Love Language: Collaboration as Practice

Dyani White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Minneapolis. White Hawk’s work was featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial and is on view in the current mid-career survey Dyani White Hawk: Love Language, co-organized by the Walker Art Center and Remai Modern, Saskatoon. She has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, Creative Capital, Anonymous Was a Woman, Joan Mitchell Foundation and McKnight Foundation. Her work can be found within collections such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Brooklyn Museum; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Tom Jones (Ho-Chunk) is an artist, curator, writer, and educator. He holds a BFA in painting from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an MFA in photography and an MA in museum studies from Columbia College in Chicago. Jones’s artwork is a commentary on Native American identity, experience, and perception. His work examines how Native culture is represented through popular culture and raises questions about these depictions of identity by both Native and non-Native people. He continues to work on an ongoing photographic essay on the contemporary life of his tribe, the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin. Jones’s artwork is in numerous private and public collections, including the National Museum of the American Indian, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Museum of Contemporary of Native Arts, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Polaroid Corporation, Sprint Corporation, and Microsoft. Jones is Professor of Photography, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Talon Bazille Ducheneaux is a rap artist, producer and sound designer from the Cheyenne River Lakota and Crow Creek Dakota tribes. While he holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, his work and life is surrounded in music and sound. He currently serves as the manager of Wicahpi Olowan Music Program/Recording Studio, through First Peoples Fund & Playing For Change Foundation, which is located in the Oglala Lakota Artspace in Kyle, South Dakota. His albums, such as <em>Creator Bless the Underground</em>, are in the rap and hip-hop genres, mixed with flavors of philosophy and culture stemming from his Dakota and Lakota background, struggle, and resilience. His work in sound design has spanned visual art installations to theater productions, including the work <em>RELATIVE</em> (2023) with artist Dyani White Hawk and sound designer Leya Hale, and <em>For The People</em> as Indigenous Music Consultant, written by Larissa Fasthorse and Ty Defoe, which premiered at the Guthrie Theatre in 2023.

Leya Hale is a 2025 Bush Fellow and documentary filmmaker from the Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota and Diné Nations. Based in Minnesota, she is a multiple regional Emmy Award–winning producer for Twin Cities PBS, where her work elevates Indigenous lifeways and addresses pressing social issues. She is best known for her nationally broadcast films <em>The People’s Protectors</em> and <em>Bring Her Home</em>, both distributed by PBS. Her recent documentary <em>The Electric Indian</em> won the Dog Iron Award for Best American Indian Feature at the 2024 Will Rogers Motion Picture Festival and is being distributed nationally by American Public Television. Hale is a 2020 recipient of the Sundance Institute’s Merata Mita Fellowship for Indigenous Artists. Her work has screened at festivals such as Big Sky and been featured by the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. Through powerful storytelling and cultural advocacy, Hale fosters deeper understanding and connection between Native and non-Native audiences alike.

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