Wendy Red Star

Wendy Red Star is a contemporary artist whose multidisciplinary practice examines Native American history, colonialism, representation, gender, family, and cultural identity. An enrolled member of the Apsáalooke (Crow) Tribe, Red Star works across photography, sculpture, installation, textiles, collage, performance, and archival research, frequently combining historical materials with humor, autobiography, and incisive critiques of the ways Indigenous peoples have been represented within museums, photography, popular culture, and American history.

Raised on the Crow Reservation in Montana, Red Star grew up immersed in Apsáalooke culture and community. Her work draws extensively upon that experience while resisting simplified ideas of what contemporary Native art should look like. Family histories, tribal archives, material culture, photographs, oral histories, and her own experiences as an Apsáalooke woman become tools for reclaiming narratives that have often been filtered through non-Native institutions and observers.

Photography has played a central role in Red Star's practice, particularly as a means of interrogating the long history of ethnographic representation. In her widely recognized Four Seasons series, Red Star photographed herself in traditional Apsáalooke clothing against deliberately artificial museum-style dioramas populated with inflatable animals, plastic flowers, and synthetic landscapes. At once humorous and confrontational, the images parody romanticized representations of Native people as timeless inhabitants of an untouched natural world while asserting the artist's control over her own image.

Archival research has become increasingly important to Red Star's work. She frequently returns to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs of Apsáalooke individuals held in museum and institutional archives, researching the names, biographies, relationships, and histories of people who were often presented merely as anonymous ethnographic types.

Her celebrated series 1880 Crow Peace Delegation developed from photographs of six Apsáalooke chiefs who traveled to Washington, D.C., to negotiate with the United States government. Red Star surrounded the historic portraits with handwritten annotations identifying clothing, objects, relationships, personalities, and biographical information, restoring specificity and individuality to men whose images had long circulated primarily as ethnographic records.

Family is equally important within Red Star's work. Her daughter, Beatrice Red Star Fletcher, has appeared repeatedly in photographs and collaborative projects, extending the artist's exploration of cultural knowledge across generations. Red Star has also researched and incorporated the histories of her ancestors, connecting personal genealogy to broader histories of land, sovereignty, diplomacy, and cultural survival.

At Haw Contemporary, Red Star presented the solo exhibition Parading Culture (Tokens, Gold, & Glory) in 2016. The exhibition combined influences from Apsáalooke culture, daily life, collected ephemera, and histories both real and invented, creating a visual world that moved deliberately between Native and popular culture, urban and rural experience, and high and low forms of representation.

Red Star has exhibited extensively throughout the United States and internationally. Her first major career survey, Wendy Red Star: A Scratch on the Earth, opened at the Newark Museum of Art in 2019 and subsequently traveled to other institutions. Her work has also been presented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, National Gallery of Art, Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, National Gallery of Victoria, Portland Art Museum, Hood Museum of Art, Saint Louis Art Museum, and Minneapolis Institute of Art, among many others.

Her work is held in major collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; Brooklyn Museum; Museum of Modern Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian; National Gallery of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Portland Art Museum; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Saint Louis Art Museum; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art; and Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, among many others.

Red Star received her BFA from Montana State University and her MFA in Sculpture from the University of California, Los Angeles.