Edgar Heap of Birds

In 2018, Heap of Birds was awarded an honorary doctorate of arts degree from the California Institute of the Arts at the Institute’s 2018 commencement ceremony on May 11.

In 2012, Heap of Birds was named a Fellow of United States Artists.

In 2008, Heap of Birds was awarded an Honorary Doctors of Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, Massachusetts.

He is known for text-based conceptual art, such as Dead Indian Stories in the Honolulu Museum of Art. It superficially resembles public signage, but is actually commentary on the Native American experience. An example of his site-specific public signage projects is Building Minnesota (1990), a signage installation mounted on the banks of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, Minnesota and commissioned by the Walker Art Center. In it, Heap of Birds set forty large, metal, billboard-like signs along Minneapolis's downtown riverfront. The signs honored the forty Dakota men who were sentenced to death by Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson after the US-Dakota Conflict of 1862, in what is the largest mass execution in American history. The piece became a focal point "of mourning and remembrance to which people brought gifts and offerings" in memory of the men who were executed.

In 1976 Heap of Birds earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas and in 1979 he received his Master of Fine Arts from Temple University's Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In between his undergraduate and graduate studies, Heap of Birds also classes at the Royal College of Art in London, England from 1976-1977.

Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds was born on November 22, 1954 in Wichita, Kansas, where his father worked in the aeronautical industry. He attended East High School in Wichita and graduated in 1972. After graduation, Heap of Birds studied at Haskell Indian School in Lawrence, Kansas.