Dyani White Hawk in “Between Worlds”

Version without descriptive audio available here.

Surrounded by friends and family working in her Minneapolis studio, one of today’s most acclaimed artists, Dyani White Hawk, finds continuities and commonalities between Indigenous and European abstraction, creating paintings and sculptures that incorporate elements of Lakota beadwork and porcupine quillwork alongside aesthetics of European easel painting and Modernist abstraction. Across years of artistic practice, White Hawk’s work has grown in scale and ambition, completing monumental works comprising hundreds of thousands of glass beads, a 30-foot-long tile mosaic, and countless works of sculpture, painting, and video. This documentary short captures this moment of growth and possibility in the artist’s career, revisiting the places where her practice began, like the Santa Fe Indian Art Market, and following her to institutions like the Whitney Museum of American Art, where her work calls for a deeper reflection on the erasures and absences in the story of American art. “It’s not two worlds,” says White Hawk, “We may have multiple cultural influences, but we are all sharing one common world, and hopefully making efforts to learn how to collectively do that better.”

This film was directed by Bryan Chang and Travis Wood, produced by Zeshawn Ali and Bryan Chang, edited by Zara Serabian-Arthur, and photographed by Eric Phillips-Horst.