Edgar Heap of Birds, Places of Healing
Edgar Heap of Birds, Places of Healing
Edgar Heap of Birds, Water is Your Only Medicine
Edgar Heap of Birds, Detail of Native Hosts
Edgar Heap of Birds, Places of Healing
Edgar Heap of Birds, Places of Healing
Edgar Heap of Birds, Water is Your Only Medicine
Edgar Heap of Birds, Detail of Native Hosts
Featuring 90+ artworks across our galleries and Campbell Art Park
January 30–October 20, 2025 | Mary LeFlore Clements Oklahoma Gallery
February 20–August 4, 2025 | Eleanor Kirkpatrick Main Gallery
Opening April 24, 2025 | Campbell Art Park
Oklahoma Contemporary presents the first major retrospective of Oklahoma City-based artist Edgar Heap of Birds (b. 1954, Wichita, Kansas; Cheyenne and Arapaho Nation), who is known internationally for conceptual artwork that addresses Indigenous rights, sovereignty, and relationships to place. Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds: Honor Song is a landmark for American art, for the region, and for the city: the artist’s first institutional survey in his home-state of the last forty years. The exhibition spans over four decades of art production, tracing Heap of Birds’s trajectory from the 1970s to the present through colorful prints, abstract paintings, drawings, glassworks, sculptures, and public works.
The campus-wide installation takes over Oklahoma Contemporary’s indoor galleries and outdoor spaces, and includes archival materials, original printing plates, and new works commissioned for a workshop this fall leading up to the show that is part of Getty's Paper Project initiative for curatorial innovation in the graphic arts. The totality of work reveals a through-line: Heap of Birds harnesses conceptual art approaches to address the treatment of Native American communities and advocate for the agency of Indigenous identity toward stewardship of the earth we all share.
Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds: Honor Song features the artist’s signature text-based prints involving urgent messages that highlight issues, figures, and events distinct to Indigeneity, yet that also speak to universal human conditions. These monotype works are often saturated with deep hues and accompanied by fainter “ghost prints” executed from a second pull enlisting the use of varied colors of paper. Heap of Birds explains, “the primary prints represent who we are as Native people: bright, vibrant, strong, clear;” while the “ghost prints’” allude to how marginalized Indigenous people are believed to be “gone, like ghosts.” Presented by the dozens in massive, overwhelming grids, these “wall lyrics” convey the relentless march of history and the depths of pain and joy experienced by many on this land over time. For Heap of Birds, form advances content.
Mixed-media projects relating to Heap of Birds’s public interventions are a highlight of the exhibition. Since the 1980s, the artist has appropriated the civic language of traffic signs and wayfinding to create site-specific works that make visible the unexamined histories of a given place. Charged by forms that convey municipal authority, Heap of Birds’s public works call out tribal nations erased from lands we inhabit, delivering powerful commentary on the treatment of Indigenous communities. For Heap of Birds, public signs are a space for meditating on who is given a voice.
Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds: Honor Song provides, for many, the first opportunity to see the artist’s ongoing, yet lesser-known, abstract acrylic paintings. Begun as a daily practice in 1981, when Heap of Birds moved to Oklahoma tribal and ancestral lands, the “imagery” in his paintings involves repeated and layered diagonal shapes of color with jagged edges that seem to vibrate with earthly energy. Titled Neuf, the Cheyenne language word for performing actions in sets of four, each composition is shaped formally by the ritually and cosmologically significant tetrad, regardless of scale or where the artist created the painting. Exhibition curator, Pablo Barrera notes, “For Heap of Birds, the practice of painting—especially when he is traveling the globe—becomes an enactment of cultural sovereignty.”
Featuring over 500 art objects in various media loaned from collections across the country, Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds: Honor Song, will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with critical essays, providing audiences and researchers an opportunity to, for the first time, consider the breadth of a ground-breaking American artist. Along with never-before presented ephemera from the artist’s studio, the expansive exhibition will make evident the ways in which Edgar Heap of Birds has utilized color, text, place, and the language of abstraction to reconstruct histories and advance the rights of people and land.
About the Artist
Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds (b. 1954, Wichita, Kansas) is a multidisciplinary artist and citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Nation, for which he serves as headsman of the Elk Warrior Society, instructing ceremony on tribal lands near Geary, Oklahoma. He received his BFA from the University of Kansas (1976), undertook graduate studies in painting at the Royal College of Art, London (1977), and received an MFA from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University (1979). Heap of Birds has participated in over 200 national and international exhibitions since the early 1980s and his works are part of museum collections worldwide. He has been the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including induction as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2020). From 1988 to 2018, Heap of Birds was a professor at the University of Oklahoma, served as visiting lecturer in over 14 countries, and was invited to teach at Yale University and Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, South Africa. He is now Professor Emeritus in the University of Oklahoma Native American Studies Department and continues to live and work in Oklahoma City.
This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out more about how National Endowment for the Arts grants impact individuals and communities, visit www.arts.gov.
A special workshop connected to this exhibition is made possible with support from the Getty through The Paper Project Initiative.
This project is supported by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. The Henry Luce Foundation seeks to deepen knowledge and understanding in pursuit of a more democratic and just world. Established in 1936 by Henry R. Luce, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Time, Inc., the Luce Foundation advances its mission by nurturing knowledge communities and institutions, fostering dialogue across divides, enriching public discourse, amplifying diverse voices, and investing in leadership development. A leader in arts funding since 1982, the Luce Foundation's American Art Program advances the role of American art in realizing more vibrant and empathetic communities. Through support for innovative projects, it empowers institutions to celebrate creativity, elevate underrepresented voices, challenge accepted histories, and seek common ground.
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