A fierce advocate of women’s critical and central role within the narrative of American art, Sičáŋǧu Lakota artist Dyani White Hawk creates works which plumb the histories of Native women’s extensive contributions to abstraction.¹ White Hawk synthesizes Native artforms such as porcupine quillwork and beadwork with Western practices such as easel painting to create innovative forms of artistic expression. She is perhaps best known for minimalist acrylic paintings that simulate the texture of porcupine quillwork on large-scale canvases. However, her oeuvre also includes paintings that engage with figuration, such as this piece, which was created as a commission for a 2017 exhibition at the Center for American Indian Research and Native Studies (CAIRNS) on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Like her abstract work, Tapun Sa Win melds Native and Western aesthetic sensibilities. The work utilizes Northern Plains beadwork and quillwork traditions as well as acrylic painting on canvas. In a rich interplay between these two artistic legacies, the silhouettes in the center of the work were added to the painting using techniques drawn from Lakota assemblage practices, yet simultaneously recall modernist collage in their form.

      The title of the work, which refers a traditional Lakota narrative, holds the key to its interpretation. Tapun Sa Win, or Red Cheek Woman, is a maiden who falls in love with an enigmatic man from the stars.² After she leaves her village to marry him and live with his people in the sky, the young woman is plagued with homesickness. She soon discovers a hole in the ground of the sky world, sees her family through it, and attempts to reach them by climbing a braid. Tragically, Tapun Sa Win falls to her death, and in the aftermath, her husband’s grief and refusal to move transforms him into the North Star. Her son, meanwhile, is miraculously discovered next to her body and becomes a member of her relatives’ community before returning to the sky world as a young man. In the painting, White Hawk depicts the star-crossed lovers as silhouettes made out of smoked buckskin, their bodies outlined in beadwork.

      In interviews, White Hawk has noted that Plains women wielded and perfected concepts of abstraction in their beadwork and parfleche bags long before its adoption in Western artistic practices.³ Here, the kaleidoscopic rays painted around the figures directly reference the designs found in beadwork-adorned objects created by Northern Plains tribes. Throughout these geometric patterns, the slightly uneven application of the paint—translucent in some instances, opaque in others—adds a naturalistic, handmade element to the formal design. The colors of the rays are mirrored—what is yellow, green, blue, and red at the top of the canvas appears as white on the bottom, and vice versa—evoking the two worlds of the narrative on which this painting is based. The careful consideration of the colors and orientation of the figures is the result of experiments by the artist that played with the work’s arrangement and with the materials. The quillwork and beadwork of the final composition are all created using traditional techniques; the brain-tanned buckskin White Hawk carefully sourced and used for the silhouettes retains a faint aroma of the smoke used in its making.⁴ In this synthesis of dual creative traditions, Tapun Sa Win celebrates and invites audiences to appreciate a meaningful Lakota narrative through both formal and figurative entry points.

¹Kathleen Ash-Milby, “Speaking the Language of Abstraction: Dyani White Hawk,” in Jade Powers, et al, Dyani White Hawk: Speaking to Relatives, (Kansas City, MO: Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, 2021), 12-18.

² “Tapun Sa Win,” Center for American Indian Research and Native Studies (CAIRNS), Accessed July 21, 2022, https://www.nativecairns.org/projects/leap/tapun-sa-win/tapunsawinnarrative.html.

³ Autry Vision, “Curator's Circle Salon: Dyani White Hawk,” YouTube video, 59:10, February 12, 2021.

⁴The author thanks the Dyani White Hawk for noting this. Conversation with the artist, July 29, 2022.