Artist to Watch: Raven Halfmoon Honors Caddo Ancestry with Empowering Sculptures
The trailblazing artist is presenting a solo exhibition at Salon 94 in New York, debuting new sculptures in clay, travertine, and bronze that evoke a communal narrative and spirit through repetition
By Janelle Zara September 3, 2024 for Galerie Magazine
For thousands of years, the Caddo people, whose homeland included parts of Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, shaped the soil into sacred mounds— “large-scale earthworks that took a community to build,” says Raven Halfmoon. In “Neesh & Soku (Moon & Sun),” the Caddo artist’s new exhibition at Salon 94 in New York, new sculptures in clay, travertine, and bronze evoke this communal narrative and spirit through repetition. A six-and-a-half-foot-tall work features multiple pairs of eyes stacked like a tower, the artist explains, representing “the multiple viewpoints that I carry with me.” A composite of her own features and those of her female family line, the figure itself represents and accumulation of history, “not just my personal experiences, but my mother’s and our ancestors’.”
Halfmoon’s first sculpture carved from travertine debuts alongside her new bronze piece, a nine-foot-tall figure of two strong female figures proudly standing back-to-back. As with the rest of her work on view from September 19 to November 2, she made their initial casts and maquettes from clay using coiling techniques similar to the ones employed by the Caddo people. “I really like clay as a material that picks up human emotion,” she says, emphasizing the way impressions of her fingertips solidify on the surface. Halfmoon works with a custom mixture—in traditional shades of chocolate, black, and red—that emulates the textures her ancestors pulled from the gritty bed of the Red River in Texas.