Celebrating its 40th year, Bockley Gallery presents Together: Leslie Smith III & Dyani White Hawk. This dynamic exhibition impresses a conversation within and between the artists’ respective and overlapping commitments to relationality, narrative, and the pictorial as part of the complex histories and futures of abstraction. New and recent two and three dimensional works – from Smith III’s multiform attunements to White Hawk’s geometric honorings – draw attention to surface, structure, and the materiality of objects while emboldening a rigorous love for the practice and potentials of painting that first instigated the artists’ friendship over a decade ago.
Leslie Smith III was born in 1985 in Silver Spring, Maryland, and is based in Madison, Wisconsin. He holds an MFA from the Yale University School of Art (2009) and BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (2007). Recent solo exhibitions include Reaching for Something High, CHART Gallery, New York, NY (2023); The Depth of Thoughts, Galerie Isabelle Gounod, Paris, France (2022); Stranger Days, Maus Contemporary Gallery, Birmingham, AL (2022); and The Passage, Saint-Tugdual Chapel, as part of L’Art dans les Chapelles, Bretagne, France. Recent group exhibitions include Moreover: 50 Paintings, curated by Michelle Grabner, Green Gallery, Milwaukee, WI (2024), and OFFSITE, James Fuentes Gallery, New York, NY (2022). Smith III’s work is collected by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, VA; Birmingham Museum of Art and Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts, Birmingham, AL; and FRAC, Auvergne, France, among others. Among numerous awards, he has received Fellowships from the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2022) and the American Academy in Rome (2009). Smith III is a Professor of Art and Art Department Chair at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Dyani White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota) was born in 1976 in Madison, Wisconsin, and is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2011) and BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico (2008). Featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, followed by a permanent commission at the Whitney Museum of American Art, White Hawk’s art has been the subject of numerous institutional solo shows, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2022), the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art (2022), and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (2021). In 2025, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and Remai Modern, Saskatoon, will present the survey exhibition Dyani White Hawk: Love Language. Collections include the Aktá Lakota Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Denver Art Museum, Gochman Family Collection, Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. White Hawk is the recipient of generous recognitions and awards, most recently, the Guggenheim Fellowship and Creative Capital Grant (both 2024), and MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2023).