Edgar Heap of Birds: Genocide and Democracy, Secrets of Life and Death
At the Charles H. Scott Gallery until November 6

Walk into the Edgar Heap of Birds exhibition at the Charles H. Scott Gallery and you will be immersed in shades of blue. Emanating from the abstract paintings, text-based monoprints, and blown-glass vessels on display, the cerulean, aqua, and powdery blues may lull you into a sense of serenity.

That is, if you don’t look too closely at the dead bodies floating across the glass, or read too intently the violent histories and contemporary injustices that are embedded in the text works. That is, too, if you don’t notice the horror and outrage in Genocide and Democracy, the grid of blood-red monoprints mounted on the gallery’s far wall. Handwritten, these pieces employ altered lyrics of patriotic songs to point up the massacres of indigenous people that underlie the American republic.

Based in Oklahoma but constantly travelling, Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, curator, and educator of Cheyenne and Arapaho descent. Widely esteemed as a leader in the creation of political art focused on Native American issues, he uses his practice as a way of remembering a tragic and traumatic past while also asserting the living presence of indigenous peoples and cultures, in the United States and elsewhere. (That “elsewhere” includes Vancouver, where he has created public artworks, in the form of signage, that remind us of whose unceded territory this city is built upon.)

At the exhibition’s opening, Heap of Birds talked about the methods and ideas behind his artworks. And although he frequently describes himself as a warrior for his people, although, too, the histories of massacres and cultural destruction he recounts are horrendous, he spoke with such a calm intelligence and generosity of spirit that we felt truly welcomed into the circle of his art.

Most Serene Republic: Native Bodies of Remembrance is the title of a series of blown-glass vases, created in 2007 when Heap of Birds was exhibiting at the Venice Biennale. They memorialize the 20 or more Native Americans who died in Europe in the late 19th century while touring, under coercion and duress, with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show. Each vase is encircled by ghostly figures, arms and legs outstretched, as if flying. Here, it seems, Heap of Birds has freed the dead warriors from their cold, dark, European graves, allowing their spirits to soar homeward.

The 48 blue monoprints of Secrets in Life and Death are installed in three sets of 16 each (16 is a number of ceremonial import for the artist). Handwritten in capital letters, the texts take on the urgent, antigovernment tone of graffiti and, at the same time, the confiding nuances of poetry. In a kind of stream of consciousness that is at once angry and loving, didactic and ambiguous, the words written here interweave the “secrets” of past and present Native American history with the artist’s personal life as a husband and father.

As much as his work demands recognition of a bloody and traumatic past, Heap of Birds also offers the possibility of renewal through the natural world. Four abstract paintings from his “Neuf” series recall a 10-year period when he lived on Arapaho and Cheyenne lands in Oklahoma. (Neuf is the Cheyenne word for “four”, another number of ceremonial significance, Heap of Birds says.)

The recurring leafy forms in a range of blues and other hues—both earthy and celestial—are layered over each other, above grounds of ochres, umbers, and greys. These forms evoke juniper trees, flocks of birds, schools of fish, and the movement of clouds overhead. As in other works here, the predominant blue tones allude to sacred elements—the great dome of the sky, fresh water, and the sea. In a very real sense, Heap of Birds’ art is life-affirming—and death-defying.