Raven Halfmoon’s Empowering Sculptures Go on View at Ballroom Marfa
The artist’s lauded traveling exhibition, “Flags of our Mothers,” is on view through October 11
For her first visit to Marfa, Texas, Raven Halfmoon decided to make the eight-hour drive from her home in Norman, Oklahoma, along with her three dogs and her mom. Wearing sunglasses and athleisure in her preferred colors of black and white, she’s now sitting in Ballroom Marfa, surrounded by the latest iteration of her lauded traveling exhibition “Flags of Our Mothers.” After the road trip, the evolving contours of the Great Plains are fresh in her mind. “Coming down south, it goes from the woods with these beautiful green hills, and then you get to the desert, with shrubs. Then there’s palm trees! Then you pass through the oil rigging.” Marfa then seems like an “oasis,” she says, “out in the middle of nowhere. It feels very ethereal.”
Contrasts within people, places, and materials have long intrigued the 35-year-old artist, whose dual identity as Caddo and American is a through line in her practice. Take her intuitive attraction to clay, her medium of choice since her early teenage years, later reinforced in class at the University of Arkansas. “So tactile. And leaving your mark, you can see it exactly,” she says. At first, it’s forgiving, but the process of firing can be chastening; she recalls many shattered failures she’s discovered upon opening the kiln.
Her successes, meanwhile, display fingerprint-indented surface textures that once signaled the material’s receptive malleability, and now exist as ossified records of her gestures. As she matured as an artist, she developed a coil technique to build out monumental sculptures. Her desire to work on a larger scale arises from how imposing forms—like the Easter Island Moai statues or the Montana landscape or Mark Rothko paintings—can make a viewer feel awesomely diminutive in comparison: “It makes you feel quiet, humbled, like you have to take a breath of fresh air. I wanted to instill that in my artwork,” she says. She also straddles past and future, bringing aspects of her Caddo heritage, including ceramics, motifs, and ancient mound-building, into a contemporary vision.
A centerpiece of the exhibition, which first opened at the Aldrich Museum in Connecticut in 2023, is the 12.5-foot-tall outdoor Flagbearer (2022). Her largest work to date, the piece is a towering matriarch who represents Halfmoon’s female relatives and other indigenous women. Its looming presence feels protective, guardian-like, while dripping red glaze on the bottom third recalls the violence perpetuated against this same group. As with many of her sculptures, Halfmoon has signed her name on the back in graffiti-like scrawl—a nod to the resilience of her family name through generations that have survived genocide and more pernicious attempts to annihilate her culture.
Meanwhile, two new works debuting with Ballroom Marfa’s version of the show suggest an increasingly explicit meditation on duality. Day and Night in Oklahoma, and Riding into the Sunset, made this year, each display two heads pointing in opposite directions, attached at the back. In Day and Night, one bust is cream, and the other is dark blue—a change from her go-to red and white—and both are covered in crosses, which, she says, symbolize balance. “I think of it looking back and looking forward,” she says. “It’s important to me to remember where I am from: I am from Oklahoma. I am Caddo. Then also looking to the future.”
The theme of duality becomes especially pertinent on the eve of America’s 250th anniversary, which will coincide with the show’s run. “All off us have good, all of us have bad,” says Halfmoon, drawing a parallel to American identity and history. At the same time, Halfmoon has been thinking more about utilizing a red, white, and blue color palette. “Native history is American history. It’s one and the same, which can be tragic, but we’re still here,” she says. “It’s the idea of what patriotism means: Using red, white, and blue, I’m flipping it on its head, because we’ve been here for thousands of years.” It’s a way of reclaiming these colors, too, in removing them from patriotic contexts.
Marfa is an especially apt backdrop for these explorations: being such a degree of remote that artistic expression feels like it can sprawl unimpeded across the flat plains stretching to the horizon, while by the same token becoming a lightning rod for community. For the coming months, Flagbearer will gaze serenely from its position in Ballroom Marfa’s garden, beckoning and standing watch.
“Raven Halfmoon: Flags of Our Mothers” is on view at Ballroom Marfa through October 11, 2026