Power of language leaps off canvas
Edgar Heap of Birds’ text collages dig into Native American life
BY CAROLINA A. MIRANDA >>> Careful what you say in front of Edgar Heap of Birds. It could end up in a painting.
Since the 1970s, the artist has used words in ways both pointed and wry to create installations that riff on funny song lyrics, urgent environmental issues and indigenous history.
“I hear things, I go to movies, I’m listening to people talk, I read history and think of phrases,” says Heap of Birds, who is of Cheyenne and Arapaho descent. “I used to have a little notebook — those spiral notebooks with cards. Now I have a Samsung Note 8 and I just write them down into my phone.”
These utterances are source material for prints that he assembles into large, collaged installations — words rendered by hand in all caps, in shades of bright red or cool blue. Hung together, they feel like a combination protest placard, note to self, cut-up poem and urgent reminder: “WHAT PART OF SACRED DON’T THEY GET” “CLEAN YOUR CHURCH WITH SEWER WATER” “DEFEND DEVINE MTNS FOR SPRING-BREAK FUN” Heap of Birds, 63, is broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, with curly gray hair he suspends in a buoyant ponytail. He is low-key, with an easy laugh, but conveys a simmering sense of purpose — intent on creating art that addresses Native issues without delivering symbols that make for trite decoration.
“You have to have integrity, you have to have spirit,” he says, seated amid text pieces and abstract paintings that await installation at Garis & Hahn gallery in downtown Los Angeles. “Being Native, it becomes a subject matter. You’re not living with grandma and taking her to the diabetic clinic. But you’re making this thing, this topical thing. And you’re dealing with the gaze. You can’t let them do that to you. You can’t become a buzzword artist.” If anything, Heap of Birds is more interested in prying those buzzwords apart.
The artist’s work is now at two Southern California venues. A solo exhibition at Garis & Hahn is his first L.A. gallery show in years. “It’s been a long time,” he says. Another solo exhibition, “Defend
Sacred Mountains,” is at Claremont’s Pitzer College Art Galleries. That show is inspired by four mountains held sacred by indigenous people in the U.S.: Mauna Kea in Hawaii, Bear Butte in South Dakota, San Francisco Peaks in Arizona and Devil’s Tower in Wyoming (known to the Cheyenne as “Bear’s House”).
That allusion to sewer water in church? It references the San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff. These have been important to the Havasupai, Hopi and Navajo and others. Since 2012, a ski resort on one of the mountains has manufactured snow for the slopes with reclaimed and treated wastewater — essentially blanketing a holy site in water that once contained human waste.
Heap of Birds shakes his head as he considers this fate. He says sites such as Bear’s House — composed of igneous rock, the solid core of what was likely a volcano — are charged places. Yet they are not treated as such.
“It’s a federal offense to climb Mt. Rushmore,” he says. “You can climb Bear’s House all day long.”
It’s a history he takes jabs at in the show at Pitzer:
“DEVIL’S TOWER WRONG NAME CONFUSED WHITE MAN”
“YES WORSHIP AFTER PAYING ENTER FEE”
“MOUNT RUSHMORE POUND SPIKES IN”
Bill Anthes, who co-curated the show and authored a 2015 book on the artist, says Heap of Birds’ work can be terse but never “lecture-y.”
“His plays on words is always fascinating, ” he says. “Some are jokes on the viewer. Some are playful surrealist wordplay. … He has fun with it, even if he is challenging you. One work takes on stereotypical descriptions of Indians, which are also names of Indian casinos.”
Heap of Birds is intrigued by the power of language and the stories it can tell but also by its innate practicality.
“Living in Oklahoma, I have to be mobile with my practice,” he says. “I can’t make a big concrete block and take it to New York and Toronto and Stockholm. But paper ships easily. Language is very mobile.”
Edgar Heap of Birds was born Hock E Aye Vi (“Little Chief”) in Wichita, Kan., in 1954. His father, the descendant of Cheyenne who fought at Little Big Horn, worked in an aircraft factory. Heap of Birds says he grew up “citified,” away from his family’s rural Oklahoma reservation.
An early inspiration was Kiowa-Comanche artist Blackbear Bosin, a Wichita sculptor and painter.
“Indian people didn’t have cachet,” Heap of Birds says. “Indians were laborers. But he extended beyond the laboring part. He showed us that you could be an artist. … He was respected. He had a presence in the city.”
In 1977, following his undergraduate studies at the University of Kansas, Heap of Birds studied at the Royal College of Art in London.
“That was the era the Sex Pistols were happening,” he says. “I lived on Fulham Road, right near King’s Road,” in the heart of the punk counterculture. “It was on the street, it was in the water, it was like, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ ”
Europe was formative. But later, at Philadelphia’s Tyler School of Art, he found his artist’s voice.
“I had a wall on my studio and I would write things. The wall became a piece,” he says. “The text became the piece.”
At the time, he was studying George Custer’s 1868 massacre at Washita, Okla., in which the lieutenant colonel attacked sleeping Cheyenne, killing more than 100, including women and children, and taking many prisoners, among them the artist’s great-great-grandfather, named Heap of Birds.
Abstraction, he says, didn’t provide him with the tools he needed to express his feelings about that historic attack. “And I didn’t want to make a bad narrative painting,” he says. “So I started notating a lot of the issues.”
He still paints patternfilled abstractions, but text remains central to his work. One of his earliest public text projects ran on a digital billboard in New York’s Times Square in 1983. “It was with artists like Jenny Holzer and Hans Haacke,” he says. “I did mine in Cheyenne.”
“IN OUR LANGUAGE; TSISTSISTAS ‘CHEYENNE,’ ” went part of the missive, noting a name that Cheyenne call themselves.
“I put him alongside artists like Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, and older artists of the conceptual movement who were working with language,” Anthes says. “And he’s an artist who... used it to introduce the mainstream art world audiences to issues of native sovereignty and representation.”
He did this from Oklahoma, on a family patch of canyon land on the Cheyenne reservation, where he relocated after Tyler.
“It wasn’t like people were all welcoming,” he says. “They were like, ‘Show me.’ ”
The experience was profoundly enriching. And while many artists of his generation remained on the East Coast to get the attention of gallerists and museum curators, Heap of Birds balanced life in rural Oklahoma with an art world career. He’s exhibited at New York’s Whitney Museum and Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum; he has a sculptural installation on permanent view at the Denver Art Museum and work in the permanent collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Garis & Hahn show gathers a range of works, including abstract painting and selections from his longtime “Native Hosts” series, begun in the 1980s, in which he creates signage evocative of government placards as a way of marking the indigenous history of an area.
“CALIFORNIA TODAY YOUR HOST IS TOP’ANGA,” reads one such sign outside of Garis & Hahn, referring to the name given to parts of the Los Angeles area by the Tongva people. Heap of Birds first created the California signs as a 2013 public art installation at Pitzer when he was an artist in residence at the campus.
Also in the show is a text piece inspired by the lyrics of songs played at the raucous after-parties that follow powwow celebrations:
“TAKE YOU HOME IN MY ONE EYED FORD”
“SHE DON’T LOVE ME CAUSE I DRINK WHISKEY”
“COME OVER TO MY TIPI WATCH SUN RISE”
“My favorite lyric is, ‘Lonely for sweet heart, she’s in jail,’ ” says Heap of Birds with a grin. “They can be really funny. And it shows you the real humanness of it.”
That ultimately is what the artist’s work is about: Indian experience fully rendered, with nuance, depth and a profound sense of history. Not to mention tenderness and humor — capturing moments that aren’t just about epic history but those late-night hours in which all a person wants is the comfort and warmth of another.