Wendy Red Star on the Rise

The Crow artist takes on heavy topics with humor and cutting commentary.

Wendy Red Star's self-portrait series “Four Seasons” places the artist at the center of dioramas depicting spring, summer, fall and winter (above), all of which juxtapose stereotypical Native American imagery with elements of authenticity.

Image courtesy of the artist

Colonialism, stereotypes and ignorance. Native Americans generally identify each as tools of oppression, but for multimedia artist Wendy Red Star (Crow), they’re an unlikely source of inspiration.

They’re also conversations starters in her art, where HUD homes and family photographs are mixed with highly saturated colors and other clear references to her Crow culture (see more at ). “It’s important for me that people enjoy my art on some level,” Red Star says. “I want to create something that is tantalizing for them to be able to pull them in that way.”

Clearly, the Portland, Oregon-based artist’s edgy approach is working. She was the curator of an exhibit featuring 10 other Native artists at the Seattle arts and music festival Bumbershoot over the summer; she opened a solo show at the Portland Art Museum in September; and now a self-portrait series of hers is part of the exhibit “The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky.” The show is currently at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City after an opening in Paris earlier this year and ahead of a final stop at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Red Star, the niece of famed Crow painter Kevin Red Star, grew up in Lodge Grass, Montana, on the Crow reservation and went to graduate school at the University of California, Los Angeles. It goes without saying she’s established an approach, career path and artistic voice that are all her own. “I want to pull (people) in with aesthetics first and with more knowledge they can find more meaning,” Red Star says.

In the photo series “Four Seasons” that is part of the current Plains exhibit, Red Star wears a traditional Crow elk-tooth dress as she poses at the center of highly stylized dioramas conveying scenes of winter, spring, summer and fall. The elk-tooth dress, an iconic image of Crow culture made of wool, is adorned with hundreds of reproduced elk teeth. Traditionally, the teeth were a symbol of wealth, as only two can be harvested from a single elk.

But the series carries an avant-garde quality characteristic of Red Star’s work, with stereotypical Native American imagery juxtaposed against authentic imagery. “The look pulls people in, but as you look closer you can see the image deteriorate, and if you are more privy to Native history you can see it right away,” Red Star says.

The beautiful look reflective of the commonly accepted narrative of what Native Americans look like attracts onlookers, but upon further inspection, the viewer can see tacks holding up the background, many of the animals are inflatable toys, and cellophane used to evoke the reflective quality of water.

“I’m dealing with really heavy topics pertaining to Crow and Native culture and the colonization of people,” Red Star says. “You can be very heavy handed about it, but people don’t want to be around that. You can find an in by using humor. Humor or wit can be very healing, by getting viewers to crack a smile or laugh I can get them in, that way they can investigate my work further.”

Red Star says her choice installation to date is one focused on Chief Medicine Crow and the 1880 Peace Delegation, showing at the Portland Art Museum through Dec. 7, 2014. Red Star, who says her favorite Crow chief is Medicine Crow, researched his trip to Washington, D.C., with a delegation of four other Crow leaders. They remained there for a month, she says, while negotiating reservation boundaries with the U.S. and a peace agreement with traditional Crow enemies, the Blackfeet and Sioux.

The historic nature of the trip for the tribe is intriguing but a side excursion for the delegation captures Red Star’s attention too: The Crow leaders went to the zoo.

While there, they were astounded to see exotic animals, like crocodiles and camels, which Medicine Crow later drew. He also assigned names to them in the Crow language. Crocodiles became “big snakes with legs” and camels “elk with the big back”.

“Can you imagine being there? They saw those strange animals and [Medicine Crow] came up with names for them. Imaging the delegation being there in their best outfits. Their hair done up with white clay,” Red Star says.

She ordered stuffed animal versions of Medicine Crow’s renditions from a specialized manufacturing company, and each are now part of her Portland show, along with tapestries of fabric and photographs, and manipulated images of the men. “My daughter totally connected with (the stuffed animals)— 3D, tactile things that she can hold that came from Medicine Crow,” Red Star says. “Even for me, when those things came in the mail, it was incredible.”

As a mother, Red Star says her time with her daughter, Beatrice, who is 7, is precious. Between Bea’s school schedule and homework and Red Star’s work schedule and art projects, the window of time the two share is limited. Bea sews, paints, draws and is even featured in Red Star’s current exhibition. “When we are home and I’m working on art, I don’t want to shut her out of that process, so she dives right in with me,” Red Star says.

Luella Brien (Crow) is a professor at Little Bighorn College in Crow Agency, Montana. She is a former reporter for the Billings Gazette newspaper.