Edgar Heap of Birds: Neufs for Oklahoma Autumn

Edgar Heap of Birds: Neufs for Oklahoma Autumn

Opening April 24, 2025
Campbell Art Park

Oklahoma Contemporary is honored to present Neufs for Oklahoma Autumn, a basketball court installation commissioned as a public art iteration of the Neuf painting series (1981—ongoing) by renowned artist Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne and Arapaho Nation). Neufs for Oklahoma Autumn, composed of imagery inspired by Oklahoma tribal lands, will be installed at Campbell Art Park and will be presented as part of the spring 2025 exhibition Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds: Honor Song, the inaugural retrospective for the visionary artist’s lauded forty-year career.

Edgar Heap of Birds, Neufs for Hawai’i

The site-specific Neufs for Oklahoma Autumn presents an intriguing installment in Heap of Birds’s ongoing Neuf series in the form of hand-painted, public basketball courts, shedding light on the importance of these lesser-known abstract acrylic paintings. Begun as a daily practice in 1981, when he moved to reservation lands in Oklahoma, the “imagery” in Heap of Birds’s Neuf paintings is his signature rendition of the wooded canyons surrounding his mother’s home. These works feature repeated and layered diagonal shapes of color that seem to vibrate with jagged edges, suggesting an earthly energy. Titled Neuf, the Cheyenne word for the ritually and cosmologically significant symbolism surrounding the number four, each composition is shaped formally by the deep meaning of the tetrad, regardless of scale or where the artist was when he created it. Heap of Birds notes, “These works are about sovereignty and landscape, and they speak to the issues of homeland and beauty.” For Heap of Birds, the practice of painting—even when he is traveling around the globe—is an enactment of cultural sovereignty.

Edgar Heap of Birds, Neufs for Hawai’i

The courts’ flanking backboards will contain commissioned elements of Heap of Birds’s second longest-running body of work, the Native Hosts public art series, in which the artist installs signs honoring the Native tribes who have historically inhabited the region, emphatically declaring them enduring hosts. This monumental commission combines two immensely important decades-long bodies of work for the first time in a meaningful way near the artist’s own tribal reservation lands. The courts’ “scoreboard” will recreate Heap of Birds’s 1982 work featured in Messages to the Public, an artist project organized by Jane Dickson through the Public Art Fund using the Spectacolor light board in Times Square.

Presented in collaboration with the artist, Project Backboard, and Common Practice in association and concurrent with Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds: Honor Song, Neufs for Oklahoma Autumn will draw audiences beyond typical art-settings and serve as a literal canvas for dialogue, site for contemplation, and platform for storytelling: connecting histories, traditions, narratives. The large-scale, functional versions of his painting series will stand as a powerful testament to the intersection of sports, culture, and identity in our state, inviting engagement with Campbell Art Park in unprecedented ways.

Edgar Heap of Birds. Photo by Ted West.

About the Artist
Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds (b. 1954, Wichita, Kansas) is a 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 is part of museum collections worldwide. He has received 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. He continues to live and work in Oklahoma City.

Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds: Honor Song is organized by Oklahoma Contemporary Adjunct Curator Pablo Barrera (Wixáritari) with the artist.