Indians 101: Caddo artist Raven Halfmoon (museum tour)

by Ojibwa for Native American Netroots

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Thursday, Oct. 13, 2022 Thursday, Oct. 13, 2022 at 8:21:07am PDT

The Missoula Art Museum (MAM) in Missoula, Montana had a special exhibit, New Monuments, featuring large ceramic sculptures by Caddo artist Raven Halfmoon.

According to MAM:

“Halfmoon’s latest collection of work was created during her recent residencies at the University of Montana Ceramics department and Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts. Known for her monumental figurative sculpture, Halfmoon’s exhibition features her bold figures that are a continuance and expansion of contemporary Caddo culture.

…

The artist hand-builds her sculptures with coil and uses thick layers of black, white, or red glaze cover exposing areas of raw clay. The bold and sizable figures, some of which top several hundred pounds and rise over 9 feet tall, represent women and Caddo’s matrilineal culture.”

The Artist

With regard to the artist:

“Halfmoon attended the University of Arkansas earning double bachelor’s degrees in ceramics and cultural anthropology. Since then, she has garnered an impressive series of awards and accolades, including being named the 2018 Fund the Change recipient from the Activist and Social Justice Arts Organization in Oklahoma as well as a Burke Prize finalist at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the American Craft Council Emerging Voices Award, and Ceramics Monthly Emerging Artist—all in 2019. Last year, she also received a John Michael Kohler Arts Center residency in Sheboygan, Wis. Halfmoon’s first exhibition in New York City, “Okla Homma to Manahatta,” was on view at the Ross + Kramer Gallery in early 2021.”

The Caddo

The traditional homelands of the Caddo stretched from the Red River Valley in Louisiana to the Brazos River Valley in Texas. The Caddo were agricultural people whose culture emerged about 800 CE. Caddo culture is considered to be related to the Mississippian mound-building cultures.

The term “Caddo” originates from one particular tribe, the Kadohadacho who occupied the area around the Great Bend of the Red River in Texas. Kadahodacho signifies “the real chiefs.” The term is also applied to a number of other tribes in the region who have a similar language and culture. According to archaeologist Timothy Perttula, in his chapter in Between Contacts and Colonies: Archaeological Perspectives on the Protohistoric Southeast:

“the Caddo peoples were a powerful group of related theocratic chiefdoms who exercised, through their political and religious elite, great political skill and trading savvy with their southeast U.S. Mississippean neighbors.”

In her entry on the Caddo in the Encyclopedia of North American Indians, Helen Hornbeck Tanner writes:

“The Caddo people formed the most western of the chiefdoms that attained peak development in the southeastern United States from the tenth to the thirteenth century.”