When most art museums decide to purchase large-scale outdoor artworks, they typically turn to a predictable list of internationally recognized blue-chip sculptors such as Claes Oldenburg, Richard Serra or Marc di Suvero.
The Denver Art Museum has made its share of acquisitions by such artists, but when it sought to commission a piece for one of its most prominent sites – along West 14th Avenue Parkway near its main entrance – it took a very different tack.
It chose Edgar Heap of Birds (HOCK E AYE VI in Cheyenne), an Oklahoma City artist of Cheyenne and Arapaho descent, becoming one of the few general art museums in the country to own a monumental artwork by a contemporary American Indian artist.
Director Lewis Sharp said the piece, which was dedicated Tuesday and is on permanent view, provides visitors and passers-by an unmistakable statement about the importance the institution places on art by this country’s indigenous peoples.
“The Denver Art Musem’s collections of Native American art are among the finest in the country,” he said. “And for us to have those great collections inside the building and for there not to be a reference or a major artistic statement by a Native American on the grounds of the Denver Art Museum I always thought was a missed opportunity.”
The new work, which is titled “Wheel” and measures 48 feet in diameter, was inspired by the Big Horn Medicine Wheel in northern Wyoming’s Big Horn Mountains. That centuries-old landmark consists of 28 rows of stones radiating from a central cairn to an encircling stone rim.
Heap of Birds’ wheel is composed of 10 porcelain-enameled steel towers aligned in a grassy circle in such a way that one of the vectors cutting across the piece corresponds to the sunrise and sunset of the summer solstice.
Forming a kind of backdrop for the contemplative piece is a preexisting curved wall on the facade of the museum. Inscribed in raised letters on it is a Cheyenne saying that translates roughly as “We are always returning home again.”
Each of the 12-foot-tall towers, which Heap of Birds calls “trees,” are topped with forked caps. They draw their inspiration from the support beams in traditional American Indian dwellings.
The trees are adorned with text, archetypal symbols, ancient petroglyphs and original drawings that tell the history of Native Americans in the region – both the good and bad – and interweave autobiographical elements.
“There was an absence of history that native people have been in control of,” Heap of Birds said. “We’re really sort of moved out of all the history or we’re painted in a very bizarre way where no one really knows what happened. So it’s kind of a rebuttal for me – going on record to describe what I think history really is.”
Some of his earlier works have generated controversy, but he does not see this one as polemical.
“It’s informative,” he said. “And it presents some difficult issues perhaps. But they’re basically just facts. They’re events that did happen, and they’re not an editorial, necessarily, on the events.”
The origins of “Wheel” can be traced to a desire by Nancy Blomberg, curator of native arts, to bolster the museum’s comparatively meager holdings of contemporary Indian art when she arrived in 1990.
In 1996, she sent out requests for proposals to nine Native American artists who had successfully completed outdoor sculpture projects. She set no conditions other than the works had to conform to the site and be able to withstand Denver’s tough weather conditions.
“Every single one responded, and I wish we could have acquired all of them,” she said. “But Edgar’s was the one that interested us most both in the specific nature of the piece – it was just perfectly adapted to the circular site – and in intellectual content.”
The Wichita, Kan., native, who teaches at the University of Oklahoma, has been a visiting lecturer around the world and has exhibited in museums ranging from the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City to the Hong Kong Arts Centre.
The cost for the commission, fabrication and installation of the piece was about $500,000, with funding coming from a wide range of sources. These include the National Endowment for the Arts, which supplied $95,000, and the Douglas Society, a support group for the museum’s native arts department.
Now that “Wheel” is completed, Blomberg said she couldn’t be more pleased.
“It’s absolutely beautiful on the site,” she said. “It just really fits there.”
“Wheel”
Permanently on view|Public art installation by Edgar Heap of Birds|Near main entrance, Denver Art Museum, 100 W. 14th Avenue Parkway|Free|(720-865-5000 or denverartmuseum.org)
