Raven Halfmoon, a citizen of the Caddo nation, produced CADDOxCHIC at the Archie Bray Foundation in Montana during a residency that allowed her to create ceramic work on a monumental scale. The artist’s connection to the medium spans much of her life. As a child, she was introduced to ceramicist Jereldine Redcorn, whose artistic practice revived pre-Columbian traditions of Caddo potterymaking. During her undergraduate education at the University of Arkansas, Halfmoon continued her studies of ceramics through the university’s holdings of ancient Caddo pottery. Though she quickly moved away from functional vessels in her artistic practice, the distinctive finger prints on the matte surface of her sculptures read as an amplified expression of the first steps of traditional pottery making, in which the clay is coiled into a form that is later smoothed. Her current work, which emphasizes scale and power, draws from her interest in anthropology, particularly the large-scale heads and figures produced by the Olmec and Rapa Nui (Easter Island) people. In this piece, as well as its sister work, CADDOxCOUTURE, the artist turned her attention toward what she describes as the “entanglement of being a millennial” and simultaneously sharing the weight of her tribal history.¹ Though the somber faces of the work nod to the horrific aftermath of colonization, Halfmoon’s mischievous and unrelenting inclusion of the Chanel logo upend any attempts to read the piece as a solemn mediation on power.

      Glamour, according to humanist geographer Nigel Thrift, has three tenets. Glamour symbolizes a troubleless world or a world with “troubles you would want;” it provides an outlet for the expression of an “extra-you,” that is, a performance tailor-made for an audience of oneself; and it is, at its core, a “calculation [that] must appear as effortless.”² Halfmoon’s massive ceramic bust, CADDOxCHIC plays with all of these concepts. The sculpture presents Chanel as a signifier of material abundance and simultaneously play-acts Halfmoon as an artist-collaborator of a luxury fashion house. All this, the work accomplishes with an air of sprezzatura—the graffiti-like writing, the pronounced mark of the hand on the work’s surface, and the dripping glazes are distinctly at odds with the prim polish typically associated with Chanel. Of her use of the famed logo in her work, Halfmoon has stated that she strives to “to be relevant in today’s society and culture… I try to use craft as this manifestation carrier of culture, riding a balance of maintaining Caddo heritage and at the same time wanting to spend all my money on a bag.”³ Yet her use of the logo is also tongue-in-cheek and subversive, an appropriation of (and a retort to) the unaffordable exclusivity of the brand. The red and black glazed stripes on the multi-eyed faces gesture to the facial tattoos that are traditional to Caddo culture. A foil to the branding on the sides of the work, this aesthetic choice subtly asserts the artist’s tribal affiliation. In its combination of these features, CADDOxCHIC expresses an actuality that holds true for countless Native and non-Native women living today: that style and strength are inextricably linked, each a source of the other and both deeply vital to navigating life in the twenty-first century with resilience and grace.

¹ Laisun Keane, “Virtual Opening Reception for Raven Halfmoon: Rumination In Isolation,” YouTube Video, 46:43, May 22, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_N7z-F_hBPc.

² Nigel Thrift, “Understanding the Material Practice of Glamour,” in Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader, (Durham: The Duke University Press, 2010), 298-299.

³ Annie Armstrong, “Raven Halfmoon On Toeing the Line Between Her Caddo Heritage and TikTok,” Garage Magazine, January 8, 2021, https://garage.vice.com/en_us/article/5dpw8b/raven-halfmoon-on-toeing-the-line-between-her-caddo-heritage-and-tik-tok.


Image courtesy the artist.