Raven Halfmoon: Flags of Our Mothers

On view at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts May 18 to September 24, 2024

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum: June 25, 2023 to January 7, 2024

Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts: May 18 to September 24, 2024

I create work that is large and powerful. I build sculptures that demand to be heard and experienced. My artwork exists to break the mold of the romanticized Native American stereotype and to simply say: We are still here and we are powerful.

—Raven Halfmoon

Red, white, and cream colored ceramic sculpture with several faces.

Ceramic sculpture with a red rider on a white horse.

Large white ceramic sculpture of three interconnected women with a red marking on the front.

Co-organized by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts

The Aldrich: June 25, 2023 to January 7, 2024

Bemis Center: May 18 to September 14, 2024

Raven Halfmoon’s practice spans torso-scaled and colossal-sized stoneware sculptures, with some soaring up to twelve feet and weighing over eight hundred pounds. With inspirations that orbit centuries from ancient Indigenous pottery to Moai statues to Land Art, Halfmoon interrogates the intersection of tradition, history, gender, and personal experience. Born and raised in Norman, Oklahoma, she learned about ceramics as a teenager from a Caddo elder. Working mainly in portraiture, Halfmoon hand builds each work using a coil method. Her surfaces are expressive and show deep finger impressions and dramatic dripping glazes—a physicality that presences her as both maker and matter. She fuses Caddo pottery traditions (a history of making mostly done by women) with populist gestures—often tagging her work (a reference to Caddo tattooing). Her palette is specific and matches both the clay bodies she selects and the glazes she fires with—reds (after the Oklahoma soil and the blood of murdered Indigenous women), blacks (referencing the natural clay native to the Red River), and creams. Sometimes she stacks and repeats imagery, creating totemic forms that represent herself and her maternal ancestry while also reinforcing the multiplicities that exist inside all of us. Her works reference stories of the Caddo Nation, specifically her feminist lineage and the power of its complexities. This exhibition will include a combination of new and borrowed works that vary in size and content from over the last five years. Halfmoon will also be creating some of her largest works to date commissioned by The Aldrich and Bemis Center. The artist’s first museum catalogue will accompany the exhibition.

Raven Halfmoon is curated by Amy Smith-Stewart, Chief Curator at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and Rachel Adams, Chief Curator and Director of Programming at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art.

Raven Halfmoon (Caddo Nation) is from Norman, Oklahoma. She attended the University of Arkansas where she earned double bachelor’s degrees in ceramics and cultural anthropology. She has garnered an impressive series of awards and accolades, including being named the 2018 Fund the Change recipient from the Activist and Social Justice Arts Organization in Oklahoma, a Burke Prize finalist at the Museum of Arts and Design, in New York, NY, the American Craft Council Emerging Voices Award, and Ceramics Monthly Emerging Artist—all in 2019. She just concluded a two-year residency at Archie Bray Foundation for Ceramic Arts in Montana.

Installation Images

Installation view of a gallery with large scale ceramic sculptures on white pedestals.

Large ceramic sculpture of a head on a white pedestal in front of glass windows.

Two large-scale figurative ceramic sculptures in a gallery.

Large scale figurative ceramic sculpture with a person standing next to it.

Three large scale figurative ceramic sculptures in a gallery.

Three small sculptures of heads on shelves to the left and a video projection to the right.

Audio

About Flags of Our Mothers

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum · About Flags of Our Mothers

The Caddo Origin Story

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum · The Caddo Origin Story

Video

Curator Talk | Big Ceramic Sculptures: Laura Phipps on Raven Halfmoon

A discussion of Raven Halfmoon’s work through questions of material, scale, and collaboration in context with other contemporary makers of large-scale ceramics led by Laura Phipps, Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Press Release

En Español

Press

“Halfmoon still works with clay, creating monumental sculptures of Indigenous figures, often stacked or set side by side. Each piece is visibly crafted by hand, as revealed by the deep dents left by the artist’s fingers that repeat in a rough pattern. Meanwhile, glazes in symbolic colors—red for the blood of murdered Indigenous women, and black for the clay of the Red River—are poured and dripped on haphazardly. In a way, the sculptures serve as a bridge between tradition and modernity to comment on both historic and ongoing injustices.”
—Artsy

“One piece stands over 12-feet tall that was made in three pieces; one is five-feet tall and four-feet wide, comparable to the size of a full-size bed; and another stands at 9-feet tall. Combined, these three used more than 15,000 pounds of clay that started off as blocks of wet clay, with as many as 10 people helping in the process. 'My ancestors made these large-scale earth works, and so I’ve always been interested from a young age in community and making work together, and that’s how I think of these pieces,' Halfmoon said. 'There were a lot of other hands included in making these works.'”
—CT Insider

