Hotvlkuce Harjo

Artist Biography

Hotvlkuce Harjo is a queer Mvskoke Creek interdisciplinary artist based in Oklahoma. Their work engages with ancestral Southeastern Woodlands and Mississippian motifs, Indigenous Tattoo Revitalization, and surfaces dimensions of contemporary Mvskoke identity. Guided by frameworks like Mvskoke epistemology, Indigenous Feminisms, Queer Theory, and Indigenous Futurity, their art practice spans mediums such as visual art, photography, and graphic design.

Hotvlkuce’s work has been exhibited in galleries and at institutions such as the University of Nebraska, Abrons Art Center, and Stanford University, amongst others. Their clientele and collaborations include For Freedoms, NDN Collective, Industry PDX, and the FX Network.

Hotvlkuce attended the Institute of American Indian Arts, where they majored in Studio Arts. Later they pursued their education in Women + Gender Studies, Queer Theory, Indigenous Feminisms, Race, Class, and Gender at the University of New Mexico. As well as fine art photography, analogue processing techniques, and photography theory.

Currently, their work centers around the rematriation of Mvskoke people and artists back to the ancestral homelands in, what is currently known as, Alabama and Georgia. With specific efforts being made to reestablish a kinship with Atlanta and Macon. Hotvlkuce comes from a long lineage of Mvskoke and Southeastern people actively reinstilling that former relationship to the homelands.

Artist Statements

LocvLocv

“Locv, Locv,” they say as they call out to the shell shakers.

Hues of pink, red, orange, and yellow—totkv colors—reflect the glowing flame at the ceremonial grounds. I feel the warm summer night air, with cicadas and firewood crackling in the background. As I look beyond the tree line, stars twinkle overhead as if ancestors are coming to say stonko.

“Locv, Locv” draws on themes such as Mvskoke epistemology, ceremony, and abstract image-making. I used digital collage to construct the scene of the stomp grounds and the feeling. Rather than explicitly showing the grounds, I employ techniques from contemporary photography to build an abstract depiction of this space. Specific visual components—such as the turtles worn by the women/dancers—are arranged in fours to represent the four directions, cycles of life, and the arbors. Referencing this technique allows for ambiguity and eliminates full access unless you have been to these spaces, thereby reclaiming agency over our ceremonies.

Purification

"Purification" reimagines a contemporary interpretation of the well-known art style, flat style. This style, particularly the version developed at Bacone College in Muskogee, OK, is closely associated with Southeastern artists from Oklahoma, such as Ruthe Blalock Jones, Joan Hill, Dana Tiger, Johnnie Diacon, and Acee Blue Eagle, among others. Depictions of Native life characterize flat style within the context of Oklahoma.

This digital illustration draws inspiration from the work of Acee Blue Eagle (Muscogee Creek). It introduces additional Southeastern Woodlands elements—spiral pottery, stickball sticks in the textiles, and pucker-toe moccasins. The figure is seated in a field at night, beneath a blood moon, in a ceremony or purification.

The mask worn by the figure is a reference to the Diné Farmington-based ethereal doom metal band LIŁITH. Drummer A. Augustine explains that their mask serves as a means to become an unknown entity, embodying something diabolical and dark, with runes and sigils as nods to ancient [chaos] magick. Similarly, the figure in this piece wears a mask inspired by that design, but adorned with Mississippian iconography and red tassels. The adornments on the mask tie it back to markings both ancestral and powerful, much like A. Augustine's description. The red tassels specifically honor our Missing & Murdered Relatives, including MMIWG2ST and MMIR.