Dyani White Hawk Polk

Dyani is an award winning artist that blends modern abstract painting and Native American beadwork and porcupine quillwork. She draws from her multi-cultural background and education to create paintings and mixed media works that speak to her upbringing as a Lakota woman in an urban American landscape.

Through her fellowship and additional funding, Dyani made the leap to fulfill her life long dream of being a full time artist in her own studio space.  "As a woman of Lakota and European ancestry my life experiences have been a continual negotiation of both Western and Indigenous educations, value systems, and worldviews. Through the amalgamation of symbols and motifs derivative of both Lakota and Western abstraction, my artwork examines, dissects, and patches back together pieces of each in a means to provide an honest representation of self and culture."

Dyani's works have been acquisitioned into the collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Tweed Museum of Art, Akta Lakota Museum, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin Union Art Collection and the Robert Penn Collection of Contemporary Northern Plains Indian Art of the University of South Dakota as well as many organizational and private collections. She is represented by Shiprock Santa Fe www.shiprocksantafe.com and the Bockley Gallery in Minneapolis, www.bockleygallery.com.