Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne-Arapaho), Native Hosts, Claremont, California, 2013.
Contemporary artist Edgar Heap of Birds created twenty sign panels recognizing sites and landmarks in the Los Angeles basin in the indigenous Tongva language. Povu’nga is the Tongva word for Long Beach. Photo: Laurie Babcock. Artwork © Edgar Heap of Birds.
Bill Anthes is Professor of Art History and a member of the Art Field Group at Pitzer College. He is author of Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940-1960 (Duke University Press, 2006) and contributing author to Reframing Photography: Theory and Practice, by Rebekah Modrak (Routledge, 2011). He has received fellowships and awards from the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center, the Center for the Arts in Society at Carnegie Mellon University, the Rockefeller Foundation/Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, and the Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program. He lives in Los Angeles, California.
With a background in art history and the interdisciplinary field of American Studies, Bill Anthes teaches and writes about modern and contemporary art in terms of multimedia practice and intercultural exchange. His published work has focused on Native North American art and on the history and theory of photography. His book on the Cheyenne-Arapaho contemporary artist Edgar Heap of Birds will be published by Duke University Press in 2015. He is currently participating in collaborative global projects on indigenous modernisms and on art history in settler colonial nations, and is developing a new project on contemporary art and the non-human.