Sixty is partnering with Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts for our annual Critic-in-Residence Program, bringing one of Sixty’s writers to Omaha to engage with Bemis Center’s exhibition program.
This initiative provides an opportunity for Sixty’s writers to connect with artists working in Omaha and respond to the artwork on display at Bemis Center, sparking new dialogue and creative connections while offering intentional space and time for critics to expand their practice. Sixty’s partnership with Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts furthers our reach within the Midwest as well as emphasizes the Midwest’s creative capabilities and role in global contemporary arts discourse.
This year’s Critic-in-Residence is Sixty writer and digital storyteller River Kerstetter, who will travel to Bemis Center this summer to view and respond to one of the two dynamic exhibitions on display, engage with the center’s talented artists-in-residence, and connect with an Omaha-based arts writer. During her stay, she will have the opportunity to immerse herself in a new, creative environment and contribute to the contemporary arts dialogue happening in Omaha, bringing her own interests, background, and expertise to the conversation. As a digital storyteller, designer, and writer, we are excited for River to forge new, generative relationships that will feed into and further her practice while deepening Sixty’s presence and network in the region, cultivating a conversational bridge between Chicago and Omaha.
Read 2023 Critic-in-Residence Chenoa Baker’s response to Bemis’s exhibition “Presence in the Pause: Interiority and its Radical Immanence,” which won the author the Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art (AICA) Young Art Critics Prize in 2023.
About the Critic-in-Resident: River Ian Kerstetter (she/her) is a designer, curator, and writer living in the unceded Anishinaabe lands also called Chicago. River is a citizen of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin.
Image: Black and white self portrait by River Ian Kerstetter. She wears a floral top, chain necklaces, earrings in the shape of crescent moons, and her hair in two thin braids. A plant obscures the lower left corner.
About the Exhibition
Raven Halfmoon: Flags of Our Mothers
May 18, 2024–September 15, 2024
Raven Halfmoon’s practice spans torso-scaled and colossal-sized stoneware sculptures, with some soaring up to nine feet and weighing over eight hundred pounds. With inspirations that orbit centuries from ancient Indigenous pottery to Moai statues to Land Art, Halfmoon interrogates the intersection of tradition, history, gender, and personal experience.
Born and raised in Norman, Oklahoma, she learned about ceramics as a teenager from a Caddo elder. Working mainly in portraiture, Halfmoon hand builds each work using a coil method. Her surfaces are expressive and show deep finger impressions and dramatic dripping glazes—a physicality that presences her as both maker and matter. She fuses Caddo pottery traditions (a history of making mostly done by women) with populist gestures—often tagging her work (a reference to Caddo tattooing).
Her palette is specific and matches both the clay bodies she selects and the glazes she fires with—reds (after the Oklahoma soil and the blood of murdered Indigenous women), blacks (referencing the natural clay native to the Red River), and creams. Sometimes she stacks and repeats imagery, creating totemic forms that represent herself and her maternal ancestry while also reinforcing the multiplicities that exist inside all of us. Her works reference stories of the Caddo Nation, specifically her feminist lineage and the power of its complexities.
Located in Omaha, Nebraska, Bemis Center facilitates the creation, presentation, and understanding of contemporary art through an international residency program, exhibitions, and educational programs. Their vision is to inspire an open and diverse dialogue on the critical issues that give shape and meaning to the human condition.
