Standing more than five-feet tall, Raven Halfmoon’s ceramic sculpture “Do You Practice Your Culture?” intentionally places the viewer at eye-level with a stoic ancestral figure. Meant to comment on the resilience of Native Americans, Halfmoon’s sculpture, as the artist put it, makes the viewer “feel small.” She continued, “Sometimes I think we need moments like that.”
Halfmoon wrote her name and the sculpture’s title—the question “Do you practice your culture?”—on the work in blood-red glaze, allowing it to drip downward dramatically for emphasis.
As a member of the Caddo Nation, Halfmoon creates ceramic sculptures to carry on the profound legacy of her tribe, culture, and heritage while acknowledging its place (and in turn, her own place) in today’s world. “I’m always riding this line of understanding traditional tribal knowledge, and representing that, versus the pressures of the 21st-century mindset and the fast-paced materialistic world,” Halfmoon explained.
Up close, one can see the hand-molded curvature of the clay, a tradition that connects Halfmoon to the practices of her ancestors.
Raven Halfmoon, “Do You Practice Your Culture?” (detail), 2019, stoneware and glaze, Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts Foundation Collection: Purchase. Photography by Edward C. Robison III.
Original source can be found here.
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