Tapun Ša Win
The work of Sičáŋǧu Lakota multimedia artist Dyani White Hawk combines Lakota cultural art forms, such as beadwork and quillwork, with acrylic-based easel painting.
In Tapun Ša Win, White Hawk renders two figures from a Lakota narrative: Tapun Ša Win, or Red Cheeked Woman, and her husband Star Man. In the story, Tapun Ša Win and Star Man fall in love on earth, and she must leave her home to live with Star Man’s family in the sky. Tapun Ša Win becomes pregnant and filled with nostalgia for the world she left behind. She tries to return to her family on earth through a hole in the sky but tragically falls to her death. Star Man, overcome with grief, hides away in solitude and becomes the North Star. Tapun Ša Win foregrounds Lakota culture not only through its subject matter but also through its patterned design and material choices. To create Tapun Ša Win and Star Man’s bodies, White Hawk outlined their silhouettes, cut from buckskin, with beadwork of alternating colors. Delicately applied quillwork identifies them as individuals from the story. By using these materials, White Hawk engages in a continuation of Lakota artistic traditions that have been practiced by women for millennia.
About the Artist
Dyani White Hawk (b. 1976), a multidisciplinary artist and a woman of Sičáŋǧu Lakota and European American ancestry, was raised within Native and urban American communities. She earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 2008 and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2011. She served as the gallery director and curator for the All My Relations Gallery in Minneapolis, where she is currently based, from 2011 to 2015.
White Hawk's painting and sculptural works reflect her own cross-cultural experiences through the combination of influences from modern abstract painting and Lakota art forms. Some are executed strictly in paint on canvas, while others incorporate materials like beads, porcupine quillwork, and buckskin, weaving aesthetics and concepts from multiple, intertwined histories. White Hawk's studio practice includes employing family members, such as her daughter Nina Polk and her mother-in-law Helen Polk, to assist in completing beadwork for massive installations. Her recent work in performance, video, and photography focuses on issues of Indigenous language, women's rights, and the necessity of nurturing cross-cultural relationships. The driving force of her practice is to encourage conversations that challenge the under representation of Native arts, people, and voices in our national consciousness, while highlighting the truth and necessity of equality and intersectionality.
Support for White Hawk's work has included the 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2024 Creative Capital grant, 2023 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, 2019 United States Artists Fellowship in Visual Art, and Eiteljorg Fellowship for Contemporary Art, among many others. Her work is in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC; IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico; and the Aktá Lakota Museum, Chamberlain, South Dakota.
Tapun Ša Win
Free and open to the public with a general site admission ticket.
On loan from Art Bridges. Support provided by Art Bridges.