Loie Hollowell has been painting sex and pregnancy for the past decade. Over that time, her artistic approach to these subjects has transformed in ways that rely on her own felt experience of embodiment, and two exhibitions now on view, one at Pace Gallery and one at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, provide ample evidence of this fact.
I visited artist Loie Hollowell at her bright Queens studio on a bristlingly cold February day. We were meeting to discuss her ten-year survey at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT, and her solo exhibition of works on paper at Pace Gallery in Chelsea.
In Flags of Our Mothers, Raven Halfmoon honors her Caddo heritage and ancestors while pushing back against Indigenous silencing. With monumental hand-built stoneware sculptures filling the galleries of The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, she claims space for Indigenous peoples, herself included. The sheer size and weight of the figural sculptures command attention. As she works, Halfmoon considers the lived experiences of her ancestors—their traditions and the impact of colonization—and seeks to empower her community and uplift their stories. At the same time, she reflects more broadly on the rich heritage of Indigenous peoples, as well as their own tragedies as colonizers forced them off their land. The evidence of her emotions is preserved in the glaze, divots, indentations, and figures that adorn the surfaces of her work.