As museum colonial practices have come under more critical discussion in recent years, talks of repatriation have proliferated in the mainstream and the question of whether these institutions should be remodeled from scratch remains unanswered. Much like the museum, the art gallery engages in this discourse on ownership and representation. I want to explore these politics of visibility as it relates to public art and privately exhibited art by examining two pieces by Edgar Hock E Aye Vi Heap of Birds. The first work, named Surviving Active Shooter Custer, is a series of monotypes created in 2018 and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York alongside its ghost prints. The second work, Native Hosts, is a collection of aluminum signs that were mounted on sections of orange fencing around City Hall Park in New York in 2018. This paper will provide an overview of Edgar Heap of Birds and his style, a visual analysis of the two works to be considered and an examination of the effectiveness of each piece’s message on mainstream audiences in the context of each work’s location. Therefore, by looking at the formal qualities of Surviving Active Shooter Custer and Native Hosts, I will explore how these works interact with the themes of decolonization, indigenous visibility, and exhibition history of Indigenous art in North America.
Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds is an artist of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Nation and is currently based on tribal land and in Oklahoma City. His work often draws comparisons between past violence against Indigenous people and present injustices in America. In doing so, Heap of Birds repurposes the vernacular of America and thus reveals the inherent violence of archives itself wherein the “victors”— the dominant culture— has the power to write history— obscure acts of oppression. Additionally, Heap of Birds often employs the language of the dominant culture in his works; most pieces by the artist such as Our Red Nations Were Always Green, Nuance of Sky, and Genocide and Democracy III are text-based works, a style that is not what mainstream audiences would consider “authentically Indigenous.” Indeed, the usage of lettering in English disrupts romanticized expectations, as it is not a stylized landscape or depictions of animals. Thus, Heap of Birds addresses the parallels between the past and present through his medium, and through the content of the works. His pieces have been the subject of many solo exhibitions such as the Berkeley Art Museum, California; the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, New York; and the Association For Visual Arts Museum, Cape Town, South Africa. Heap of Birds has also received awards from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and The Rockefeller Foundation. Furthermore, the artist stated in an interview with Sheila Regan of Hyperallergic, “I don’t have any time to spare.” Heap of Birds is a teacher, priest, and instructor, mentoring many young men for ceremonies and striving to get his message out to the world. Given this, it is crucial to assess how dissemination can be brought about; whether location matters, if at all, for Heap of Birds’ unique form of pedagogy.
First, Surviving Active Shooter Custer is mainly concerned with violence in America. Heap of Birds repurposes the phrase “Active Shooter”, often used in reference to the rise of gun violence in America, to refer to the prolonged violence against Indigenous peoples during the 1800s. Instead of a single person as the “shooter”—the perpetrator of violence— Heap of Birds refers to the American government as a whole. Evidently, the USA is “active” because violence is ongoing in all loci of Indigenous activity. The work is comprised of forty-eight monoprints, a method of printmaking wherein an ink image is drawn on a plate and then imprinted onto a piece of paper. The papers are lined up in a three by eight grid, reminiscent of protest posters as each part features a six word slogan in bold, capital letters. Heap of Birds also features ghost prints on the adjacent wall, referencing the Indigenous lives lost to government-sanctioned violence. Further, the artist uses familiar expressions to reflect on this subject matter; from popular music, the piece sings that it will “TAKE YOU HOME IN MY ONE EYED FORD” and it cries “MAKE UTERINE HATS YOUR SPORT” in reference to sterilization policies by the Chivington militia during the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864. Alongside sayings from reservation social gatherings, political speeches, and texts on historical events, Heap of Birds transforms the vernacular language of America into art. When inspecting the lettering further, it should be noted that the piece uses bold capital letters in white ink on various tones of red. The red backgrounds are significant of blood and sacrifice; however, given the title’s usage of the word “surviving”, the colour may also refer to the passion and courage of Indigenous peoples. Additionally, the white lettering seems to yell at the viewer and may refer to white supremacy in America. This intense emotional disruption is further echoed by the lack of direction in the piece. The phrases may be read from left to right, up and down, or in no order at all. Curiously, the work is not one piece divided into a grid but a composite of many papers, indicating that the violence being experienced is not one monumental event but many instances of attacks on Indigeneity. With the “active” prints on one wall and the “ghosts” of them on the other, the viewer is placed between two tragedies without recourse and how to aid the situation. This work was shown at the MoMA in an exhibition titled “History in the Present Tense”, which perfectly describes this feeling of entrapment between two worlds, history and present. Finally, location contributes to the work’s obscurity; indeed, its resemblance to protest posters ends when considering that protests are public spectacles. They are made to publicize messages or unify a group around a single, powerful, phrase. However, Heap of Birds’ use of vague references paired with the locus of the work as a private space is contradictory to the iconography it invokes. Similarily, the MoMA requires an entrance fee to view exhibits like “History in the Present Tense”, thus the piece is not truly accessible to the mass public. The work is only viewable to those who invest into the arts, those who live near the MoMA, and those who are present at the time of the exhibition's limited showing period. There are other ways to display art, as I will address with Heap of Birds’ Native Hosts.
