Tsu' cus Ea' titi I (Star Sister—Caddo)
Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
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
Raven Halfmoon. Photo: Cody Hammer
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.
One of her main challenges since she began sculpting as an undergraduate at the University of Arkansas has been scale. “I always outgrow the kilns that I’m in,” she says. Last year, a solo exhibit at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut showcased a 13-foot-tall stacked figure composed of three parts titled Flagbearer, which is on display in Omaha, Nebraska at The Bemis, through September 15, before traveling to Austin, Texas.
B't CahShun (Two Blackbirds—Caddo). Photo: Courtesy of Kouri + Corrao, Santa Fe, N.M.
Flagbearer (2022), installed at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska. Photo: Colin Conces, Courtesy of Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts.
After “pushing clay to its max,” Halfmoon found travertine and bronze better suited to the monumentality she has been envisioning. She’s inspired in part by the colossal heads sculpted by the Olmec people of Mexico and the moai of Easter Island, as well as the sense of awe she feels in the presence of nature.
“There’s something about being around mountains that make you feel quiet for a minute,” says Halfmoon, recalling family trips to national parks. “I wanted to instill that same feeling in my work—a moment where we can just sit with something large scale and powerful, and feel serene.”
Halfmoon found travertine and bronze better suited to the monumentality she has been envisioning. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2024 Fall Issue in the “Artists to Watch” section. Subscribe to the magazine.
Cover: Tsu' cus Ea' titi I (Star Sister—Caddo)
Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
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