Wendy Red Star
(Apsáalooke, b. 1981)
Apsáalooke Feminist #1, 2016
Pigment Print
36.5 x 43.5 inches
Courtesy of the Artist and Sargent's Daughters, NYC, New York
Wendy Red Star’s large-scale photograph Apsáalooke Feminist #1 and the related series is a contemporary update of typical turn-of-the-century portraits of indigenous women, such as those taken by photographer and ethnologist Edward Curtis and photographer Richard Throssel, both of whom separately documented life on the Crow (Apsáalooke) reservation.
Red Star and her daughter Beatrice are seated on an Ikea couch, facing the viewer, in a posed scene reminiscent of a museum display or diorama. Surrounded by woven textiles, both wear traditional elk tooth dresses, shawls, turquoise and beaded jewelry and bags, and leather moccasins. Red Star’s gaze is serious, stoic, while her daughter smiles, clutching handmade dolls to her chest.
Through this series, Red Star highlights brilliance and radiance (literally through vivid colors and patterns) as well as humor—characteristics she associates with Crow women but notes are often missing from stereotypical, ethnographic museum displays or the sepia-toned images of Curtis and Throssel. The technology for color photographs did not exist during their time, of course, but Curtis’s images in particular were less about truthful depictions of the sitter and more reflective of his imposed biases.
Red Star’s Apsáalooke Feminist series image is beautiful, witty, and accessible, juxtaposing the expected, romanticized, popular depictions of Native Americans with Red Star’s more accurate understanding of the evolving identity of 21st-century Apsáalooke women and mothers.
Biography
Red Star, of Apsáalooke (Crow) and Irish descent, was born in Billings, MT, and grew up in Pryor, MT, on the Crow Reservation—a rural community and sovereign nation. She earned her BFA in sculpture from Montana State University, Bozeman, and her MFA in sculpture from the University of California, Los Angeles. Red Star’s work has been exhibited at institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Newark Museum of Art, NJ; Portland Art Museum, OR; Hood Art Museum at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; St. Louis Art Museum; Minneapolis Institute of Art; and Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris, among others. She has also served as a visiting lecturer at institutions across the United States and abroad. Red Star was awarded an Emerging Artist Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation in 2015, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 2017, and a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in 2018. Red Star lives and works in Portland, OR.
