How Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds Found His Voice Outside of the Art Establishment

Edgar Heap of Birds loves basketball. The artist holds season tickets for his team, the Oklahoma City Thunder, and attends every game with family, wearing custom jerseys with his Cheyenne name, Hock E Aye Vi.

So it was a natural fit when Project Backboard, a nonprofit that invites artists to make over existing community courts, proposed that he redesign two in Long Island City, New York. The new courts were unveiled this past October, their grounds painted with jagged-edged patches of invigorating blues and greens, complete with new backboards sporting phrases like “NEW YORK TODAY YOUR HOST IS SHINNECOCK” and “NEW YORK TODAY YOUR HOST IS MOHAWK.”

Visually striking and delivering incisive messaging upon closer look, the artwork, entitled Neufs for Hawaii (2022), offers an immersive primer into Heap of Birds’s decades-long practice. It touches on his attunement to the potency of color, embrace of pithy texts to underscore ugly truths about Native history and life, and affinities for working with other artists and in public settings.

The courts build on two ongoing series the artist started in the 1980s: “Neuf,” abstract paintings that encapsulate the energy of natural landscapes from his Cheyenne and Arapaho homelands, as well as Hawaii, where he often prints; and “Native Hosts,” steel panels he has installed, often in public places around the United States, that name, in emphatic declarations, local tribes as perennial hosts.

As much as Neufs for Hawaii expresses Heap of Birds’s love of the color blue—representing, as he put it, “an optimistic sky, or water”—it also asserts Indigenous sovereignty over a site deemed public property. “We did a kind of reclamation of land,” he added.

More broadly, the project exemplifies how Heap of Birds has preferred to build his career over the past 40-plus years: independent of institutions while remaining in their orbits. Take, for example, the opening celebrations for the new courts, which were hosted by MoMA PS1, where Heap of Birds is a trustee. From the margins, he stays loud, working across disciplines to challenge stereotypes of Native people while centering narratives that non-Natives have been quick to erase or varnish over.

Born in 1954 in Wichita, Kansas, Heap of Birds received his BFA from the University of Kansas and studied art at the Royal College of London, before moving to Philadelphia to earn an MFA from Temple University. Since 1981, he has lived far from art hotspots, on reservation lands in Oklahoma. He has also chosen to represent himself rather than be tied to a single gallery.

“You get put into this machine, and it runs, and it doesn’t really represent you as a person,” he said. “I don’t believe in promotion. I believe in making the work and being true to the work.” Today, he exhibits with artist-run spaces and young galleries such as Hannah Traore, as well as K Art, a Native American–owned space in Buffalo, New York.

Deprioritizing the art market has granted him significant autonomy, but not without drawbacks. “I never really sold much until more recently. It took a long time for somewhat of an acceptance, but it was a battle to be myself,” he said. “It’s always a battle. I can arrive in the art world with a political agenda, but then the paintings aren’t accepted because they’re not in the idiom of protest art.”

The medium Heap of Birds has received the most attention for is printmaking, specifically his ghost prints, which consist of primary prints paired with secondary prints pulled from the same plate. Presenting short phrases in all caps—such as “EMPIRE INFLICTS FORCED REMOVAL VIOLENCE WAR,” “JUST THEIR NAMES MASCOTS CITIES PRODUCTS BUILDINGS,” and “DO NOT DANCE FOR PAY”—they confront the violent histories of settler colonialism and ongoing injustices that Native people face on their own land. The ghost prints, with their faintness, become metaphors for the status of Native communities: present, yet diminished by white supremacist systems.

In recent years, Heap of Birds’s prints have taken center stage in buzzy solo exhibitions, including the major 2019 exhibition “Surviving Active Shooter Custer” at MoMA PS1 that pinpointed the role of the U.S. military in the genocide of Indigenous peoples. This year, in addition to having a die-cut and painted work featured in MoMA’s exhibition on the 1970s–80s gallery Just Above Midtown, he has a current solo exhibition at New York’s Hannah Traore entitled “Old Indian Tricks.” The phrase is a slippery catch-all: “Slang from Native people, but white people think they understand Natives and they’re mystical or whatever,” said Heap of Birds.

The Hannah Traore exhibition, on view through January 14, 2023, features 24 pairs of primary and ghost prints hung across a corner of the gallery. Printed with inks of varying viscosities and shades of red, they read like cautionary messages or plain truths: “DON’T FOLLOW T.V. MUST HONOR SUN,” “BUILT THREE FORTS INDIAN NEVER SAFE,” “BULLETS ARE RAPID FLESH IS SOFT.” Up close, they show drips and splatters; the words are streaky, as if freshly written. “I wanted to immerse the viewer in the experience of the prints,” Heap of Birds said. “I like how the prints look like they’re wet. And you can still smell the ink.”

The prints at Hannah Traore were primarily made in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Heap of Birds has been printing for two decades since learning the process of viscosity printing from Michael McCabe, a master Navajo printmaker. Heap of Birds also prints in Hawaii, where the humidity causes inks to react differently on paper, creating unpredictable but welcome splash marks. While on the Big Island, he likes to paint, taking in the greens of the tropics, and the blues of water and sky.

His longest-running body of work may be “Native Hosts,” a series whose necessity can be measured by the aggressive and racist responses it has garnered. When it was first commissioned in 1988 by the Public Art Fund in New York, then-mayor Ed Koch called for the removal of the artist’s six steel signs acknowledging six local tribes.

In 2007, several signs installed at the Native American House at the University of Illinois in Urbana, naming tribes including the Potawatomi and Meskwaki, were vandalized; two were later stolen by a university graduate student. The offenses continue: In 2021, additional panels outside the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas were vandalized and then stolen by two students.

“There’s reticence from the audience to actually encounter Native presence or art,” Heap of Birds said. “Non-Native kids, white kids think it’s their school. When they see this Native thing, that is an affront. It’s reality, but then they want to defy it. So my work has been torn up, all over the place.”