Crow Artist Wendy Red Star Is Decolonizing the Fine Art World

“Ancestral collaboration and the passing-along of knowledge is my medicine.”

Wendy Red Star, The Soil You See…, 2023, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

On her initial site visit to the Mall, Red Star noticed a small island in a lake sandwiched between the Vietnam and Lincoln memorials. Signers Island, as she discovered it’s called, is home to a memorial for the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence; each one is honored with a glossy granite brick on which his signature is stamped in gold. “I thought, It would be nice to do a site-specific piece that talks about the other side of the Declaration of Independence,” she says, referring to one of the most uncomfortable ironies of American history: When the United States, a nation built on freedom, achieved independence from Great Britain, it subsequently stole land and liberty from the country’s original inhabitants. “All tribal leaders at some point traveled to Washington, D.C., to sit with presidents and members of the federal government to try to preserve the future of their communities,” says Red Star, noting how the The Soil You See…’s journey from Washington to Tippet Rise traced a similar path. “All of the Crow chiefs who signed those land treaties have shaped my reality of what it means to be Crow, what it means to live on our current reservation. That’s pretty profound. And you could say that for any Native person: The same happened with their tribal leaders, and it totally shapes their reality now.”

All 51 names of the Crow chiefs are inscribed between the whorls of the scarlet thumbprint, which is a colossal rendering of Red Star’s own. At the bottom of the glass encasing it is a quote from the Crow scout named Curly, who traveled to Washington in 1912 to give an impassioned speech to Congress about why reservations should not be opened to non-Native settlers. “The soil you see is not ordinary soil—it is the dust of the blood, the flesh, and the bones of our ancestors,” the speech began.

“He tried to articulate how extremely important the land [in and around the reservation] is to Crows,” says Red Star. “He explained that the upper portion was made of the blood and dust of our ancestors, and that if you were trying to dig down to nature’s earth, you’d have to dig down really far past that crust. It was such a great quote [that captured] the entire picture of what I was trying to do in conjunction with the Declaration of Independence.”

Now 43, Red Star specialized in sculpture while a student at Montana State University in Bozeman and the University of California, Los Angeles (she was the only Native art student at either school), but only recently returned to the medium. “[Until now,] I just didn’t have the resources to make large-scale sculptures and store them,” she explains. She focused on photography instead; her images have been acquired by institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others. Her portraits, which often feature herself and her daughter, Beatrice, poke fun at and recast tired clichés and tropes about Native people. Red Star also revises historical imagery of Native people, adding handwritten notations in the margins that detail the symbolism of certain objects and important facts and dates related to its subjects.

Wendy Red Star, Fall, from Four Seasons, 2006

In her most famous work, 2006’s Four Seasons, Red Star appears in a quartet of seasonally themed tableaus, surrounded by inflatable animals, fake nature backdrops, and plastic plants—parodies of how Native individuals are romanticized as “noble savages” who are one with nature. And in White Squaw (2014), a series of prints inspired by the “adult western” romance novels published in the 1980s and ’90s under the same name, Red Star inserts herself as the half-Native heroine to draw attention to the sexism and racism Native women still face today. “I want to find humor in everything; it is a means of relief and healing,” she says. “I know that my work confronts people with subjects they’re not comfortable thinking or talking about, but if there’s a reprieve in there through humor, it’s so powerful.”

Wendy Red Star, White Squaw #7, 2014

The latter work dovetails with another cornerstone of Red Star’s practice, which is celebrating and bringing visibility to Native women and their art. She has curated exhibitions of Native art that specifically highlighted female artists, and all her work is created through a distinctly feminist, Native lens. In her photo series Apsáalooke Feminist (2016), she celebrates the matrilineal structure of Crow society by photographing herself and Beatrice wearing traditional elk tooth dresses she handmade; the images also stand in response to historical depictions of Crow peoples by Anglo-American photographers, which almost exclusively center men. “You even see it in museums that have collections of Native art and Native galleries. The stories are about chiefs and warriors,” she says. “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.”

Wendy Red Star, Apsáalooke Feminist #1, 2016

Historically, work by Native artists has been excluded from museum collections and galleries; their absence has helped reinforce the Eurocentric erasure of Native histories, culture, and existence. But within the last handful of years, institutions like the Whitney and the National Gallery of Art have presented exhibitions showcasing Native art and its breadth, including traditional pieces (like beadwork and garments) alongside contemporary and modern works (including Red Star’s own). Still, Red Star has come to understand there are aspects of Native art that might never be reflected or understood within the Western fine art canon. “I grew up on the reservation and was immersed in the Crow aesthetic. My grandmother and aunts were constantly beading; my grandma was making all of her grandchildren traditional outfits,” she says. “But none of the community ever thinks about our culture or designs as art—they’re just representative of the entire community’s aesthetic. It’s what makes us Crow. Everybody in different tribes, they have their own colors and their own patterns; that’s what makes them Blackfeet, that’s what makes them Cheyenne. The aesthetic of my community is not going to be part of the fine art world and that’s okay. It shouldn’t, because you can’t really compare them.”

In the shadow of Red Star’s thumbprint pressed into the Apsáalooke earth, in her portraits that call on the women who came before her, and in her photographs that amplify silenced histories, there is, perhaps above all, healing. “Crows have a lot of medicine; everybody in the tribe has their own kind. Somebody might be really talented at something, and therefore people consider that to be their medicine,” she says. “Ancestral collaboration and the passing-along of knowledge is my medicine. Having Beatrice and working with her, the torch gets carried on.”