Edgar Heap of Birds

Bill Anthes, Edgar Birds. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2015.232 pages. ISBN 978-0-8223-5994-4. $24.95 USD paperback.Edgar Birds is Bill Anthes's second book on American Indian art, first being his 2006 Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940-1960 (Duke UP). Unlike this earlier title, Edgar Birds is devoted to documenting and establishing art historical, political, and social context work a single artist: Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Birds. Anthes succeeds in his initial goal arguing for Birds's place in history contemporary art generally, and in particular in terms developments in global art world 1980s to present (20) and his later objective, which evolved as he worked on project, foregrounding Heap Birds's practice as grounded in Cheyenne spirituality and local indigenous knowledge because such is the crux his contemporaneity (21).The first theme-based chapters is Land, which begins with a discussion Birds's Neuf series, many which are abstract paintings. Neuf means four in Cheyenne, and series became an expression artist's sense specific locations, places where people have lived and built homes, and places that his ancestors have been forced to evacuate by foreign aggressors. Most illustrations in this section, however, are word-based works. Chapter two, Words, begins with Public Enemy Care for Youth (1993), a three-print serigraph series that reads How did beautiful children become mad dogs? Whose enemy? Whose youth? These words invoke many aspects Native American life and American politics in general. Chapter three, Histories, begins with Who Owns History (1992), a series signs questioning history - written by apparent victors -of battle for control Ohio River headwaters at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Chapter four, Generations, begins with a discussion Birds's thirty-foot banner 25 Million Red Indian Lives Lost! a work intended as a reminder of human toll that accompanied rise England as a global power-and Europe and its colonial proxies -during era discovery and conquest (163).Land, words, histories, and generations are certainly thematically appropriate chapter titles, but with this arrangement Anthes is sometimes obliged to find new ways to say what he has already said, albeit with reference to different examples, as he positions Birds's text-based work under each header to identical or overlapping art historical, political, and social events and movements. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.