The K Art Gallery is pleased to announce Edgar Heap of Birds: Punctures, an exhibition of a multitude of works by Edgar Heap of Birds at 808 Main Street, Buffalo, New York. Opening on Friday, Jan. 21, 2022, the exhibition includes mono prints and ghost prints, paintings from the artist’s Neuf series and works from his famous Native Hosts series. The exhibition will also include a newly created public art project on the gallery’s grounds.
Heap of Birds’ mono print installations exist in two combined forms — a set of primary prints accompanied by a set of ghost prints. The primary mono prints are the first pull from the print-making plate, while the ghost prints are from the second plate pull. As Heap of Birds notes, “[t]he primary mono prints are strong, bright, and bold, thus articulating the way Indigenous life develops, grows, and survives in spite of the American empire. The faint color, blurred text, and sometimes obscured image treatment of the ghost mono prints represent the United States of America’s refusal to accept Native Indigenous Nations, their history, and the brutal holocaust perpetrated on our Nations by the ruling republic.”
The artists’ Neuf series of paintings reference Cheyenne philosophy and history with rich and vibrant colors. The paintings evoke the landscape, bodies moving, and other concepts tied to the Cheyenne nation.
Heap of Birds’ well-known Native Hosts is an ongoing series of public art interventions that have been in creation for over 20 years. The host signs are intended to honor indigenous citizens and seek to educate the non-Native public as to the indigenous lands upon which they live and walk. As Heap of Birds states, “[a]s in any proper decorum it is fitting, before one proceeds in life, to properly recognize one’s host.”
Born in 1954, Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne and Arapaho) is a multi-disciplinary artist, advocate, and academic. He studied at the University of Kansas, Lawrence (BFA, 1976), undertook graduate studies at the Royal College of Art, London (1977), and attended the Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia (MFA, 1979). He was named USA Ford Fellow in 2012 and Distinguished Alumni, University of Kansas, in 2014. Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts and Letters degrees have been awarded by the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston (2008), Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver, Canada (2017), and California Institute of the Arts, Valencia CA (2018).
Heap of Birds’ works are included in such significant collections as: The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Denver Art Museum, CO; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC; and the British Museum, London.
Edgar Heap of Birds: Punctures will be on view at the K Art Gallery, 808 Main Street, Buffalo, New York beginning Jan. 21, 2022 through March 4, 2022. For more information about the gallery, please visit thek.art, or contact the gallery by phone at 716.216.2941.
