Raven Halfmoon’s ‘Sun Twins’ on View at the Parrish Art Museum

From June 12 to October 6, the Parrish Art Museum and The FLAG Art Foundation will present the next installment of Fresh Paint, a collaborative exhibition series showcasing recently created or previously unexhibited artworks.

The installation showcases ‘Sun Twins” (2023), a commanding stoneware sculpture by Raven Halfmoon (Caddo Nation, b. 1991).

“Raven Halfmoon’s ‘Sun Twins’ is a powerful sculpture, and we are thrilled to exhibit fresh work once again in partnership with The FLAG Art Foundation,” said Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, executive director of the Parrish Art Museum. “For this exhibition, Halfmoon invites us to engage with Indigenous histories and futures through impressive form and scale. We are proud to offer a platform that responds in real time to the evolving practices of artists who are reshaping our collective visual landscape.”

Standing over six feet tall, “Sun Twins” presents two towering figures positioned side by side, embodying Halfmoon’s ongoing commitment to creating compelling representations of Indigenous women. Sculpted from clay, an elemental material rooted in her Caddo heritage, the dual forms stand as monuments to Indigenous feminisms, generational knowledge and relationship to homelands.

“Sun Twins” reflects Halfmoon’s interest in duality, a motif that often appears in her work as a representation of what she has identified as “the binary elements of life — darkness and light, ancient and modern, traditional and contemporary.” Each of the figures is bisected by Halfmoon’s application of white and buttery yellow glazes — colors the artist works with to symbolize celestial light, as well as the white designs applied to traditional Caddo pottery. The sculpture’s doubled forms embody both ancestral lineage and the multifaceted nature of identity. As Halfmoon explains, “I use multiplicity…to physically manifest these ideas of who I’m carrying with me.”

Fresh Paint is a rotating series of single-artwork exhibitions at the Parrish that spotlight new or never-before-exhibited works by both emerging and established artists. By circumventing traditional exhibition planning timelines — which can extend years into the future — Fresh Paint provides a platform for artists to promptly showcase freshly created artworks and ideas, allowing for a more direct response to current issues and cultural movements. This approach fosters a timelier dialogue between the museum, visitors and the surrounding community. Presented in the Parrish’s Creativity Lounge located in the Lobby, Fresh Paint is open to the public at no charge during regular museum hours.

Each Fresh Paint installation is accompanied by two sets of interpretative texts: One is a commissioned piece by an invited writer, critic, poet, or scholar; the other is a collaboration with the Parrish Teen Council ARTscope, a youth-focused initiative offering an in-depth exploration of the visual arts and museum operations.

The FLAG Art Foundation is a noncollecting, nonprofit exhibition space that mounts solo, two-person, and thematic group exhibitions centering on emerging and established artists from around the globe.

“I love the Parrish Art Museum and FLAG is proud to continue our partnership with them on the Fresh Paint exhibition series,” said Glenn Fuhrman, founder of The FLAG Art Foundation. “Raven Halfmoon’s sculpture ‘Sun Twins’ is a formally impressive and complex work, one that connects contemporary audiences with vital histories of this country. For this reason and many others, it embodies the curatorial spirit and scope of Fresh Paint.”

The Parrish Art Museum is at 279 Montauk Highway in New York. For more information, visit parrishart.org.