UW–Madison alumna Dyani White Hawk, a rising star in the Native art world, has received multiple awards and fellowships while participating in a groundbreaking exhibition.
White Hawk, who earned her master of fine arts from the School of Education’s Art Department in 2011, has a painting in, and was on the Exhibition Advisory Board for, “Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists.” The exhibition, which is currently up at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, will travel to Nashville, Tennessee, Washington, D.C., and Tulsa, Oklahoma.
“Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists,” one of the first major exhibition of artwork by Native women, honors the achievement of over 115 artists from the United States and Canada spanning over 1,000 years. The new show, according to MSP magazine, a Minnesotan news outlet, is a radically different approach from how Native American art has been traditionally collected, displayed, and interpreted in western museums. While western museums sever Native art from the artists and communities that created it, this new exhibit pulls “a few thousand years of Native American art out of the obscurities bin of art miscategorization. And it attributes the work, for the first time, to the right gender.”
White Hawk comments on the importance of this show, saying, “Art history has never been taught from an indigenous perspective. It’s taught from a predominantly male, European perspective. It takes a lot of work to unravel that.”
Earlier this year, White Hawk received awards from the Jerome Foundation and the United States Artist Visual Fellowship.
White Hawk is also an Artist Fellow for the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art and will be exhibiting with other fellows later this fall at the museum. Each artist receives a $25,000 unrestricted fellowship award and will be featured in a catalogue. Additionally, works by each fellow will be purchased for the museum’s permanent collection.
Read more about the “Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists” exhibit here, and learn about the Eiteljorg fellowship here.