Raven Halfmoon: Flags of Our Mothers Raven Halfmoon’s first major traveling museum exhibition is coming to Ogden Museum of Southern Art fall of 2025

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Raven Halfmoon, Tsu’-Cus Iya’y? I (Star Sister I), 2022, Stoneware, glaze, 55 x 38 x 23 inches, Collection of Mark McDonald and Dwayne Resnick, Courtesy of Ross + Kramer Gallery

 

(New Orleans, LA) – Ogden Museum of Southern Art is pleased to present Raven Halfmoon: Flags of Our Mothers, a major traveling exhibition showcasing the work ceramicist Raven Halfmoon (Caddo Nation). Organized by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Flags of Our Mothers features new and recent work created over the past five years. On view at Ogden Museum from September 13, 2025 to March 8, 2026, the exhibition includes Halfmoon’s largest sculptures to date—most notably a three-part stacked ceramic form towering over twelve feet tall.

The exhibition’s title pays tribute to the matriarchs in Halfmoon’s life and celebrates the strength and resilience of Indigenous women—honoring all they have created and endured to preserve their stories and cultural traditions. Prior to its presentation in New Orleans, Flags of Our Mothers was exhibited at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield, CT), Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (Omaha, NE) and The Contemporary Austin (Austin, TX). The exhibition is supported for travel by the Art Bridges Foundation. While on view across thecountry, Halfmoon’s work has been featured in outlets including “Artsy,” “The Art Newspaper,”“Forbes,” “Vogue,” “Hyperallergic,” “Garden & Gun,” “Ceramics Monthly” and “The Brooklyn Rail.”

Halfmoon’s ceramic sculptures range from torso-sized to monumental, with some weighing over a thousand pounds. These commanding forms challenge romanticized portrayals of Indigenous identity and offer powerful new monuments that honor her Native heritage, family lineage, Indigenous history and tradition. In addition to studying fine art and ceramics in college, she was honored to also learn from a distinguished Caddo potter as a teen.

Raven Halfmoon shares, “I create work that is large and powerful. I build sculptures that demand to be heard and experienced. My artwork exists to break the mold of the romanticized Native American stereotype and to simply say: We are still here and we are powerful.”

Halfmoon’s inspirations orbit centuries—from ancient Indigenous pottery, specifically Caddo ceramic traditions, to the colossal Olmec stone heads in Mexico, the Moai statues on Easter Island and the major earth mounds constructed by the artist’s ancestors for a variety of purposes, including ceremonial. Fusing Caddo pottery traditions, a history of making mostly done by women, with populist gestures—often tagging her work (a reference also to Caddo tattooing and ancient pottery motifs), her works reference stories of the Caddo Nation, specifically her feminist lineage and the power of its complexities.

Halfmoon primarily works in portraiture, building each piece by hand using the coil method. Her surfaces carry a raw, expressive energy, bearing visible finger impressions and dramatic, dripping glazes—a physicality that positions her as both maker and matter. Her color palette is deeply symbolic and tied to the clay bodies she selects and the glazes she fires with: reds, evoking the Oklahoma soil and honoring the missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW) movement, whose symbol is a red hand; blacks, referencing the natural clay of the Red River; and buff creams.

Halfmoon often stacks and repeats imagery, forming totemic structures that reflect her own identity and maternal ancestry while echoing the Native tradition of honoring both past and future generations. These towering works also explore the multiplicities within us all, giving form to both personal and collective histories.

William Andrews, The Helis Foundation Executive Director, Ogden Museum of Southern Art explains, “As Ogden Museum approaches our 25th anniversary, we present an ever-expanding story of art of the American South, as accomplished with our critically acclaimed, recent exhibitions Baldwin Lee and Hoa Tay (Flower Hands): Southern Artists of the Vietnamese Diaspora. By celebrating the excellence of art of the American South, highlighting Raven Halfmoon’s work at this moment will further dramatically underscore a key goal of ours: for Ogden Museum to become the acknowledged, international leader in its field.”

Flags of Our Mothers will be accompanied by Raven Halfmoon’s first museum catalogue, co-published by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and Gregory R. Miller & Co. The catalogue includes an introduction and interview with the artist by Amy Smith-Stewart, an essay by Rachel Adams, and a commissioned poem by Kinsale Drake.

A Gallery Talk with Raven Halfmoon, along with Rachel Adams, Chief Curator and Director of Programs at Bemis Center and Amy Smith-Stewart, Diana Bowes Chief Curator at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum will take place on Saturday, September 13 at 2 p.m. During this interactive program, the artist and curators will discuss a selection of works, exploring the inspiration for the exhibition, Halfmoon’s Caddo Nation heritage, its pottery traditions and her feminist lineage. The event is free and open to the community.

Raven Halfmoon: Flags of Our Mothers is organized by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. The exhibition is curated by Amy Smith-Stewart, Diana Bowes Chief Curator at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and Rachel Adams, Chief Curator and Director of Programs at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. The exhibition will be on view at Ogden Museum of Southern Art September 13, 2025 to March 8, 2026.

About Raven Halfmoon

Raven Halfmoon was born in 1991 in Norman, Oklahoma, where she presently lives and works. A descendant of Choctaw, Delaware and Otoe-Missouria, she is a member of the Caddo Nation, a federally recognized Tribal Nation headquartered in Binger, Oklahoma with a rich history of many thousands of years in the Southeastern region of the United States. Halfmoon received her BFA from the University of Arkansas, where she double majored in ceramics and cultural anthropology.

Halfmoon is influenced by tradition of tribal craft and early monolithic sculpture, for which she considers herself to be a cultural preservationist. Her work resists conventional stereotypes while blending history, identity and cultural heritage with modern iconography, music and fashion within contemporary art practices. She’s recently had solo exhibitions at Salon 94 (New York, NY) and Art Omi, and her sculptures are in the permanent collections of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami and the Montclair Art Museum. In 2023, she was selected as an Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellow (Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, IN), and in 2024, she was a finalist for the international Loewe Craft Prize (Loewe Foundation, Madrid, Spain). Raven’s work has been the focus of numerous reviews in “Vogue,” “Forbes,” “Hyperallergic,” “Garden & Gun,” “Ceramics Now” and “Make Magazine,” and she is the “Ceramics Monthly” Artist of the Year.

About Ogden Museum of Southern Art

Located in the vibrant Warehouse Arts District of downtown New Orleans, Louisiana since 1999 and open to the public since 2003, Ogden Museum of Southern Art invites visitors to experience and learn about the artists and culture of the American South. Ogden Museum is home to a collection of more than four thousand works, making it the largest and most comprehensive repository dedicated to Southern art in the nation, with particular strength in the genres of Self-Taught art, Regionalism, photography and contemporary art. The Museum is further recognized for its original exhibitions, public events and educational programs, which examine the development of visual art alongside Southern traditions of music, literature and local craft.

Ogden Museum is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Admission is free to Museum Members and admission for Non-Members is $15.00 for adults, $12.00 for seniors 65 and older, $7.00 for children ages 5-17 and free for children under 5. Prices are subject to change when exhibitions are being rotated. Admission is free to Louisiana residents on Thursdays, courtesy of The Helis Foundation.

The Museum is located at 925 Camp Street, New Orleans, Louisiana 70130. For more information visit ogdenmuseum.org or call 504.539.9650.

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