10 Trailblazing Artists with Must-See Museum Shows in 2023
By Allyssia Alleyne - Artsy
Raven Halfmoon at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut
June 25, 2023–January 2, 2024
Raven Halfmoon studied ceramics, painting, and cultural anthropology at the University of Arkansas before completing a long-term residency at the Archie Bray Foundation in 2020. However, her interest in sculpture stretches back to her upbringing in Oklahoma. Her tribe, the Caddo Nation, has been producing pottery for centuries, and she would make clay pieces with a community elder as a teenager.
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.
“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,” Halfmoon has said. Her upcoming exhibition at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum will include works created over the last five years, along with a new commission.