Do Not Dance For Pay

Garis & Hahn is pleased to present Do Not Dance for Pay, a survey of work by the renowned multi-disciplinary Cheyenne and Arapaho artist, Hock E Aye VI Edgar Heap of Birds.

Featuring works from six distinct series made over four decades, the exhibition marks Heap of Birds' first Los Angeles show in ten years. The title of the exhibition alludes to indigenous art and its deep-rooted link to tourism and an art market that has been historically driven by the non-Native. Most artists "dance for pay", a reference to the making of apolitical art with the focus on commercial sales--not so with the work of Heap of Birds. This survey is the artist's inaugural exhibition with the gallery and will be on view February 10 through March 10, 2018.

In recent years the post-war art historical narrative has been revised, with artists of color, long-excluded from contemporary art history, finally finding agency for their work. Enter Edgar Heap of Birds, who was featured on the cover of the October 2017 issue of Art In America. Throughout his singular four-decade career, Heap of Birds has brandished words as weapons. The words and phrases he scrawls on his paintings and monoprints act as scathing indictments of the odious history of appropriation and violence against indigenous people. His words serve as an effectual counterweight to the biased historical narratives regarding the Native presence.

Through public art pieces, biting political text-based work, poetry, large-scale drawings, monoprints, signs, and more intimate abstract paintings, Heap of Birds purposefully subverts the power dynamics between the privileged and the marginalized, conventional society and the reservation. His multifaceted oeuvre rejects the separation between protest and poetry, taking aim at a history which obscures the Native population. For his "Native Hosts" series (begun in the late 1980s), Heap of Birds manipulates institutional regulatory signs which he then installs in outdoor public spaces. He r