Celebration with Melon, 1986

To make the strips of beads in Untitled (Black and Iridescent), Dyani White Hawk (Sičangu Lakota) employed traditional Lakota beadwork techniques that date to the early nineteenth century, when Lakota women began to embroider beads they acquired through trade with European settlers onto clothing, jewelry, saddlebags, and regalia, among other creations. She then sewed these thin loomed strips onto the surface of a painted canvas, where they function formally as stripes within a hard-edged geometric abstraction that evokes Eurocentric modern art of the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, the complex intersection of Indigenous and modernist aesthetics forms the core of White Hawk’s practice. She seeks to honor the creative contributions of Lakota artists—primarily women—to the development of abstraction. More broadly, her work reminds us that abstraction was not invented in the twentieth century but rather has roots stretching all over the globe and dates to humankind’s earliest forms of decoration and devotion.