Making a deep dive into her museum exhibit Love Language with my Meta RB glasses
In the past month, I have visited Dyani White Hawk’s Walker Art Center exhibition Love Language several times. After the second viewing, on leaving the museum overwhelmed, I asked myself: How can I convey this experience to friends who have not yet encountered the work? After careful thought, one word asserted itself—insistently, and simply: PROFOUND.
What began as a routine museum visit became a compound experience that unfolded, layer by layer, like the work itself. The more time I spent studying White Hawk’s art, the more my understanding deepened—not only of the work, but of the histories, values, and philosophies embedded within it. The exhibition spans fifteen years of practice and is remarkably cohesive, guided by four recurring principles: See, Honor, Nurture, and Celebrate. These are not slogans. They are ethical positions, offered to the viewer as ways of being in relation—to history, to art, and to each other.
Because of my background, this work is deeply personal. I’ll get to that—but first, some viewing context. I have Stargardt’s disease, a genetic form of macular degeneration. My peripheral vision remains intact, but my central vision has deteriorated to the point that I am unable to read text. For the past five years, most of my museum visits were made with friends who generously read captions and wall text aloud for me. Now, that limitation has been bridged by my Meta Ray-Ban glasses.
Using the built-in Meta AI, I can tap and hold the right bow of the glasses, say “look and read,” and the glasses photograph the wall text and read it aloud to me. This creates a multitasking experience: while the text is being read, I can simultaneously view the work—absorbing color, texture, scale, and material. Instead of pausing to read, I am able to see and listen at the same time. The result is immersion rather than interruption. Oddly, this means the glasses now give me a deeper experience than I had when I was fully sighted.
On my first visit, the viewing experience felt comfortably familiar. White Hawk’s work is framed within the narrative context of contemporary Euro-American art—a genre to which the Walker Art Center is committed, and one I have studied avidly for fifty years.
The accompanying text and videos are exceptionally clear and extensive—more so than in most museum exhibitions. Early on, White Hawk describes her practice as “an expression of love—the love of making; the love of community; the love of color, texture, joy, and critical thinking.” That statement resonated, because it describes what the work does as much as what it means. She also explains how her practice reflects Lakota culture, a culture unfamiliar to most Americans. Being about identity and culture, all of this is complex. Fortunately—as great art does—White Hawk’s work embodies that complexity beautifully, uniquely, and profoundly.
One early piece, Untitled, Blue and White Stripes (The History of Abstraction), quietly reframes an entire art-historical narrative. By placing lane-stitch beadwork—an Indigenous abstraction with thousands of years of history—over a painted background referencing mid-twentieth-century American abstraction, White Hawk makes a powerful but measured claim: abstraction did not begin with modernism. Indigenous artists were there all along. The work doesn’t accuse; it invites acknowledgment.
Throughout the exhibition, White Hawk’s philosophy becomes increasingly clear. She understands abstraction as a human practice rather than a Western invention. Her recurring motifs—moccasin vamps, vertical marks evoking quillwork, and the kapemni symbol of balance and interconnection—operate simultaneously as formal elements and cultural signifiers. They honor ancestral knowledge while asserting Native presence at the center of contemporary art.
The political dimensions of the exhibition are equally powerful. Works such as I Am Your Relative confront the ongoing crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women with clarity and dignity, grounding activism in kinship and relational responsibility. Elsewhere, materials such as ledger paper and beadwork carry the weight of loss, survival, and continuity.
Perhaps the most lasting idea for me comes from White Hawk’s statement: “I believe that beauty is medicinal.” This exhibition embodies that belief. Beauty here is not decorative; it is restorative. It acknowledges pain without being consumed by it, and it insists—through care, precision, and joy—that healing is possible.
An eight minute walk through filmed with my Meta glasses.
I was unprepared for the effect this exhibition would have on me. Upon reflection, I recognize that several forces were at work. First, I am an artist who has been deeply embedded in art for years. I lived and worked in New York City for forty-five years. My studios were in SoHo and Tribeca. I had exhibitions. My friends were artists. For twenty-five years, I supported myself as a graphic designer in mid-town, often spending my lunch breaks in the 57th Street galleries or at the Museum of Modern Art just three blocks away. Until I began losing my central vision, every visit to the Metropolitan Museum reaffirmed my conviction that I could never leave Manhattan. Eventually, though, my eyes betrayed me and in 2018, my wife and I moved back to Minneapolis, where I had attended university and where family and friends still live.
Another consequential connection is my having grown up in South Dakota. My great-grandparents on both sides were homesteaders. My parents grew up on those farms and became teachers. I was born in the Black Hills, a sacred place for the Sioux—a Western name for a people who define themselves using as Lakota. My knowledge about them was limited, but it exists. I had Native American friends, knew the reservations were there, and yet my early understanding was formed not is school but primarily by popular culture.. Later, in high school, one of my friends was Melvin Rousseau. This is not to say I understood much about his culture. We were simply boys on our way to becoming American men. It wasn’t until my thirties—and only after I was established in Manhattan—that I became academically curious and began to question what I thought I knew about our shared homeland.
I came to the exhibit knowing, however imperfectly, something of the injustice Native Americans have suffered at the hands of conquering Europeans, missionaries, profiteers, and the machinery of colonizing expansion. Dyani White Hawk correctly uses the term erasure to name that fate What was threatened was not only land, but presence, memory, and cultural continuity itself.
That knowledge deepens everything. This is an exhibition of beauty, creativity, nurturance, and survival in the face of injustice. Its power does not depend on anger or militancy. It is steadier than that, and more lasting. Love Language bears witness through clarity, dignity, and form.
Using the vocabulary of contemporary Western art, White Hawk expresses her cultural values through painting, prints, sculpture, and video. What moved me most was the grace and intelligence of that achievement. She enters that language without surrendering to it. She expands it.
As a fourth-generation Anglo Dakotan and a New York artist, I came believing I was enlightened. Those credentials gave me insight most museum-goers do not have. But the result was a humbling experience. I left realizing that my assumed understanding, though not false, was very limited.
Yes, I have come to the conclusion that my assertion that growing up in South Dakota made me knowledgeable about the Native American experience was delusional.
In recent months I have come to know a Native woman, and through her I have glimpsed hardships and dislocations I had never truly understood. In her office, she calmly told me about, at age 5, being kidnapped with her younger sister by their alcoholic white grandmother. She was nine when the were discovered and put into foster care. For too many, Life on the Rez, is dysfunctional.
That conversation changed me. It made clear how deep the wounds can be, how confounding identity can become in lives marked by mixed heritage, displacement, and historical neglect. (Erasure)
In addition, I argue that, compared to other ethnic minorities. Native Americans have less organized advocacy. By American, not to mention, Christian ideals, the cruel injustice that has been forced on them is exceptionally abhorrent.
This exhibit, Love Language embodies a rare strength: it bears witness without bitterness, affirms culture without defensiveness, and makes survival visible through grace. That is why it feels so distinctive for me. It is profoundly humbling.
EXTERNAL LINKS
VIDEOS
Dyani White Hawk: The Intersection of Lakota & Contemporary Art
Whitney Biennial 2022: Dyani White Hawk
Artist Talk—Dyani White Hawk: Sacred Geometry and Contemporary Art | Harvard
