Installation view, “Raven Halfmoon: Ride or Die,” at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. In the foreground, two chow chow sculptures titled “Protectors I & II” stand guard before Halfmoon’s stoneware and glaze horse sculpture, “Leave Her Wild (Self Portrait)” (2025). “Tushka Manahatta” stands at rear left; “Scouting the Horizon” (2025), appears on the right. (photo by E.G. Schempf)
Raven Halfmoon’s “Ride or Die” exhibit at Kemper Museum powerfully articulates a contemporary indigenous perspective
Raven Halfmoon’s small and mighty exhibition, “Ride or Die,” features what has to be one of the best Kemper Museum sight lines ever. And by small, I mean few in number; the works’ size is anything but.
Upon entering the irregular, polygon-shaped Charlotte Crosby Kemper Gallery, one meets two perky life-size chow chow sculptures. Their voluminous fur bulges out in rippling knuckle-sized textures of hand-built black clay. One chow chow wears an uneven white glaze drizzled generously over the black clay and decorated with blue equidistant crosses. Its mate is slathered in lipstick red adorned with black stars. This attentive pair stands guard over the new work, the artist’s pet “Protectors I & II,” poised on a neatly stacked pedestal of red bricks.
Beyond the chow chows, one’s gaze goes directly to the exhibition centerpiece, elevated on its own red brick pedestal. Halfmoon’s lively stoneware and glaze horse sculpture “Leave Her Wild (Self-Portrait)” (2025), stands 4 1/2 feet high, perfectly framed by the enormous blue five-pointed star spray painted on the back wall of the gallery.
The horse rises up, arching its back, head thrust back, its front hooves dangerously defying gravity while supported by the powerful trio of hind legs and tail. Halfmoon’s formidable forms push the limits of hand-built clay construction. Her ambitious Botero-esque volumes wear thick overlapping glazes in ash black, cornflower blue, and creamy white over black clay, a conscious nod to her Caddo ancestry and its long-lived pottery tradition.
As a self-portrait, one meets the artist at a thrilling moment of self-affirmation, as the work exclaims wildness against taming influences. Her energetic mark-making over the clay surface ranges from rhythmic dimples to gnarly scraped textures while dappled with recurring stars and lightning bolts. The artist favors emotive touch and texture all over her sculptures, unconcerned with any anatomical correctness or finish fetish. This ain’t no smooth equestrian statue! Besides the fact that the artist has horses of her own and loves to ride them.
Two powerful new female busts in terra cotta clay stoneware are meaningful companions to “Leave Her Wild.” “Scouting the Horizon” (2025) is Halfmoon’s response to one of Kansas City’s most famous public artworks, Cyrus Dallin’s “The Scout.” His elegiac bronze depiction of a lonesome Sioux warrior on horseback gazing westward has stood on a stone pedestal in Penn Valley Park for over a century. Halfmoon deftly reclaims and inverts the romanticized image, transforming it into a doubled female head, a cape-like coiffure topped by a cowboy hat, all glazed in drip-tastic white and light blue, with lightning bolts symbolically placed on cheeks, neck, hat and hair. Who’s your scout now, Kansas City?
Halfmoon’s work engages candidly with indigeneity and vitally important concepts of sovereignty and “survivance,” as the Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor called it. Think survival + resistance, or a robust Indigenous resilience. In addition to Delaware, Otoe and Choctaw ancestry, she is enrolled in the Caddo Nation, a people who have occupied the Red River watershed for thousands of years, a territory linking border states of Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana. Caddo material culture is especially rich in pottery making, with elaborate localized designs in both black and redware that also figure prominently in Halfmoon’s recent work.
The artist plays with the lingering tropes of cowboy vs. Indian, mediated through the dominant cultural lens of the American colonial settler. In other words, she’s used to absurd questions about being “Native,” her life in “Indian Country,” and the weird ways Indigenous people are still perceived in the 21st century. Chiefs, anyone? Halfmoon’s work brings one up to speed on a contemporary Indigenous perspective, savvy about the art game, deeply committed to her own voice, innovating from tradition. One also detects in these brash new works a career turn defined by an expanding studio practice, new materials beyond clay, international demand, a bigger brand.
Take “Tushka Manahatta” as an example. This elegant female bust is even more modeled in the shoulders and face with expressive pinches, scars and slashes in the surface. She sports a cowboy hat divided vertically, half-black, half-white, from yin to yang with a “I’ve got my game face on” vibe to it. Tushka in the Choctaw language means warrior, and this fierce figure might be another faceted self-portrait of the artist, ready for her close-up, given her notable representation in the New York art market by Salon 94.
Halfmoon cut a memorable figure when she gave a standing-room-only lecture at KCAI the night of her “Ride or Die” opening. Decked out in shades, black cowboy boots and hat, “Okie” shirt, and a badass studded leather jacket, Halfmoon told the audience “I’m a trigger-puller,” when it comes to pushing the material limits of clay and kiln capacity. Clearly, her go-big-or-go-home philosophy has been serving her well.
She talked about her diverse influences and interests that inform her work. From archaeological curiosity in the ancient mound-building cultures of the Mississippi, Arkansas and Red Rivers, to the colossal Olmec heads of Mexico, to the Postwar Native pop art of T.C. Cannon (Kiowa/Caddo) and Fritz Scholder (Luiseño), to distorting daubers like Van Gogh and Bacon, a couple of French fashion houses, and graffiti tagging, of course.
It is interesting to consider Halfmoon’s body of work in relation to Viola Frey, ceramic sculptor and pioneer of the California Funk movement of the 1960s and 70s, who was born in the Bay Area with folks like Peter Voulkos and Robert Arneson. Frey, like Halfmoon, shared an interest in gigantic figural forms and a fearless use of color over clay. Both artists equally embraced the drip, the mess, the funk, the punk. Make no mistake, Raven’s got her own thing going with plenty of mid-career momentum. “Ride or Die” is a punky Caddo party, so wear ya drip, make the trip and get bucked by a significant American sculptor.
“Raven Halfmoon: Ride or Die” continues at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, 4420 Warwick Blvd., through April 19. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday and 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday. For more information, 816.753.5784 or www.kemperart.org.
