User:Lil.sichen/sandbox

Biography and education
Born in Billings, Montana, in 1981, of Apsáalooke (Crow) and Irish descent, she was reared in Pryor, Montana, on the Crow Reservation, "a rural community that's also a sovereign nation and cultural powerhouse." At age 18, she moved 170 miles to attend Montana State University - Bozeman.

Growing up as a "half-breed", Red Star went through identity issues. At elementary school, she was afraid of her classmates knowing that her grandparents were white. When she left the reservation, she had to deal with "otherness": The responses she received to her identity and identity-based artwork often damaged her confidence. She later learned to embrace the identity and was completely comfortable with it at 26 when she had her daughter. She incorporated her cultural identity into her work, reflecting on her childhood and where she grew up.

Her mother was a public health nurse who encouraged Crow cultural pursuits; though Red Star herself did not speak Crow, her adopted Korean sister spoke fluent Crow as a child. Her father ranched and was a licensed pilot who played in the "Maniacs", an Indian rock band. Red Star's uncle Kevin Red Star and grandmother Amy Bright Wings were big influences to her practice.

In 2004, Red Star received her B.F.A. from Montana State University - Bozeman in sculpture. In 2006, she received her M.F.A. in sculpture from the University of California, Los Angeles.

In 2012–2013, she was a manager at Chief Plenty Coups State Park, located in Pryor, Montana. In 2014, she moved to Portland and worked on Medicine Crow and the 1880 Crow Peace Delegation. She is a full-time artist in Portland, Oregon.

Career
Critical reception

The Spokesman-Review noted, "Red Star works in a variety of media. Her fiber work blends traditional and contemporary elements, as in her pieces Rez Car Shawl and Basketball Shawl. Her photographs combine stereotypical and authentic images, references to the past and modern day. Many are self-portraits." Her art often includes cliched representations of Native Americans, colonialism, the environment, and her own family. Gorman Museum described her work as layering "influences from her tribal background (Crow), daily surroundings, aesthetic experiences, collected ephemera and conjured histories that are both real and imagined." Though Red Star deals with some serious issues in Native American culture, she often includes humor, through inflatable animals, fake scenery, and other elements. In her photography, Red Star often depicts herself in traditional elk-tooth dresses that she creates.

Zach Dundas of Portland Monthly noted her "mash-ups of mass-market and Crow culture make perfect sense...Red Star is enjoying a moment in the wider art world. New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art includes her work in a current exhibit of Plains Indian art, and Dartmouth College's Hood Museum is showing her self-portraiture alongside big names like Chuck Close, Cindy Sherman, and Bruce Nauman. Red Star will stage 15 separate exhibitions this year."

According to the description of her APEX exhibit at the Portland Art Museum, her early work "employed gender-focused, political self-imagery...to draw attention to the marginalization of Native Americans." Norman Denizen observed, "Wendy Red Star, Crow Indian cultural activist and performance artist, offers an alternative view, focusing on performances and artworks that contest the images of the vanishing dark-skinned Indian." Her work has been collected at institutions such as the National Museum of the American Indian, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art.

Advocacy

She has lectured extensively at both Yale University and Dartmouth College but has also been guesting in other universities such as the California Institute of the Arts and Brown University.

Red Star wants to provide more opportunities for Native women in the art world. In 2014, Red Star curated Wendy Red Star's Wild West & Congress of Rough Riders of the World, "the first-ever all-Native contemporary art exhibition at Bumbershoot", which took place in Seattle during the annual musical concert. There were 10 artists that exhibited, and most of them were Native artists that primarily worked with identity-based artworks. In 2017, Red Star curated an exhibition at the Missoula Art Museum called Our Side, which featured four contemporary Indigenous female artists: Elisa Harkins, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Marianne Nicolson, and Tanis S'eiltin.

Works and publications
Thunder Up Above

For "Walks in the Dark" of the Thunder Up Above series, she created a costume with European and Victorian motifs in a Native American design, and photoshopped an interplanetary background. Dundas observes, "The sci-fi results evoke the intrigue and suspicion of first contact with an unknown people—or, as she put it in her artist's statement, 'someone you would not want to mess with'."

Four Seasons

For Red Star's Four Seasons series, the Metropolitan Museum of Art catalog noted, "In this four-part photographic work, Wendy Red Star pokes fun at romantic idealizations of American Indians as 'one with nature.' " Luella Brien of the Native Peoples Magazine wrote the Four Seasons series had an avant-garde quality, with traditional "Native American imagery juxtaposed against authentic imagery". Red Star also uses humor to draw viewers into her work. Blake Gopnik of Artnet News commented, "Posing amid blow-up deer, cut-out coyotes and wallpaper mountains, Red Star uses her series to go after the standard blather about Native American's inevitable 'oneness' with nature." The Saint Louis Art Museum acquired Four Seasons as part of its permanent collection, describing it as among "some of the amazing works of art acquired by the Art Museum in 2014".

White Squaw

Red Star characterizes her work as research-based, especially as she investigates and explores cliched Hollywood images like beautiful maidens or western landscapes. While conducting research on the term squaw, she found a reference to White Squaw, a 1950s movie, and later books with pulp-fiction style covers, published as recently as 1997. Red Star took photographic prints of the covers, substituting her own image in a cheap costume for the character "White Squaw", using all the original taglines, with comical satiric effect. 

Medicine Crow & The 1880 Crow Peace Delegation

In 1880, six Crow chiefs traveled to Washington, D.C. to talk with the president because the settlers were about to build a railroad through their hunting territory. She researched Medicine Crow/Peelatchiwaaxpáash (Raven) for her exhibit of the Crow Peace Delegation to Washington in 1880 and discovered the narratives behind elements of the iconic picture. She used a red pen on a print of this famous image to notate his outfit and the symbolism attached to elements such as his ermine shawl, the bows in his hair, and the eagle fan he is holding. Red Star said she wanted to use the details of his clothing, and the ledger drawings he made upon his return to the reservation, to humanize Medicine Crow. What she learns in research emerges in her creative process, which she articulates with visual means.

Circling the Camp

Red Star took photographs at the Crow Fair - a massive annual event in Central Montana that happens every third week of August. In an effort to focus on the culture and history of the Crow nation, she removed the background of the pictures to bring attention to the Indigenous people and objects in the foreground.

Apsáalooke Feminist

Most photographs of Crow women are colorless, so Wendy Red Star took photographs herself and her daughter Beatrice with colorful Crow clothes to showcase Crow people's everyday fashion. The patterned background is photoshopped to give the images a visual punch.

Other

All other work can be found on her website

Personal Life
Red Star was culturally aware from a young age. In the 90s, She represented the Crow Nation as Miss No Water District Princess in the Denver March Powwow. She likes to bring her daughter Beatrice to cultural events such as the Denver March Powwow and the Crow Fair to experience and embrace Indigenous traditions. She shows her support for women's rights and Indigenous rights by participating in many political events. In 2017, she participated in Women's March in Portland with her daughter, and in the same year, they went to the Portland MAX Attack location to show support for the victims.