On November 19, 2025, The Block Museum welcomed artists Dyani White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota) and Caroline Kent for an in-depth conversation on abstraction, artistic lineage, and the lived experiences that shape their practices. Co-presented with Northwestern’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Research (CNAIR) as the Fall 2025 Indigenous Feminisms keynote, the program brought together two leading voices in contemporary abstraction whose work reimagines form, language, and cultural narrative.

Megan Baker (Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma), Assistant Professor of Anthropology, opened the evening by situating White Hawk’s practice within Indigenous feminisms. She noted how White Hawk’s work “exemplifies Indigenous feminism’s dual purpose of critique and affirmation of Indigenous life,” pointing toward the artist’s sustained engagement with Lakota philosophies and with the intergenerational knowledge embedded in beadwork, quillwork, and community-centered making.

As the conversation unfolded, White Hawk reflected on her early experiences of abstraction, which were rooted in Indigenous artistic practices long before she encountered Western art history in graduate school. Her remarks reframed abstraction not as a modernist innovation but as a much older visual language.

“I learned how to see abstraction through our practices first, before it was ever translated onto stretched canvas. People were practicing painted abstraction on this continent long before stretched canvas showed up — and that was the work of women.”

– Dyani White Hawk

White Hawk spoke about the challenges of navigating academic art history while honoring the Indigenous aesthetic systems that had shaped her vision from childhood. Her comments underscored how narratives of abstraction are expanding to recognize the histories and makers long excluded from the conversation.

Caroline Kent shared parallel reflections from her own early career, describing a moment during graduate school when she began actively seeking out Black artists and histories that would help her understand her place within a broader artistic lineage. She spoke to abstraction’s capacity to unsettle and reconfigure received narratives:

“For me, abstraction can be subversive — it can act up. As painters, we’re looking back at the canon, but abstraction also lets us question it, push against it, and find our own way through.”

– Caroline Kent

Their conversation showed how artists draw on community and lived experience to shape their work, and how abstraction becomes a place to express those connections.

The full recording now available to view