For Arizona Denials

Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds, artist

Cultural affiliations: member of Cheyenne and Arapaho Nations

born 1954

Landfall Press, publisher

active 1970–2004

Jack Lemon, printer

circa 1935

Steve Campbell, printer

Sarah Pavlus, assistant printer

For Arizona Denials, 2001

Where object was made: Chicago, Illinois, United States

Material/technique: color lithograph; Rives BFK™ paper

Dimensions:
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 509 x 662 mm
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 509 x 662 mm
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 20 1/16 x 26 1/16 in
Mat Dimensions (Height x Width): 30 x 36 in

Credit line: Museum purchase: Peter T. Bohan Art Acquisition Fund

Accession number: 2001.0204.02

Not on display

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The Power of Place: KU Alumni Artists

Since the mid-1990s, Edgar Heap of Birds has created compositions in prints, paintings, and other materials that take a form similar to the work displayed here. These works are connected to the artist’s Neuf series. Neuf is the Cheyenne word for the number four, and a key concept in Cheyenne culture, relating to the four seasons and the four directions. Nearly all of the works in the Neuf series use the same type of pattern seen here. Heap of Birds describes how he began making these forms: “I started walking in the canyons. I started becoming a creature of the woods, observing cedar trees, juniper trees, the rock outcroppings, the water running off those rocks, the birds I was hunting. The Neuf series came out of all these moving shapes.”

The Power of Place: KU Alumni Artists

Exhibition Label: "American Indian Art at the Spencer Museum," 6-Sep-2003 to 19-Oct-2003, Andrea Norris Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds graduated from the University of Kansas and teaches art and Native American studies at the University of Oklahoma. His best known work is characterized by its political content and imaginative and challenging use of words, but since the mid-1990s he has painted abstractions similar to this print, which he says are inspired by the cedar trees of the canyon lands of western Oklahoma and the multicolored fish of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. He says “the water-world has merged with the pastoral tree forms to create a pulse of color on shapes that grow, overlap and swim through the picture plane.” He says “their positive notion of movement and change … always holds hope.”