Alexander Gray Associates announces co-representation of Minneapolis-based artist Dyani White Hawk (b. 1976) in partnership with Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis. This October, White Hawk’s career continues to gain significant institutional recognition with the survey exhibition Love Language opening at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Her first solo exhibition with Alexander Gray Associates is scheduled for fall 2026.
“We are delighted to be in collaboration with our colleague Todd [Bockley], who has represented Dyani for over a decade,” shared Alexander Gray. “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. From this context, Todd and his team have strategically advanced Dyani’s artistic ambitions and carefully shepherded her work with institutions, commissions, and exhibitions, including her forthcoming survey at the Walker Art Center. We are honored to be invited by Bockley Gallery to join this rich legacy, as we expand Dyani’s platform, including her first solo gallery exhibition in New York, in fall 2026.”
White Hawk turns a critical eye toward the construction of American art history. She lays bare the exclusionary hierarchies that have long governed cultural legitimacy, authority, value, and visibility. Her paintings, sculptures, and installations ask viewers to consider how such structures shape not only aesthetic judgment and cultural memory, but also the terms of community itself. In this light, White Hawk reframes Indigenous art and Western abstraction as inseparable practices—linked by a shared history that dominant narratives have labored to separate and obscure.
White Hawk brings together Lakota and Western artistic techniques and practices of abstraction with deliberate fluency. Drawing on her Sičáŋǧu Lakota and Euro-American heritage, she describes her methods as deepening her “… understanding of the intricacies of self and culture, correlations between personal and national history, and Indigenous and mainstream art histories.” Her paintings translate and extend the meditative labor and artistic strength of Lakota practices into fields of saturated color and lines of measured brushwork, each mark imbued with the concentrated attention long sustained by Native women in their work. The effect is immediate and visceral; surfaces that register in the body before the intellect—works whose presence unsettles the categories of Eurocentric art history. By highlighting and forging connections between Indigenous practices and movements such as Color Field painting and Minimalism, White Hawk produces canvases that pulse with geometric clarity and chromatic intensity. As she notes, they honor “the importance of the contributions of Lakota women and Indigenous artists to our national artistic history … as well as the ways in which Indigenous artists helped shape the evolution of the practices of Western artists who were inspired by their work.”
This approach situates White Hawk within a lineage of Native artists who navigated and complicated the terrain of modernism. George Morrison, for instance, brought Ojibwe landscape sensibilities to Abstract Expressionism, while Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s flag paintings share symbolic ground with Jasper Johns’s work to probe questions of American history and identity. White Hawk extends this tradition while clarifying its stakes. The innovations of Native women—whether in color or composition—did not follow Western abstraction, but rather preceded, shaped, and existed alongside it.
White Hawk’s practice also moves decisively beyond the canvas through installations such as her ongoing LISTEN series. This multi-channel video work presents Native women speaking their Indigenous languages on tribal homelands without subtitles. The series asserts belonging, sharing, and presence on self-determined terms while also illustrating the profound and lasting effects of colonization. Collaboration is central to White Hawk’s project. Family members, friends, and community partners work together in the studio to create beaded sculptures and mixed media paintings using glass beads, sinew, and buckskin. These pieces insist on the conceptual sophistication of Indigenous making while celebrating the collective modes of creation that Native women have practiced for generations. White Hawk’s public commissions, created through collaborations with glass and ceramic studios, extend this ethos into civic space, ensuring Indigenous communities see themselves—and their artistic histories—centered where they have long been marginalized.
At its core, White Hawk’s practice is sustained by ancestral respect and guided by value systems that center relationality and care for all life. By addressing inequities affecting Native communities, she creates opportunities for cross-cultural connection and prompts a critical examination of how artistic and national histories have been constructed. Her work invites viewers to evaluate current societal value systems and their capacity to support equitable futures.
This approach manifests in paintings and sculptures that serve as both aesthetic explorations and strategic interventions, illuminating the reciprocal influences that bind Indigenous and broader American art histories. Attentive to how artistic representation mirrors larger social structures, White Hawk’s work addresses omissions that have perpetuated exclusion and erasure. What emerges is art that joins formal rigor with political consciousness, advocating for a more honest and holistic American cultural narrative—one in which Indigenous art is recognized as a foundational and lasting force.
“As we, Bockley Gallery, assisted Dyani in finding the right co-representing gallery in NYC, we sought a gallery whose people and legacy understand the many benefits of working together in a strategic alliance to advance artists’ careers,” Todd Bockley, founder of Bockley Gallery, shares. “In Alexander’s distinct program and thoughtful team, we found a partner that listens attentively and shares our endless excitement about Dyani White Hawk, her values, and rigorous practice. Alexander Gray Associates is poised to extend Dyani’s vision and we look forward to many celebrations in the future.”
Alexander Gray Associates
Alexander Gray Associates is a contemporary art gallery in New York City. Through exhibitions, research, and artist representation, the Gallery spotlights artistic movements and artists active in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Influential in cultural, social, and political spheres, these artists are notable for creating work that crosses geographic borders, generational contexts, and artistic disciplines. Alexander Gray Associates is an organization committed to anti-racist and feminist principles.
Alexander Gray Associates is a member of the Art Dealers Association of America.