Dyani White Hawk Exhibition: A Chat With Curator Jade Powers
The beauty of the Dyani White Hawk exhibition draws us into conversations about the important and long history of Native art-making practice and its role in Abstraction.
Jade Powers. Photo by Grace Pritchett
New to the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Speaking to Relatives is a major solo exhibition of mixed-media works by Minneapolis-based artist Dyani White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota, born 1976). Curated by Jade Powers, this ten-year survey of painting, sculpture, photography, video, and installation presents White Hawk’s unique merging of the visual language of abstraction with Lakota art forms. Her work expresses a shared formal and conceptual practice and acknowledges the significance of Indigenous art as American art.
Jade Powers is the assistant curator at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri where she organizes exhibitions including Dyani White Hawk: Speaking to Relatives (2021), Dawoud Bey: Selections from Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2020), Joiri Minaya: Divergences (2020), Child’s Play: An Exploration of Adolescence (2019), Color Application (2019), Abstracted Wonders: The Power of Lines (2018), and Deconstructing Marcus Jansen (2018).
Before joining Kemper Museum, Powers was the 2017-2018 Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellow at Saint Louis Art Museum. There, Powers created the first museum-wide gallery guide to comprehensively highlight works by artists of African descent. Powers has also been a Visiting Critic at Kansas City Art Institute, University of Kansas, and Washington University St. Louis as well as a juror for several artist awards. Powers is currently the visiting lecturer for the MFA graduate seminar in the Department of Visual Art for the 2020-2021 Academic Year at the University of Kansas. She studied art history, religious studies, and post-colonial theory at DePauw University and Indiana University-Bloomington.
After seeing Dyani White Hawk: Speaking to Relatives, it’s clear that Jade has made her mark on the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Keep reading to learn more about the curation process behind Dyani White Hawk: Speaking to Relatives - I bet it’s going to be different than any museum exhibition you’ve seen.
Photo courtesy of Kemper Museum
What was it like curating the exhibition? What felt most important for you to include?
I really enjoyed curating Dyani White Hawk: Speaking to Relatives. I have a wonderful team at Kemper Museum as well as a wonderful partner in White Hawk and her gallery, Bockley Gallery. I also worked with really strong writers, editors, and designers to bring together the catalogue. For me, the most important thing to include was a well-rounded understanding of her work. Including earlier works to demonstrate how she uses the moccasin motif, including video and photographic work (a new media for her), sculpture, beadwork, and paintings all were equally important so that the audience could understand the significance of her practice and her message of inclusion of Native voices and people--both in general and in art history.
Photo courtesy of Kemper Museum
What is your creative process for curating? Where do you draw inspiration from?
I honestly love everything about curating an exhibition. It is exciting to share my research and expertise with Kansas City communities and beyond. I also very much enjoy creating programs that allow people to engage with works in meaningful ways. I take my biggest inspiration from thinking about people who are seeing meaningful work for the first time and thinking about people experiencing their cultural references in a museum setting.
When curating an exhibition, how much do you take into consideration what's going on in the world? Are there specific themes you leaned into since this exhibition was going up in 2021?
My interest aligns strongly with equity, so right now I am closely attuned to important conversations happening as museums and institutions thinking about diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion. It proved to be incredibly poetic that conversations surrounding inclusion are happening while Speaking to Relatives is on view. My career goals center around presenting work by underrepresented artists, and I am so happy that my first major exhibition at Kemper Museum aligned with this priority.
White Hawk’s work is perfectly suited for 2021. She has said many times that it is important that her work is beautiful. With the uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic, I wanted to make sure the work in this exhibition was beautiful both in person and virtually in case people are not able to view and experience the work in person. The beauty of the work sets the tone and draws us into conversations about the important and long history of Native art-making practice and its role in Abstraction.
New menu items at Cafe Sebastienne inspired by the Dyani White Hawk exhibition. Photo by Grace Pritchett
Outside of the gallery space, what connections were made to make Dyani White Hawk: Speaking to Relatives feel like it was part of the whole museum?
The work and ideas at play in Speaking to Relatives is in conversation with the artwork throughout the museum from our Permanent Collection and other exhibitions on view. For example, I included a Sean Scully (Irish, born 1945) work titled The Moroccan that speaks both to the language of Western stripe paintings that White Hawk references but also to conversations about cross-cultural experiences. Atrium project artist Joiri Minaya uses photography and collage to discuss ideas of reclamation and female agency. This ties in nicely with White Hawk’s work as she also discusses reclamation of ideas and land.
By coordinating with works in the museum, Café Sebastienne, and the Museum Shop we have been able to continue important conversations focused on in White Hawk’s work and central to the themes of Speaking to Relatives throughout the museum. We worked with the café, Chef Rick Mullins and his team create culinary experiences inspired by White Hawk’s work. In the Museum Shop, our shop manager thoughtfully stocks limited edition puzzles, magnets, and postcards of White Hawk’s work at accessible price points. We are also stocking jewelry made by White Hawk as well as by local artists, the exhibition catalogue, and a selection of other books related to the exhibition.
After seeing Dyani White Hawk's work, what do you suggest people check out next? Any books, movies, other forms of media, or other artists that you'd love to shout out?
After viewing Speaking to Relatives I might recommend reading the Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists catalogue. I also really enjoyed Tommy Orange’s 2018 novel, There There. Both are available in the Kemper Museum Shop. Hearts of Our People was a group exhibition of Native female artists organized at the Minneapolis Institute of Art that did a wonderful job of highlighting the meaningful careers and artistic practices of the more than 115 artists honored in the exhibition. There There is a novel that follows a group of Native people as they prepare for a Pow Wow in California while also discussing ideas of identity and history.
Dyani White Hawk: Speaking to Relatives runs Thursday, February 18, 2021 to Sunday, May 16, 2021. Find more info on the exhibition and reserve your ticket here.
Photography Credits
Images from the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art
Credit: Installation view, Dyani White Hawk: Speaking to Relatives, February 18–May 16, 2021, Charlotte Crosby Kemper Gallery, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo: E. G. Schempf, 2021.
