Telling Many Magpies, Telling Black Wolf, Telling Hachivi

About the Work

From the Artist

The real mission of my art is to reset history, to be truthful about what happened to Native people. I see protecting Indigenous people around the world as a big part of my job as an artist. 
—Excerpted from https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/in-the-studio-hock-e-aye-vi-edgar-heap-of-birds-63298/, accessed 6-22-2021

The language drawings of Edgar Heap of Birds (Hock E Aye Vi) investigate the relationship between nature and culture. The screenprint Telling Many Magpies, Telling Black Wolf, Telling Hachivi, 1989, features a decorative design with text about the annihilation of Native Americans and their culture. His work is a "mapping" of Native American symbols and representations of the natural world. The spaces between the letters, the sound of the note, and the spaces between them are all incorporated into the formal design. The work of Heap of Birds addresses the stereotyping and appropriation of Native American culture in contemporary American society. The artist's primarily word-based art aims to dispel racist and romantic notions of Indians while revealing the more complex realities of the contemporary Native American experience. The title of this print alludes to Native Americans' oral history tradition: Many Magpies was the name of the artist's great-great-grandfather, a Cheyenne chief known as Heap of Birds; Black Wolf was the artist's great-grandfather, and Hachivi (Hock E Aye Vi) was the artist.
_{— Adapted from https://eheapofbirds.com, accessed 6-22-2021, from https://www.philamuseum.org/collection/object/307038, accessed 6-22-2021, and "Fresh, Human and Personal: Signature of Brandywine Workshop," ,Three Decades of American Printmaking: The Brandywine Workshop Collection (Manchester, VT: Hudson Hills Press, 2004)}


VIEW TEACHING RESOURCE ↗️︎