Edgar Heap of Birds

Last updated
Edgar Heap of Birds
Edgar Heap of Birds.jpg
Heap of Birds at the 2009
Americans for the Arts convention
Born
Hock E Aye Vi [1]

(1954-11-22)November 22, 1954
Wichita, Kansas, United States
Nationality Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes
EducationMFA Tyler School of Art, BFA University of Kansas, Royal College of Art
Known for Painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, installation, conceptual
Notable workIn Our Language, Wheel
Website eheapofbirds.com//

Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne name: Hock E Aye Vi) is a multi-disciplinary artist. His art contributions include public art messages, large scale drawings, Neuf Series acrylic paintings, prints, and monumental porcelain enamel on steel outdoor sculpture. [1]

Contents

He is Southern Cheyenne and enrolled in the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes. [2]

He sits on the board for MoMA PS1. [3]

Early life and education

Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds was born on November 22, 1954 in Wichita, Kansas, where his father worked in the aeronautical industry. He attended East High School in Wichita and graduated in 1972. After graduation, Heap of Birds studied at Haskell Indian School in Lawrence, Kansas. [1] [4]

In 1976 Heap of Birds earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas and in 1979 he received his Master of Fine Arts from Temple University's Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In between his undergraduate and graduate studies, Heap of Birds also took classes at the Royal College of Art in London, England from 1976-1977. [1] [4]

In 2008, Heap of Birds was awarded an Honorary Doctors of Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, Massachusetts.

In 2018, Heap of Birds was awarded an honorary doctorate of arts degree from the California Institute of the Arts at the Institute’s 2018 commencement ceremony on May 11.

Professional career

Dead Indian Stories, monoprint, Honolulu Museum of Art Dead Indian Stories by Edgar Heap of Birds.jpg
Dead Indian Stories, monoprint, Honolulu Museum of Art
Wheel Heap of Birds Wheel.jpg
Wheel

Heap of Birds has taught as Visiting Professor at Yale University, Rhode Island School of Design, and Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, South Africa. At the University of Oklahoma, Heap of Birds teaches in Native American Studies and previously taught Fine Arts.

He is known for text-based conceptual art, such as Dead Indian Stories in the Honolulu Museum of Art. It superficially resembles public signage, but is actually commentary on the Native American experience. [5] An example of his site-specific public signage projects is Building Minnesota (1990), a signage installation mounted on the banks of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, Minnesota and commissioned by the Walker Art Center. [2] In it, Heap of Birds set forty large, metal, billboard-like signs along Minneapolis's downtown riverfront. The signs honored the forty Dakota men who were sentenced to death by president Abraham Lincoln and his vice president Andrew Johnson after the Dakota War of 1862, in what is the largest mass execution in American history. The piece became a focal point "of mourning and remembrance to which people brought gifts and offerings" in memory of the men who were executed. [6]

These 39 men were those that remained of 303 Sioux who were originally sentenced to death following the murder and rape of more than 800 American men, women and children civilians in the Dakota War. The original 303 were sentenced to death by a military commission. President Lincoln after conducting a personal review, considered there was only strong enough evidence to execute 39; who were guilty of massacres which were separate to battles, this number was later reduced to 38. He did this against the advice of General Pope, Minnesota Senator Morton S. Wilkinson, and Governor Alexander Ramsey; who feared a continuation of violence due to revenge attacks if the White population did not see that justice was done.

Heap of Birds created a fifty-foot signature, outdoor sculpture titled "Wheel" as a signature entrance piece for the Gio Ponti (North) building of the Denver Art Museum. The circular porcelain enamel on steel work was commissioned by the Denver Art Museum and is inspired by the traditional Medicine Wheel of the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming.

Exhibitions

Heap of Birds has exhibited nationally and internationally. An early solo exhibition was Full Blooded (1984) at the Center of the American Indian in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. [7]

Awards

Heap of Birds has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, The Wallace Foundation, the Bonfil Stanton Foundation, and The Pew Charitable Trusts.

In 2012, Heap of Birds was named a Fellow of United States Artists. [8]

Books

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Allan Houser</span> American sculptor and painter

Allan Capron Houser or Haozous was a Chiricahua Apache sculptor, painter, and book illustrator born in Oklahoma. He was one of the most renowned Native American painters and Modernist sculptors of the 20th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fritz Scholder</span> American painter (1937–2005)

Fritz William Scholder V was a Native American artist. Scholder was an enrolled member of the La Jolla Band of Luiseno Indians, a federally recognized tribe of Luiseños, a California Mission tribe. Scholder's most influential works were post-modern in sensibility and somewhat Pop Art in execution as he sought to deconstruct the mythos of the American Indian. A teacher at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe in the late 1960s, Scholder instructed prominent Native American students.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Mix Stanley</span> 19th-century American artist

John Mix Stanley was an artist-explorer, an American painter of landscapes, and Native American portraits and tribal life. Born in the Finger Lakes region of New York, he started painting signs and portraits as a young man. In 1842 he traveled to the American West to paint Native American life. In 1846 he exhibited a gallery of 85 of his paintings in Cincinnati and Louisville. During the Mexican–American War, he joined Colonel Stephen Watts Kearney's expedition to California and painted accounts of the campaign, as well as aspects of the Oregon Territory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George Morrison (artist)</span> American painter and sculptor

George Morrison was an Ojibwe abstract painter and sculptor from Minnesota. His Ojibwe name was Wah Wah Teh Go Nay Ga Bo. Morrison's work is associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Julian Martinez</span> American painter

Julián Martínez, also known as Pocano (1879–1943), was a San Ildefonso Pueblo potter, painter, and the patriarch of a family of Native American ceramic artists in the United States.

