The Events Calendar by Oh My! Omaha
The temporary exhibition “Raven Halfmoon: Flags of Our Mothers” is at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts from May 18 through Sept. 15, 2024. The opening reception is May 18 from 4 to 6 p.m.
Halfmoon’s practice spans torso-scaled and colossal-sized stoneware sculptures, with some soaring up to nine 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 the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts.