“She brings in influences from Caddo tattooing to Land art and Moai sculpture to create pieces that are often monumental in scale yet also intensely personal and richly tactile.”
—The Art Newspaper

“Looking at Halfmoon’s work, the ways in which she allows painting and ceramics to intersect and interact with one another becomes apparent. The artist treats the stoneware form almost like a canvas, splashing and drenching it with glaze that oozes down the sides, sometimes with text incorporated; words stretch and drip across the dimpled clay facades.”
—Hyperallergic

“In that respect, Halfmoon’s sculptures can be read as portraits. Their enormous scale and visual power oppose existing stereotypes and biases, creating new monuments honoring the artist’s Caddo ancestors and traditions, including the elders who taught her ceramic techniques when she was a teenager.”
—Forbes

“My work is this continuum of pushing that traditional knowledge and sharing history while at the same time living in a different new world that includes social media and branding and pop culture. The work is really at this crossroads of sharing that traditional knowledge and history and then being relevant to a fast-paced, materialistic world that we’re now in.”
—Epicenter

“The sheer size and weight of the figural sculptures command attention. As she works, Halfmoon considers the lived experiences of her ancestors—their traditions and the impact of colonization—and seeks to empower her community and uplift their stories. At the same time, she reflects more broadly on the rich heritage of Indigenous peoples, as well as their own tragedies as colonizers forced them off their land. The evidence of her emotions is preserved in the glaze, divots, indentations, and figures that adorn the surfaces of her work.”
—The Brooklyn Rail

“Sampling from myriad Indigenous and Aboriginal traditions and aesthetics, Halfmoon’s stoneware sculptures reference her matrilineal heritage as well as traditions and histories of the Caddo Nation through portraiture, handmade impressions in clay, recurring imagery, and deeply intentional glazes and color choices.”
—Hyperallergic

“I do a lot of human forms. I do a lot of forms that look like my mother and grandmother. I think that’s where the figure is born. Out of the human experience of what we’ve gone through—not even as a people but me, personally, in my family. I always connect my work back to these two worlds. There’s this world of traditional knowledge and carrying that forward and sharing that history. At the same time, we’re in the 21st century. It’s fast-paced. It’s social media with pop culture, music and Tik Tok reels, and fashion.”
—Southwest Contemporary

“Although I don’t work in the completely traditional manner, I use that knowledge for my contemporary sculptures. I enjoy pop culture, and so my art is a mix of both traditional and contemporary. I use Caddoan imagery and iconography, whether that be the Red River symbol which I put on my pieces, or other elements that are drawn from traditional pottery.”
—Forging

“As a maker in the process of working on several pieces at once, it takes about seven to eight months to see a finished work. To see it in a gallery space or the institutional space, where it’s not cluttered with crates in the background, is like giving it a breathing moment. With that piece in particular, to see it all put together towering over me at 13 feet was really incredible. It’s almost like it’s an out of body experience. It’s strange to think I was making that a year and a half ago — that I was spending all day out in the sun rolling coils and being up on nine foot ladders to get to the top of this piece.”
—Arkansas Times

“Flagbearer is that powerful female-she is Indigenous, she is strength, she is our future and our past. She is the mother of our Nations.”
—Sculpture Magazine

“Some of the hulking stoneware sculptures created by Raven Halfmoon weigh hundreds of pounds and tower at twelve feet, giving an imposing presence to the boldly sculpted women splashed with black, red, and white paint.”
—ArtDesk

“At once confrontational and contemplative, the exhibition does indeed have a spirit of insistence that - in addition to its palette - is communicated through the repetition and twinning of bodies and visages, the figures' larger-than-life scale and forthright body language, and Halfmoon's coil-method process, which is athletically logged in the clay through hundreds of deep impressions made by the artist's fingers.”
—Art New England

Funders

Major support for Raven Halfmoon: Flags of Our Mothers is provided by the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation. Generous support is provided by The Aldrich Council; the Amadeo Family; and Ellen and Andrew Celli. Significant support is provided by Diana Bowes and Jim Torrey; Michel Cohen, Collection Montparnasse; Agnes Gund; Henry Moore Foundation; and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn. Additional support is provided by The Cowles Charitable Trust. The catalogue is supported by the Eric Diefenbach and James-Keith Brown Publications Fund; The Kaleta A. Doolin Foundation; and Kouri + Corrao Gallery. Production support is provided by the Diana Bowes and Jim Torrey Commissions Fund. Preferred Art Logistics Provider: Crozier Fine Arts

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

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