Kay WalkingStick is a Native American landscape artist and a member of the Cherokee Nation. Her later landscape paintings, executed in oil paint on wood panels often include patterns based on Southwest American Indian rugs, pottery, and other artworks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ledger art</span> Native American narrative art

Ledger art is a term for narrative drawing or painting on paper or cloth, predominantly practiced by Plains Indian, but also from the Plateau and Great Basin. Ledger art flourished primarily from the 1860s to the 1920s. A revival of ledger art began in the 1960s and 1970s. The term comes from the accounting ledger books that were a common source of paper for Plains Indians during the late 19th century.

Teri Greeves is a Native American beadwork artist, living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is enrolled in the Kiowa Indian Tribe of Oklahoma.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Luna</span> Indigenous performance artist

James Luna was a Puyukitchum, Ipai, and Mexican-American performance artist, photographer and multimedia installation artist. His work is best known for challenging the ways in which conventional museum exhibitions depict Native Americans. With recurring themes of multiculturalism, alcoholism, and colonialism, his work was often comedic and theatrical in nature. In 2017 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Walter Richard West Sr., was a painter, sculptor, and educator. He led the Art Department at Bacone College from 1947 to 1970. He later taught at Haskell Institute for several years. West was an enrolled citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes.

Lorenzo Clayton is a contemporary Navajo sculptor, printmaker, conceptual and installation artist. His artwork is notable for exploring the concepts of spirituality through abstraction.

Bently Spang is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, writer, curator and an enrolled member of the Tsitsistas/Suhtai Nation in Montana. His work has been exhibited widely in North America, South America, and Europe.

Gwen Nell Westerman is a Dakota educator, writer and artist. She is a professor at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and the Director of the Native American Literature Symposium. She was appointed by Governor Tim Walz as Poet Laureate of Minnesota in September 2021.

David Emmett Williams was a Native American painter, who was Kiowa/Tonkawa/Kiowa-Apache from Oklahoma. He studied with Dick West at Bacone College and won numerous national awards for his paintings. He painted in the Flatstyle technique that was taught at Bacone from the 1940s to the 1970s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edith Mahier</span> American artist and art instructor

Edith Mahier was an American artist and art instructor who was instrumental in helping develop the talent of the Kiowa Six during their studies at the University of Oklahoma. In 1941, she won the commission to complete the post office mural for the U.S. Treasury Department's Section of Fine Arts at the Watonga, Oklahoma, facility. In her later career at OU she created a division of the arts department dedicated to fashion and even designed motifs for a clothing line developed by Neiman Marcus.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Southern Plains Indian Museum</span>

Southern Plains Indian Museum is a Native American museum located in Anadarko, Oklahoma. It was opened in 1948 under a cooperative governing effort by the United States Department of the Interior and the Oklahoma state government. The museum features cultural and artistic works from Oklahoma tribal peoples of the Southern Plains region, including the Caddo, Chiricahua Apache, Comanche, Delaware Nation, Kiowa, Plains Apache, Southern Arapaho, Southern Cheyenne, and Wichita.

Julie Buffalohead is a contemporary Indigenous American artist. Her work mainly focuses on themes of racial injustice, indigenous rights, and abuse of power.

The Center of the American Indian (CAI) was an intertribal, Native American-led museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. It was housed in the second floor of the Kirkpatrick Center.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael McCabe (artist)</span> Navajo artist and master printmaker (1961–2023)

Michael Duane McCabe (1961–2023) was a Diné (Navajo) monotype artist, master printmaker and teacher. His work is found in the permanent collection of the Portland Art Museum and many of his works are held in the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Pecore, Bradley. "Hock E Aye Vi". Museum of Contemporary Native Arts. Retrieved April 14, 2014.
  2. 1 2 Reno, Dawn (1995). Contemporary Native American Artists. Brooklyn, NY: Alliance Publishing. p. 72. ISBN   0-9641509-6-4.
  3. "Officers and Trustees | MoMA".
  4. 1 2 Lester, Patrick (1995). The Biographical Directory of Native American Painters. Norman and London: The Oklahoma University Press. pp.  227. ISBN   0-8061-9936-9.
  5. Zarro, Jennifer, "Edgar Heap of Birds' Signs and a Lecture at Temple Contemporary", Artblog, Nov. 23, 2012
  6. Berlo, Janet C.; Phillips, Ruth B. (1998). Native North American Art . Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp.  235.
  7. Heap of Birds, Edgar. "Hock E Aye VI Edgar Heap of Birds CV" (PDF). Garis & Hahn. Retrieved 23 April 2021.
  8. "United States Artists Official Website". United States Artists. Retrieved April 14, 2014.

Commons-logo.svg Media related to Edgar Heap of Birds at Wikimedia Commons