A multidisciplinary artist with Sičangu Lakota and European ancestry, Dyani White Hawk has recently presented Infinite We, a sculpture based on the abstract Lakota symbol of kapémni, realised in enamel on copper published by Beyer Projects and manufactured by Incalmi.

Over the last fifteen years, Dyani White Hawk has worked intensely on the kapémni motif. Rooted in Lakota visual tradition, it consists of two mirrored triangles balanced at the center in an hourglass shape that symbolises the relationship between earth and sky, the physical and the spiritual. Infinite We realises the kapémni form as a three-dimensional volume: about three metres tall and one and a half metres in diameter, it features 360 enameled copper trapezoids, all handmade by Incalmi in its Venice workshop. The sculpture was produced by Beyer Projects, a publisher of sculpture and artist editions based in New York that works with leading contemporary artists.

Raised within both Native and urban communities, and educated at tribal colleges and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dyani White Hawk reflects on the marginalisation of Native artistic traditions, which have long been categorised as craft, design, self-taught expression, ethnography or anthropology – anything but art in its own right. She notes that formal study still centres European and European-American art history, while Native communities didn’t have the privilege of seeing their own cultures represented. Also, she challenges the way abstraction is taught in academia, and in particular the idea that European and European American men founded it, arguing instead that abstraction is a human practice present across the globe for millennia, a human response to greater thoughts.

Her practice seeks to bridge this gap by placing abstraction rooted in Lakota visual tradition in active dialogue with mid-20th-century American painting. «It’s not two worlds. We may have multiple cultural influences, but we all are sharing a common world», she states in the Art21 interview. Reinterpreting kapémni at architectural scale through artisanal techniques, Infinite We becomes a gesture toward dialogue between Native and Western art histories.
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Beyond its conceptual depth, Infinite We stages another conversation: the one between Dyani White Hawk and Incalmi, where cultural exchange is built through hand-making and material knowledge. First presented in the major solo exhibition Dyani White Hawk: Love Language at the Walker Art Center inMinneapolis, and later featured in the New York Times, the sculpture beautifully embodies this encounter.