The artist moves to the public space with his installation Native Hosts, a series of six aluminum signs which were mounted in City Hall Park, New York in 1988. The piece greets you as you traverse the park, stating “New York/Today Your Host Is” followed by one of many tribal communities that once occupied New York. This language of “host” and “guest” addresses the relationship between Indigenous stewards and Onkwehonwe persons as outlined in “What is a Guest? What is a Settler?” by Ruth Koleszar-Green. She states “The notion that the Land is ‘rented’ and ‘not owned’ is an important distinction to allow one’s understanding of the need for rematriation.” The greeting also relates to the recent proliferation of land acknowledgements in progressive North American circles, which are often criticized for their lip service in the absence of true activism and acknowledgement. Furthermore, Heap of Birds seems to refer to New York as a community much like a tribe; the sign simply reads “New York” rather than “people of New York.” By depicting this community name backwards, the artist defamiliarizes the territorial designation, rendering the citizens alien. Meanwhile, the names of the tribes are anglicized and printed forward, rendering them more legible than New York. This purposeful obscurification points to Indigenous displacement as both geographic and linguistic. Furthermore, the use of present tense ties this narrative of land occupation together; indeed, the tribe “is” not “was” the host of the land, which may refer to the land taken away without “permission” in treaties. Similar to Surviving Active Shooter Custer, the work is rendered in white and red. However, it is in the reverse as the lettering of the signs are red and the background is white. The white could then be read as colonized land, and the red wording representing Indigenous peoples imposing authority upon it. Additionally, Native Hosts challenges the idea of authenticity with its nature as a series of mass industrialized signs; the work uses modern materials such as steel and modern production processes, while the printmaking of Surviving Active Shooter Custer is considered one “acceptable” art form for Indigenous artists. Furthermore, the material is contrasted by the nature surrounding each sign. In the park, foliage acts as a pseudo-frame for the art. With nothing to detract from Native Hosts, the work remains the sole object of attention, unlike a museum exhibit where there are multiple pieces. However, this may work against the piece because the signs may go unnoticed by the general public; after all, a museum exhibit benefits from advertisements and being a spectacle— if you are not actively engaging with your surroundings or simply a person who does not frequent the park, this message will go unnoticed. Heap of Birds tries to combat this by creating multiple signs to catch one’s attention; however, there is no guarantee that it will reach mass consciousness. Like Surviving Active Shooter Custer, the work is limited to a specific location and was eventually taken down. Further, the impact of the piece is directly correlated to its location, and thus loses impact when replicated in digital media.
After considering these artworks, the importance of location has been revealed to me. Indeed, I have often considered art as fixed and timeless when it is in fact truly dependent on its geographical context as that often adds more meaning to the pieces. In a museum, exhibitions have overall themes that invite the viewer to contemplate the piece in relation to that message or challenge it. Additionally, seeing exhibitions allows an artwork to be compared and contrasted with others, opening the discussion further. Inversely, public art is often viewed in isolation, but in relation to the world surrounding. While there are no other pieces to draw parallels between in situ for works like Native Hosts, the work is rather considered in respect to the environment around. This opens the discussion to the impact of the piece in mainstream society, rather than between a community of art-oriented minds. Both contexts provide their unique value to the art, and thus the debate on if one location is more effective in communicating a message is inconclusive. While both situations may enhance the work, they also hinder its reach due to the inherent temporality of exhibitions and public installations. In order to enact greater social and political change through art, a third physical location may need to be conceived. Or, as I propose, both options need to be bolstered. If art is inherently ephemeral, then these works must be proliferated. If a museum is limited to the socioeconomic classes who can afford it, then they must become more accessible to the public. If public art is only relevant to those who frequent certain spaces, then it must multiply into spaces where it will be seen uncomfortably. Both efforts can increase the effectiveness of progressive art like Heap of Birds’ Surviving Active Shooter Custer and Native Hosts, rather than trying to invent a new locus for artworks. Thus, I conclude that great societal upheaval is through the many small actions of communities, rather than the convoluted efforts of one institution. Jeff Corntassel states this process of decolonization embraces a “daily existence conditioned by place-based cultural practices” and Heap of Birds states, “Like any disfunction, if you don’t deal with your disfunction at home, it just gets worse.”