis, is known for uniting Lakota visual languages with contemporary abstraction. Created during White Hawk’s 2024 residency at Tandem Press, They Gifted (Day) and They Gifted (Night) continue the artist’s exploration of Lakota abstraction and visual language. These paired screenprints introduce a new motif in her practice—the kapemni, a word in Lakota meaning “as above, so below.” The hourglass-shaped form, composed of two connected teepees, links ground and sky, Earth and the spiritual realm. Through this connection in form, White Hawk evokes relationships between people and land, and between forms of life.

White Hawk began each print with a base layer of pearlescent white and then added eight layers of blue, green, yellow, pink, and red. The central kapemni form is filled with small, controlled marks—white in They Gifted (Day) and black in They Gifted (Night)—that resemble beadwork and porcupine quillwork. In Lakota tradition, quillwork is one of the oldest art forms, later joined by beadwork after the introduction of European trade beads. White Hawk incorporates the histories of both materials  into her painting and printmaking. “Before I was doing those things, but it was for cultural practice: making moccasins for dancing, making leggings for dancing, making a dress for myself or my daughter to dance at pow wow or ceremony,” she has said. “I had to figure out how to bring those practices into my studio practice so that I could fulfill the desire for all those things to happen all the time. And I’ve been doing it ever since.” (Schmelzer, 2023)

The zig-zag triangles at the top and bottom of each print reference Lakota beadwork and quillwork motifs, while the horizontal stripes recall Ribbon Skirts—garments worn by women in many Native American communities that embody pride and identity. White Hawk has described abstraction as “a global practice that has been practiced in communities for longer than I think we probably understand… It certainly is a practice that has been practiced on this continent pre-colonization by my ancestors. Distilling complex ideas and thoughts down to the most graceful and poignant gestures… That’s a human process.” (quoted in Tandem Press, 2024)

Curator Jade Powers writes that White Hawk’s repeated marks “mimic soft quillwork and beadwork of Native women creatives, while indicating their relationship to the earth,” asking “why certain gifts of the earth—and of people—are valued over others.” This idea of reciprocal giving and recognition resonates with the title They Gifted. (Powers, 2021)

In speaking about abstraction and Indigenous identity, White Hawk has observed that her work is “not on the surface overtly political—which has been the accepted and expected task of BIPOC artists in recent years. The media will eat up work by artists who spoon-feed education… Artists that aren’t doing that super in-your-face work aren’t always celebrated and supported.” She continues, “My work pulls very directly from Lakota aesthetics, symbolism, teachings and spirituality, and worldviews. Those things are often embedded in the work in ways that people who are within that cultural practice are going to be able to walk up and see. And it’s beautiful to see those things in public art spaces—to see your life reflected within that work.” (Schmelzer 2022)

Sarah Sze, Day (2003)
Sara Sze, Night (2003)

Tom Jones, Peyton Grace Rapp, from the series Strong Unrelenting Spirits (2018)

These recently acquired prints join The Block’s growing collection of contemporary Indigenous art, expanding conversations around abstraction, material, and language. Their formal and conceptual pairings—Day and Night—recall other dual works in the collection, such as Sarah Sze’s Day (2012.3b) and Night (2012.3a). Their reference to beadwork echoes Ho-Chunk artist Tom Jones’s beaded photographic portrait Peyton Grace Rapp (2024.11.2); White Hawk and Jones collaborated previously on the photo-sculpture I Am Your Relative (2020). The prints also resonate with Roman Verotsko’s Derivations of the Laws of the Symbols of Logic (2008.30.3) and Bridget Riley’s Print for the Chicago 8 (2001.20k), which share her interest in pattern, color, and coded systems of meaning.

White Hawk lives and works in Minneapolis. Her work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Baltimore Museum of Art, among others. She has received the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2023), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2024), and an Honorary Doctorate of Humanities from the Institute of American Indian Arts (2024). Her mid-career survey, Dyani White Hawk: Love Language, opens at the Walker Art Center in October 2025. 

–Contributed by Llewyn Blossfeld, Curatorial Associate

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