Oklahoma slam dunk: Indigenous artist invites visitors to shoot hoops as part of his latest show – The Art Newspaper

Whether using canvas or paper, metal or wood, Edgar Heap of Birds wields flat planes like a blade to carve uncomfortable truths. The Cheyenne and Arapaho artist has been working for decades to advocate for Indigenous communities. His retrospective at the Oklahoma Contemporary museum, Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds: HONOR SONG (until 20 October), showcases the beauty and defiance in these efforts, all while inviting the community for a friendly game of hoops on a pair of basketball courts he transformed.

“I believe in the art and the moral issues and trying to be productive and useful to society and Indigenous populations,” Heap of Birds says. “I do have that internal moral compass, and I always use it. You’ve got to bring it forward to be dealt with.”

To say he is dealing with it is an understatement. The retrospective features more than 100 works, including his signature monoprints, abstract paintings, glassworks and sculptures, plus two new public art installations—the artist’s second basketball court project. The first was in 2022 in Queens, New York, a few blocks from MoMA PS1 (where Heap of Birds serves on the board).

The Oklahoma Contemporary project includes two half-sized courts in the adjacent Campbell Art Park that will be open for public play for at least a year from 24 April. The courts reflect the artist’s love for the game—a resident of Oklahoma for 40 years, he is an avid fan of the Oklahoma City Thunder basketball team—and his belief in the power of community.

Education on the home front

When his family could not attend his graduate exhibition at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia in 1979, he added their names to the gallery walls. A few years later, he left the East Coast to rejoin his family in Oklahoma. Despite degrees from Temple and the University of Kansas, Heap of Birds felt he needed the instruction of elders on the Cheyenne and Arapaho reservation.

During these years, he began the Neuf series (1981-present), whose title is Cheyenne for the ritually and cosmically significant number four. The series’ abstract patterns are inspired by nature’s palette and the textured foliage of juniper. Neuf for Oklahoma Autumn 1 and 2 (1997) serve as the inspiration for the basketball courts’ hand-painted murals.

The two backboards are also signature Heap of Birds, drawing from his series Native Hosts (1988-present). The panels honour the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes. The courts’ scoreboard recreates Heap of Birds’s work from a public art project in Times Square in 1982 that also included David Hammons, Keith Haring and Barbara Kruger, and was organised by Jane Dickson.

Highlights from the indoor portion of the retrospective include Heap of Birds’s work for the 2007 Venice Biennale, Most Serene Republics (2007), which memorialises Oglala Lakota Nation citizens lost in service to the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show, and Surviving Active Shooter Custer (2018), which features bold monotype prints paired with fainter “ghost prints”, a metaphor for the erasure of Indigenous culture.

Heap of Birds says that around 70% of the works in the show came directly from his studio. Looking back to the midpoint of his career, he says he did not always feel supported. “There was a lot of resistance, huge resistance to everything and then all that I made—the political art, the interventions, things about history,” he says.

The artist’s younger self would never have thought this retrospective possible, basketball courts and all. “This show is just that, it’s me being myself,” he says.