Wendy Red Star (born 1981) is an Apsáalooke contemporary multimedia artist born in Billings, Montana, in the United States. Her humorous approach and use of Native American images from traditional media draw the viewer into her work, while also confronting romanticized representations. She juxtaposes popular depictions of Native Americans with authentic cultural and gender identities. Her work has been described as "funny, brash, and surreal".[1] Red Star was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2024.[2]
Biography and education
Red Star was born in 1981 in Billings, Montana. She is of Apsáalooke (Crow) and Irish descent and was raised in Pryor, Montana,[3] on the Crow Reservation, "a rural community that's also a sovereign nation and cultural powerhouse."[1] At age 18, she left the reservation to attend Montana State University - Bozeman.[4] She attended university between 2000 and 2004, and studied art and Native American Studies.[5]
Growing up as biracial,[6] Red Star went through identity issues. At elementary school, she was afraid of her classmates knowing that her grandparents were white. When she left the reservation, she had to deal with "otherness": the responses she received to her identity and identity-based artwork often damaged her confidence.[7] She later learned to embrace the identity and was completely comfortable with it at 26 when she had her daughter. She incorporated her cultural identity into her work, reflecting on her childhood and where she grew up.[6]
Her mother was a public health nurse who encouraged Crow cultural pursuits; though Red Star herself did not speak Crow, her adopted Korean sister spoke fluent Crow as a child. Her father ranched and was a licensed pilot who played in the "Maniacs", an Indian rock band. Red Star's uncle Kevin Red Star and grandmother Amy Bright Wings were big influences to her practice.[1][7]
In 2012–2013, she was a manager at Chief Plenty Coups State Park, located in Pryor, Montana. In 2014, she moved to Portland, Oregon and worked on Medicine Crow and the 1880 Crow Peace Delegation.[7] As of 2016, it was reported that Red Star works as a full-time artist in Portland.[9]
The Spokesman-Review noted, "Red Star works in a variety of media. Her fiber work blends traditional and contemporary elements, as in her pieces Rez Car Shawl and Basketball Shawl. Her photographs combine stereotypical and authentic images, references to the past and modern day. Many are self-portraits."[12] Red Star's work often includes clichéd representations of Native Americans, colonialism, the environment, and her own family.[13] The Gorman Museum at UC Davis described her work as layering "influences from her tribal background (Crow), daily surroundings, aesthetic experiences, collected ephemera and conjured histories that are both real and imagined."[14] Though she often deals with serious issues of Native American culture, she often employs humor through the inclusion of inflatable animals, fake scenery, and other elements in the work.[15] In her photography, Red Star often depicts herself in traditional elk-tooth dresses that she creates.[16]
Zach Dundas of Portland Monthly noted her "mash-ups of mass-market and Crow culture make perfect sense...Red Star is enjoying a moment in the wider art world. New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art includes her work in a current exhibit of Plains Indian art, and Dartmouth College'sHood Museum is showing her self-portraiture alongside big names like Chuck Close, Cindy Sherman, and Bruce Nauman. Red Star will stage 15 separate exhibitions this year."[1]
According to the description of her APEX exhibit at the Portland Art Museum, her early work "employed gender-focused, political self-imagery...to draw attention to the marginalization of Native Americans."[17] Norman Denizen observed, "Wendy Red Star, Crow Indian cultural activist and performance artist, offers an alternative view, focusing on performances and artworks that contest the images of the vanishing dark-skinned Indian."[18] Her work has been collected at institutions such as the National Museum of the American Indian, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art.[19]
Advocacy
Red Star has advocated for improved opportunities for Native women in the art world. In 2014, she curated Wendy Red Star's Wild West & Congress of Rough Riders of the World, "the first-ever all-Native contemporary art exhibition at Bumbershoot", which took place in Seattle during the annual musical concert.[20] There were 10 artists that exhibited, and most of them were Native artists that primarily worked with identity-based artworks.[6] In 2017, Red Star curated an exhibition at the Missoula Art Museum called Our Side, which featured four contemporary Indigenous female artists: Elisa Harkins, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Marianne Nicolson, and Tanis S'eiltin.[21]
Red Star's advocacy also extends to the concept of indigenous futurism and for the sovereign. She speaks out against colonialism, but there is a sense of speaking in existence in her own right. Her art is tool for resistance as well as an expression to her existence. Her multi-generation collaborations and collaborations with indigenous artists is evident of Red Star’s efforts to amplify nuance within indigenous representation.
