Wendy Red Star
Wendy Red Star is a Native American artist who has worked with photography, bead work, fashion design, performance art, fibre art, and painting, and she received her masters degree of fine arts in 2006. She made many influential series including Four Seasons, Thunder up Above, and Medicine Crow among others. Her art has been extremely significant to other Indigenous artists, as well as artists and observers around the world.
Background
Red Star was born in Montana in 1981 and lived on the Crow Reservation in Pryor until she was 18. While going to school there, she constantly worried about her classmates finding out that her grandparents were white, and when she left the Reservation to study fine arts in university she was faced with constant discrimination for being an Indigenous woman. In the early years of her art making she struggled with her identity and how to express it through her art, especially because the feedback she received wasn’t always positive or appreciative. However, having her daughter when she was 26 helped her reflect on her upbringing and brought herself into her identity in a very powerful way.
Significance
Indigenous art is often viewed in natural history museums as being “frozen in time” rather than developing and growing, as all other art does. When people think of Indigenous art, it’s usually the same traditional carvings and three colours of paint that comes to mind, which isn’t a true reflection of how much diversity exists inside the community of art makers. Red Star recognises this in her work in a way which makes fun of the stereotypical views in museums of Indigenous people being “noble people of the past” and “one with nature” in an unrealistic notion. Her art mixes authenticity with falseness to create a tense contrast. This demands the viewer’s time and full attention to each piece.
Works
Four Seasons
This series explores how Indigenous relationships with the land have been taken and almost romanticised as an otherly, ideal, and serene thing of the past, which is now gone and unable to exist within the modern world. Red Star uses flat, creased and artificial backgrounds with blow up animals and turf as a backdrop for her to sit in her authentic elk tooth Crow dress. This shows the contrast of what people are led to believe versus reality, and explores how she fits in, or not, to the picture people paint for her. In an interview with Rebecca McNamara, she talked about the power behind her clothing, saying that her dress "embodies [her peoples] cultural richness". She explained that wearing the eye teeth of an elk is a status symbol, and very important to Crow women.
Thunder up Above
With the use of intricate costumes, Red Star photographed herself in her living room and later photoshopped herself into the space and planetary scenery. In her artist statement, she said she wanted to depict “someone you wouldn’t want to mess with”. These pieces incorporate an intriguing science fiction component, and through that give the feeling of something never seen before.
Medicine Crow
Red Star created this collection in regards to the 1880 Crow Peace Delegation, where Crow chiefs travelled to Washington D.C. to fight against a railroad being built through their territory. Once again she focused her work on bringing Indigenous art out of the past. To do so, she used some well known photographs to draw on, notating cultural significance of the chiefs’ clothing in red pen to add a deeper understanding and meaning to the photos, as well as making them relevant to present day Crow culture.
