[2] As an artist, White Hawk's work aesthetic is characterized by a combination of modern abstract painting and traditional Lakota art.
White Hawk's pieces reflect both her Western, American upbringing and her indigenous ancestors mediums and modes for creating visual art.
According to White Hawk "my life experiences have been a continual negotiation of both Western and Indigenous educations, value systems, and worldviews.
White Hawk cites later influences ranging from abstract modernists such as Mark Rothko and Marsden Hartley, to Native history traditional tribal art forms.
[8] White Hawk is known for her easel-sized paintings that depict abstract compositions emphasizing saturated colors arranged in symmetrical and asymmetrical patterns.
[9] Primarily through abstraction, White Hawk examines the relationship of traditional art making in Native American communities to more contemporary practices.
[10] Moccasin toes, ledger drawings, blanket designs, porcupine quills, teepee forms and other Native American motifs often are the subjects of White Hawk's exacting oil paintings.
She writes: "As a woman of Sicangu Lakota and European ancestry, raised among Native communities within urban American environments, my work is an investigation of communal and personal definitions.
[23] White Hawk was commissioned to create Wopila | Lineage (2022), a 14-by-8-foot work composed of a half million glass bugle beads, for the 2022 Whitney Biennial.
The piece, she states, is "meant to honor and show gratitude for the lineage of Lakota women and their contributions to abstraction, for Indigenous women at large and their contributions to art on this continent, for the generations of practiced abstraction that helped nurture and guide the work of the Western artists that were inspired by their work and brought that back into their studios with them as they created easel paintings.