NORMAN, Oklahoma — Sandstone sculptures by Raven Halfmoon (Caddo Nation) embrace the monumental. The artist, whose first major solo exhibition, Raven Halfmoon: Flags of Our Mothers, opened June 25 at The Aldrich Contemporary in Connecticut, situates his work within the canon of Caddo culture and production, while engaging in dialogue with themes that are both intimate and broad.
Halfmoon grew up in Norman, Oklahoma, where she currently lives and works. “I’ve always been a painter and loved to draw during my formative years when I was in high school,” she told me in conversation in her studio. It was during her adolescence that she encountered clay as a medium. “My first touch of clay was with a Caddo elder named Jerry Redford,” she said. “It was my first time handling clay, making traditional pots and learning about the material.” Once Halfmoon enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of Arkansas, she began taking classes and fully immersing herself in the medium to build a solid technical foundation: “C That’s when I learned what clay can do.” Along with her studies and artistic practice at university, she began to focus on her own history, heritage and identity as a Caddo person, yearning not only to know that history, but to express it in through art, eventually earning a BA in Cultural Anthropology alongside her Fine Arts degree.
Looking at Halfmoon’s work, the way she allows paint and ceramics to intersect and interact with each other becomes apparent. The artist treats the stoneware form almost like a canvas, splashing and flooding it with glaze that oozes down the sides, sometimes with embedded text; the words stretch and flow over the padded clay facades. His name is scrawled on several works in bright red, black or white. By writing her name and phrases such as “you don’t look native” or “do you speak Indian”, she not only labels the work, but conveys a message of presence to the viewer — that of his ancestors, his community and himself.
The artist’s hand is also present in the work: his fingers make visible imprints in the clay. Sculpting voluptuous figures with richly dynamic surfaces creates a shared humanity between the work, the artist and the viewer. “Clay in general is so manipulative and there’s such physics,” she shared. “I build things and add clay and smash it and run my hands over it and then take clay out. I add and subtract; it’s just such a special material for me. Although Halfmoon explores other mediums, including a recent interest in bronze and a return to painting, clay will always be central to her practice. “I will always work in clay,” she said. “My ancestors and my tribe had such an intimate relationship with clay, and clay is tied to the earth, and it’s so important where we come from and what [connection] land and what it means.
For his exhibition in Connecticut, co-curated by The Aldrich and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Halfmoon presents pre-existing pieces alongside ambitious new works that push the boundaries of clay. The show encompasses themes of power and Indigenous identity and perspective, and makes room for the stories of Indigenous women. The title, Flags of Our Mothers, has a particular resonance in the artist, a resonance that she hopes to find in the viewer. “I imagine them [my works] as flags because of their size,” she noted. But also, I read Flags of Our Fathers in high school and this is about this fight for our country… but Flags of our mothers, for me, it’s [a reference to] my own experience and what my mother taught me, our fight for our women, our history, my history, the history of my tribe, and so I feel that the pieces pave the way for this new nation of these monumental women who demand to be heard. ”
