Raven Halfmoon’s ceramic figures bring Caddo memory to Marfa
At Ballroom Marfa in West Texas, Raven Halfmoon’s first major traveling exhibition turns ceramic sculpture into a forceful meditation on ancestry, scale, and visibility. Flags of Our Mothers, on view through October 11, gathers work from the past five years and places Halfmoon’s large, hand-built figures in direct conversation with the landscape and history of the region.
Halfmoon, a member of the Caddo Nation who grew up in Oklahoma and still lives there, has built a practice around forms that feel both intimate and monumental. Her sculptures often resemble self-portraits without becoming literal likenesses: women with long hair, broad hips, and surfaces marked by the artist’s fingers, tools, and the accidental traces of making. The effect is rough, deliberate, and deeply personal.
The exhibition’s outdoor centerpiece, Flagbearer (2022), rises 12.5 feet high in glazed stoneware. Made during a residency at California State University, Long Beach, the work was constructed in three sections using traditional Caddo coil methods. Halfmoon shaped the surface by pinching and raking it by hand, then left visible drips of white and red glaze across the figure. The palette is tightly controlled throughout the show: dark gray and black, white and cream, and red. For Halfmoon, the red carries references to Oklahoma soil and murdered Indigenous women.
Inside Ballroom, another towering female figure, America’s Sweetheart (2022), echoes the American flag in dark gray, white, and red. Nearby, paired busts and torsos appear side by side or back to back, as in Tsu’-Cus lya’y? I (Star Sister I) (2022) and Day and Night in Oklahoma (2026). Some are differentiated by contrasting colors, reinforcing the sense of duality that runs through the exhibition.
Flags of Our Mothers originated at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska, where chief curators Amy Smith-Stewart and Rachel Adams developed the project together. Smith-Stewart said the collaboration began when both institutions realized they wanted to mount a show with Halfmoon.
Ballroom Marfa offers a fitting setting for the exhibition. The town’s art history is unusually dense for its size, shaped in part by Donald Judd’s move to Marfa in the 1970s and by Ballroom’s own transformation from a 1920s dance hall into a contemporary art space in 2003. Virginia Lebermann, who helped found the venue with Fairfax Dorn, said the museum was eager to host the show.
Halfmoon’s visibility has expanded well beyond Texas. In New York, her work is currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Whitney Biennial, and the High Line. In Los Angeles, it appears in a group exhibition at the Hammer Museum and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Taken together, those presentations underscore how quickly her sculptural language has moved from regional recognition to a national conversation about Indigenous form, scale, and presence.
