Raven Halfmoon

Raven Halfmoon’s practice spans torso-scaled and colossal-sized stoneware, bronze and stone sculptures, with some soaring up to twelve feet and weighing over eight hundred pounds. With inspirations that traverse centuries from ancient Indigenous pottery to Moai statues to Land Art, Halfmoon interrogates the intersection of tradition, history, gender, and personal experience.

Born and raised in Norman, Oklahoma, Halfmoon learned about ceramics as a teenager from a Caddo elder. Her work today fuses the inherited Caddo pottery techniques of coil building (a tradition of making mostly done by women) with her own expressive mark making and contemporary lexicon of symbols. Often incorporating contemporary elements like cowboy hats and cigarettes, her work bridges past, present, and future. Her palette is specific in both the clay bodies she selects and the glazes she fires with— reds (after the Oklahoma soil and red symbol of the MMIW movement (missing & and murdered Indigenous women), blacks (referencing the natural clay native to the Red River), and creams (referencing the dualities of light against dark). Through stacking and repeating imagery, she creates totemic forms that represent herself and her maternal ancestry while also reinforcing the multiplicities that exist inside all of us. Growing up in Oklahoma, a state with 37 federally recognized Tribal Nations, Halfmoon reclaims space for herself and her Caddo lineage, asserting an Indigenous presence and resilience through her colossal figures.

Raven Halfmoon (b. 1991, Caddo Nation) lives and works in Norman, Oklahoma. Halfmoon attended the University of Arkansas, where she earned a double BA in ceramics/painting and cultural anthropology. Halfmoon’s work has been featured in gallery exhibitions both nationally and internationally. Raven Halfmoon’s first institutional exhibition “Raven Halfmoon: The Flags of Our Mothers” opened Spring 2024 at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, and has since traveled to the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and will continue on to The Contemporary Austin. Halfmoon’s work can be found in the permanent collections The Museum of Fine Art Houston, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Philbrook Museum of Art, Forge Project Collection and several others national institutions. In 2023, she was selected as an Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellow (Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, IN) and in 2024 she was a finalist for the international Loewe Craft Prize.