Wendy Red Star
Who is Wendy Red Star?
What inspired Wendy Red Star’s work Interference?
What is the Four Seasons series about?
What is the significance of 1880 Crow Peace Delegation?
What does Wendy Red Star’s work Brings Good Horses represent?
Wendy Red Star (born April 13, 1981, Billings, Montana, U.S.) is a photographer, sculptor, textile maker, and painter. An enrolled member of the Apsáalooke (Crow) tribe, Red Star has used her eclectic practice to bring greater attention to Apsáalooke history and culture. She is especially interested in the predominant role played by women in the creation of the matrilineal tribe’s aesthetic sensibilities. Her work also directly confronts and satirically subverts damaging stereotypes of Native Americans. She is the recipient of many prestigious awards and grants, including a 2024 MacArthur Fellowship.
Family
Red Star was born to an Apsáalooke father and a white mother of Irish descent. Her mother served as a nurse with the Indian Health Service on the Crow Reservation in Montana, and her father worked as a game warden and managed a horse ranch. During the 1960s and ’70s he was a member of the Maniacs, an Apsáalooke rock band. Red Star has an elder sister, whom her mother adopted from South Korea while she was stationed there with the United States Army, and three half-siblings on her father’s side.
Bachelor of Fine Arts and Interference
Red Star grew up on the Crow Reservation and attended school in Hardin, Montana. She then enrolled at Montana State University in Bozeman, where she initially studied graphic design before shifting to sculpture. While working toward a Bachelor of Fine Arts (2004) with a minor in Native American studies, she was inspired by Sits in the Middle of the Land—an Apsáalooke chief who proclaimed, “My home is where my tipi sits”—to create Interference (2004). In this significant early work, Red Star installed clusters of poles to suggest the structures of tipis in sites around the Montana State campus to acknowledge the university’s encroachment on Apsáalooke land. After the sculptures were repeatedly dismantled by passersby, Red Star defiantly placed several frameworks of tipis on the college’s football field, notably in the middle, on the 50-yard line.
Master of Fine Arts, Four Seasons, and personal life
On the strength of Interference and other works, Red Star was accepted to the Master of Fine Arts program at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Although her time at the university was creatively productive, Red Star described the experience as isolating. She was the only Native American student in the program, and her instructors and colleagues often expressed disfavor toward identity-based art. She nevertheless found inspiration from such artists as Adrian Piper, Kara Walker, and Fred Wilson, who frankly address the politics of racism in their practices.
After a trip to the Los Angeles county Natural History Museum, Red Star produced the Four Seasons (2006), a series of photographs that recall the dioramas often found in such institutions. Each tableau represents a different season and shows Red Star dressed in traditional Apsáalooke attire seated within a constructed landscape. She used photomural backdrops of mountainous landscapes—a few of which show creases where they had been folded—inflatable deer, plastic flora, Astroturf, and other kitsch imitations of natural forms. The authenticity of her Apsáalooke attire is presented in deliberate contrast to the artifice of the dioramas, offering a pointed critique of the way Native Americans have been represented in museum dioramas, as if belonging to natural history rather than contemporary human culture. The reality of her experience cannot be denied or replaced with ersatz stand-ins. Her photographs also respond to the charged history of Native American subjects often being framed by white photographers as the final records of a “vanishing race.” To counter this narrative, Red Star points to, and positions herself within, the history of such photographers as Richard Throssel, of Cree and English descent, and Benjamin Haldane, of the Tsimshian people, and the active participation of Native American subjects in their own photographic documentation.
After graduating from UCLA with a Master of Fine Arts in 2006, Red Star held an artist residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, in central Maine, where she met artist Harrell Fletcher. They moved to Portland, Oregon, married, and had a daughter, Beatrice Red Star Fletcher (the couple divorced in 2013).
1880 Crow Peace Delegation
In the 2010s Red Star produced work that critically responded to museum archives on the Apsáalooke and other tribes. In 2014 she created 1880 Crow Peace Delegation, which comprises a set of 10 reproductions of portraits taken of Apsáalooke chiefs by American photographer Charles Milton Bell with annotated commentary. The chiefs were delegates to Washington, D.C., to discuss a U.S. government proposal to build a rail line on Apsáalooke territory. On the reproductions, Red Star wrote notes by hand in red ink explaining the significance of each sitter’s attire, pose, and adornments; recording acts of violence between colonizers and the Apsáalooke; and offering slyly humorous asides. Her observations alternately disturb, amuse, and inform.
Brings Good Horses
During the next decade Red Star’s focus shifted toward producing a history of Native American-made objects through art. Brings Good Horses (2021), a series of paintings on paper, reproduces the steeds in ledger books, often drawn by artists of the Cheyenne and Lakota, who were historical adversaries of the Apsáalooke tribe. Hence, by reproducing the horses from an enemy tribe’s drawings and making them a part of her own work, Red Star metaphorically refers to the tradition of “going on a raid.” The historical custom involved an Apsáalooke warrior capturing an opponent’s horses, a highly respected feat among the tribe that earned the warrior honor and wealth.
Bishkisché
Red Star’s more recent work reproduces bishkisché, the Apsáalooke term for painted rawhide cases. Bishkisché were traditionally used to transport goods and were crafted and painted by Apsáalooke women. Their distinct designs often served as a calling card, identifying the carrier to a specific tribe. Red Star emphasizes the importance of women in the process, noting that dominant historical narratives often focus on Native men. As she remarked in Harper’s Bazaar in 2024, “You even see it in museums that have collections of Native art and Native galleries. The stories are about chiefs and warriors. You’re not thinking about the women who actually made the majority of those objects, like the war shirt worn by the chief. The women are these silent forces that get no recognition or credit, even though they have basically created the legacy of the aesthetic for the community.”