Dyani White Hawk (full name Dyani White Hawk Polk) (born 1976) is a contemporary artist and curator of Sicangu Lakota, German, and Welsh ancestry based out of Minnesota.[1] From 2010 to 2015, White Hawk was a curator for the Minneapolis gallery All My Relations.[2] As an artist, White Hawk's work aesthetic is characterized by a combination of modern abstract painting and traditional Lakota art. White Hawk's pieces reflect both her Western, American upbringing and her indigenous ancestors mediums and modes for creating visual art.
White Hawk's work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, the Ca' Foscari University in Venice, Italy, the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum in Santa Fe, and Minneapolis Institute of Art. Many of White Hawk's works have also been acquisitioned into the collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian and the Tweed Museum of Art.[3] In October 2023, she was named one of the MacArthur Fellows to recognize her art "revealing the underrecognized yet enduring influence of Indigenous aesthetics on modern and contemporary art."[4] In April 2024, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts.[5]