Raven Halfmoon’s Monuments to Mothers
Sculpting voluptuous figures with richly dynamic surfaces creates a shared humanity between Halfmoon, the artwork, and the viewer.
By Erin Joyce for HYPERALLERGIC July 4, 2023
NORMAN, Oklahoma — Raven Halfmoon’s (Caddo Nation) stoneware sculptures embrace the monumental. The artist, whose first major solo exhibition, Raven Halfmoon: Flags of our Mothers, opened on June 25 at The Aldrich Contemporary in Connecticut, situates her work within the canon of Caddo culture and production, while entering into a dialogue with both intimate and broad themes.
Halfmoon grew up in Norman, Oklahoma, where she currently lives and works. “I always was a painter and I loved to draw in my formative years when I was in high school,” she told me in conversation at 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 Jeri Redcorn,” she said. “This was my first time actually handling clay and making traditional pots and learning the material.” Once Halfmoon enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of Arkansas, she began to take classes and fully immerse herself in the medium to build a strong technical foundation: “It was then that I learned what clay can do.” In tandem with her studies and art practice at the university, she began to focus on her own history, heritage, and identity as a Caddo person, aspiring not only to know that history, but to express it through art, ultimately earning a BA in cultural anthropology alongside her fine arts degree.
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. Her name is scrawled across 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 is not simply tagging the work but transmitting a message of presence to the viewer — that of her ancestors, her community, and herself.