Works and publications
Thunder Up Above
For Walks in the Dark of the Thunder Up Above series, she created a costume with European and Victorian motifs in a Native American design, and photoshopped an interplanetary background. Dundas observes, "The sci-fi results evoke the intrigue and suspicion of first contact with an unknown people—or, as she put it in her artist's statement, 'someone you would not want to mess with'."[1]
For Red Star's Four Seasons series, the Metropolitan Museum of Art catalog noted, "In this four-part photographic work, Wendy Red Star pokes fun at romantic idealizations of American Indians as 'one with nature.' "[22] Luella Brien of the Native Peoples Magazine wrote the Four Seasons series had an avant-garde quality, with traditional "Native American imagery juxtaposed against authentic imagery".[15] Red Star also uses humor to draw viewers into her work.[15] Blake Gopnik of Artnet News commented, "Posing amid blow-up deer, cut-out coyotes and wallpaper mountains, Red Star uses her series to go after the standard blather about Native American's inevitable 'oneness' with nature."[23] The Saint Louis Art Museum acquired Four Seasons as part of its permanent collection, describing it as among "some of the amazing works of art acquired by the Art Museum in 2014".[24]
White Squaw
Red Star characterizes her work as research-based, especially as she investigates and explores clichéd Hollywood images like beautiful maidens or western landscapes.[6] While conducting research on the term squaw, she found a reference to White Squaw, a 1950s movie, and later books with pulp-fiction style covers, published as recently as 1997. Red Star took photographic prints of the covers, substituting her own image in a cheap costume for the character "White Squaw", using all the original taglines, with comical satiric effect.[6]
1880 Crow Peace Delegation
1880 Crow Peace Delegation: Peelatchixaaliash/Old Crow (Raven) (2014) at the Portland Art Museum
In 1880, six Crow chiefs traveled to Washington, D.C. to talk with the president because the settlers were about to build a railroad through their hunting territory.[6] She researched Medicine Crow/Peelatchiwaaxpáash (Raven) for her exhibit of the Crow Peace Delegation to Washington in 1880 and discovered the narratives behind elements of the iconic picture. She used a red pen on a print of this famous image to notate his outfit and the symbolism attached to elements such as his ermine shawl, the bows in his hair, and the eagle fan he is holding.[6] Red Star said she wanted to use the details of his clothing, and the ledger drawings he made upon his return to the reservation, to humanize Medicine Crow.[6] What she learns in research emerges in her creative process, which she articulates with visual means.[6]
Circling the Camp
Red Star took photographs at the Crow Fair - a large annual event in Central Montana that happens every third week of August.[25] In an effort to focus on the culture and history of the Crow nation, she removed the background of the pictures to bring attention to the Indigenous people and objects in the foreground.
Apsáalooke Feminist
Most photographs of Crow women are colorless, so Wendy Red Star took photographs of herself and her daughter Beatrice with colorful Crow clothes to showcase Crow people's everyday fashion. The patterned background is photoshopped to give the images a visual punch.[26]
My Home is Where My Tipi Sits
This series of color photographs consists of grids of idiosyncratic, typological elements of life on Crow reservations: government houses, broken down "rez" cars, sweat lodges, signs and churches. The works reference the photographs of German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, which inventory industrial buildings and water towers, arranged in grids to create "families of objects."[5]
Let Them Have Their Voice
This multimedia installation was made in response to the work of Edward S. Curtis in his 1908 multi-volume book The North American Indian. Red Star altered Curtis' portraits and made the Native subjects voids in the frames, reducing them to anonymous silhouettes. The sitters are made present through a sound installation. Wax cylinder recording of Crow singers performing traditional songs which Curtis recorded between 1907 and 1912. .
This catalogue was published to coincide with the mid-career survey exhibition by the same name.[27] The exhibition was organized by the Newark Museum of Art and shown from February 23-June 16, 2019.[28] This is currently the most comprehensive publication on Red Star and her work.
Travels Pretty
In 2023 the Public Art Fund organized Travels Pretty, a public art exhibition of a series of paintings reproduced on bus stops in New York, Chicago, and Boston.[29]
The Soil You See...
In 2023, Red Star was one of six artists commissioned to create a temporary installation for the National Mall in conjunction with Beyond Granite: Pulling Together, the first curated art exhibition in the Mall's history. Commissioned by the Trust for the National Mall, National Capital Planning Commission, and National Park Service, Red Star designed a memorial to the Apsáalooke leaders who had signed - or been made to sign - treaties with the United States. The sculpture, a red glass representation of the artist's fingerprint, embedded in a granite boulder, featured the names of Apsáalooke leaders who had signed treaties and was sited directly next to the Memorial to the 56 Signers of the Declaration of Independence in Constitution Gardens.[30]
Collaborations
In 2013, Red Star began collaborating with her daughter Beatrice Red Star Fletcher, who "figures prominently in her work" and participates as a tour guide for their exhibitions.[31][32] Their collaborations have been shown at the Tacoma Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, and twice at the Portland Art Museum.
In 2022, Red Star collaborated with Standard University. Wendy Red Star: American Progress is about her experience as a Apsaalooke artist, addressing her lived experiences with belonging and unbelonging in the United States. Red Star engaged with Standford students affiliated with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity as well as the Institute for Diversity in the Arts by researching and gathering materials for the artworks. One of the artworks is entitled, Lady Columbia, and it is a “wallpaper print based on original paint-by-numbers”.[33] The collaboration created a free public program that amplifies the artist’s voice and story. This is an example of efforts made by Red Star to create public art and space to get people across communities and generations to interact with indigenous stories.
The (HUD) (2010), Gorman Museum of Native American Art, University of California, Davis;[80] Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette University, Salem, Oregon;[81] and Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.[82]
Apsáalooke Roses (2015), Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis;[103] Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette University, Salem, Oregon;[104]Museum of Fine Arts, Houston;[105] and Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon[106]
iilaalée = car (goes by itself) + ii = by means of which + dáanniili = we parade (2015-2016), Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis;[107] Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette University, Salem, Oregon;[108] and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston[109]
Yakima or Yakama - Not For Me To Say (2015-2016), Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis;[110] Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette University, Salem, Oregon;[111] and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston[112]
Four Generations (2020), Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin–Madison;[122] Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette University, Salem, Oregon;[123] and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston[124]
^Snow, Jordyn (27 April 2015). "Wendy Red Star". prezi.com. Retrieved March 7, 2016. Grew up in Pryor Montana on the Crow Indian Reservation
^Michelman, Jordan (2018-01-30). "Art In The Cafe: A Conversation With May Barruel Of Stumptown Coffee". Sprudge. Archived from the original on 28 August 2017. Retrieved 24 September 2019. I'm also thinking about Wendy's statement. How she wrote, 'Since leaving my reservation at age 18 to attend college I have often felt alone'
