Dyani White Hawk, a star of the 2022 Whitney Biennial, has new representation with the New York–based Alexander Gray Associates. The deal will see White Hawk stick with Minneapolis’s Bockley Gallery, which has long represented her in her home state of Minnesota.
White Hawk is of Sicangu Lakota, German, and Welsh ancestry, and is known for beaded artworks that underscore the role that Native American artists have played in the development of abstraction, which is typically discussed as a Western phenomena.
She often takes forms derived from ledger drawings, bags, and more, and blows them up to scale the size of abstract paintings that regularly appear in museums. But rather than paint, White Hawk often uses beads and quills to make her works, placing her pieces within a spectrum of Native art that spans centuries.
The artist has also made photographs depicting Native women, in an attempt, she has said, to move viewers “to reckon with their humanity.” She has also worked as a curator and, for four years, even ran a Minneapolis gallery called All My Relations Gallery.
“Advocating for the representation of Native artists and communities as well as encouraging critical thinking regarding the ways we teach our National history and art history have been integral parts of my practice,” White Hawk told ARTnews in an email.
Since appearing in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, White Hawk’s work has ascended in prominence. In 2023 she figured in Candice Hopkins’s acclaimed exhibition “Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969,” staged at Bard College’s museum, and in 2024, White Hawk’s work appeared in a traveling show of works owned by Komal Shah and Gaurav Garg, who regularly appear on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list. Her site-specific ceramic mosaic installation Nourish is currently on view at the Whitney Museum in New York.
She has also picked up an array of high-profile awards, including a MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 2023 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2024.
Dyani White Hawk, Nourish, 2024.
©Dyani White Hawk/Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York, and Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis/Whitney Museum
Alexander Gray, the dealer who founded Alexander Gray Associates, praised the new representation deal as a form of collaboration. “With authentic and rigorous commitment, Bockley Gallery has been a critical advocate for Indigenous artists’ development and legacies since its founding in the 1980s in Minneapolis,” he said in a statement to ARTnews, calling the new representation a chance to “expand Dyani’s platform.”
Todd Bockley, founder of Bockley Gallery, said, “We have been aware of the need for Dyani to have representation in New York for years and have been waiting for the right relationship. Alexander Gray Associates has a wonderful reputation as a serious, research-based, artist-centered, and ethics-driven gallery, and they will provide further support and context for Dyani’s extraordinary practice.”
