white hawk

Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum at Baltimore Museum of Art

Works by Dyani White Hawk and Julie Buffalohead are featured in a recent intiative by the Baltimore Museum of Art titled Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum.

The artwork, perspectives, and histories of Native artists, scholars, and community members are at the center of Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum, a major BMA initiative. The wide-reaching project seeks to begin addressing the historical erasure of Indigenous culture by arts institutions while creating new practices for museums.

The expansive Preoccupied project extends into the galleries and beyond with public programs, nine exhibitions, staff training, and new interpretive texts for artworks throughout the Museum. The curatorial team worked closely with Native artists, curators, and Baltimore-region residents on a community advisory panel to frame the questions this project would ask. In the earliest stages of the initiative, all Preoccupied project participants were invited to an “unconference,” a weekend-long retreat with the exhibitions’ curators, where they discussed Native visibility in the face of colonial oppression.

Dyani White Hawk’s work is on display in Dyani White Hawk: Bodies of Water. Dyani White Hawk presents one new and two existing sculptural works from her Carry series. Each Carry piece, composed of a large copper bucket and ladle adorned with glass beads, bears extravagantly long fringe whose draping emulates arboreal root structures. Alongside the artist’s works, White Hawk selected historic Lakota belongings from the BMA’s collection. Through these works, White Hawk insists upon an interdependence between art and function—and by extension art and life—effectively calling into question art history’s tendency to devalue craft. These works operate as physical metaphors for the carrying of history, cosmology, generational teaching, and deep thought.

Julie Buffalohead’s work is on diplay in Illustrating Agency. This installation highlights the ways in which Native artists have increasingly asserted agency—the exertion of one’s own power—over representations of their communities and identities over time. In the early 20th century, white arts educators encouraged Native artists to create “authentic” art—as defined by settlers—that embraced traditional subject matter while often neglecting present realities. In the decades that followed, generations of artists have shrugged off settler expectations by depicting their community on their own terms. Such work illustrates the modern Native experience, problematizes harmful stereotypes, and pointedly challenges outsider understandings of Indigenous identity.

Learn more about the larger initiative and exhibitions and installations on display here!

Dyani White Hawk Named 2024 Guggenheim Fellow

The Board of Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced their appointment of 188 Guggenheim Fellowships to a distinguished and diverse group of culture-creators working across 52 disciplines. Chosen through a rigorous application and peer review process from a pool of almost 3,000 applicants, the Class of 2024 Guggenheim Fellows was tapped on the basis of prior career achievement and exceptional promise. As established in 1925 by founder Senator Simon Guggenheim, each fellow receives a monetary stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under “the freest possible conditions.”

White Hawk is one of three Minnesotan artists who received the honor, alongside author David Mura and painter Lamar Peterson.

The annual fellowship dates back to 1925 and is one of the most prestigious awards given to scholars and artists who are citizens and permanent residents of the United States and Canada.

Winners are chosen from a pool of approximately 3,000 applicants with about 175 fellowships awarded annually. The fellowship is accompanied by a grant to help fund a specific project. The amount varies from project to project, but past grants have averaged between $40,000 and $55,000.

Read more about the fellowship here!

Dyani White Hawk in Coversation at the Denver Art Museum

As part of the Logan Lecture Series, Rory Padeken, Vicki and Kent Logan Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Denver Art Museum, engages with Dyani White Hawk about her dynamic practice of bringing Indigenous traditions of abstraction into a contemporary context.

This lecture is presented jointly by the departments of Modern and Contemporary Art and Native Arts and will take place on February 27th, 2024 from 6-7pm at the Denver Art Museum.

View the recorded lecture here!

Marking Resilience: Indigenous North American Prints at MFA Boston

Check out this exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston! Marking Resilience: Indigenous North American Prints is on view from November 4, 2023 through March 17, 2024 and features Highpoint Editions work by Dyani White Hawk, Julie Buffalohead, and Andrea Carlson!

Resilience often manifests in work by Indigenous North American artists, for example in its content or simply by increasing visibility to combat erasure in representation. Some Native artists have used the collaborative medium of printmaking as a way of reclaiming their histories and addressing the challenges their communities face today.

Check out MFA Boston’s website for more information and additional programming.

Creative Capital 2024 Awards Granted to Highpoint Editions Artists

Congratulations to both Highpoint Editions Artists Andrea Carlson and Dyani White Hawk on their Creative Capital 2024 Awards!

Creative Capital announced their 2024 “Wild Futures: Art, Culture, Impact” Awards in Visual Arts and Film/Moving Image, totaling $2.5 million in grants to artists for the creation of 50 groundbreaking new works. Chosen via a democratic process of external peer review out of 5,600 applications, these 28 successful visual arts project proposals and 22 film/moving image project proposals, representing 54 artists in total, were awarded on the basis of their innovative new approaches to painting, drawing, sculpture, public art, video art, architecture and design, printmaking, installation, documentary film, experimental film, narrative film, and socially engaged forms. The Creative Capital Award provides each individual artist with unrestricted project funding up to $50,000, which can be drawn down over a multi-year period, bespoke professional development services, and community-building opportunities.

Read more about the Creative Capital Awards here!

White Hawk Named 2023 MacArthur Fellow

Dyani White Hawk is among four artists named 2023 MacArthur Fellows. Along with María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Raven Chacon, and Carolyn Lazard, the Shakopee, Minnesota–based White Hawk is honored along with 19 others for “applying individual creativity with global perspective, centering connections across generations and communities,” in the words of Marlies Carruth, director of the MacArthur Fellows program.

Images courtesy of John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Read more about the fellowship here!

Julie Buffalohead, Andrea Carlson, Dyani White Hawk named Artists of the Year 2019

Star Tribune | Illustrations by Robert Carter • Special to Star Tribune

Star Tribune | Illustrations by Robert Carter • Special to Star Tribune

Highpoint Editions Artists Julie Buffalohead, Andrea Carlson and Dyani White Hawk were three of the six artists named “Star Tribune's 2019 Artists of the Year.” The six honored artists were all part of the groundbreaking exhibition “Hearts of Our People” at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and as the Tribune says were “at the height of their powers” in 2019, having released new work, participating in solo shows and receiving high profile honors.

Read the full article and learn about each artists’ work here…..

Takes Care of Them Suite by Dyani White Hawk

Takes Care of Them Suite by Dyani White Hawk

Highpoint Editions is pleased to announce the completion of a new publication: Wówahokukiya | Lead, Wókaǧe | Create, Nakíčižiŋ | Protect and Wačháŋtognaka | Nurture, four editions of eighteen screenprints created in collaboration with artist Dyani White Hawk.