Just One Work | Wendy Red Star |
Take a closer look at a single artwork from our current exhibition 250 Years, Indigenous Futures. Today, we proudly present: |
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WENDY RED STAR Chiaxxúapilake (Fifty), 2025 Fabric with archival pigment print photograph on board 25.25 x 49.25 x 1.25 inches, framed |
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Wendy Red Star’s multidisciplinary practice is grounded in the histories, archives, and her lived experience of the Apsáalooke (Crow) Nation.
Drawn from her ongoing series A Float for the Future, Red Star’s 2025 photographic collage Chiaxxúapilake (Fifty) highlights a pair of ornately decorated parade cars of the annual Crow Fair. Held each August in Crow Agency, Montana, where the artist was raised, the six-day event is the largest gathering of Native Americans in the United States. There, in a daily morning parade, automobiles join horses as ceremonial vehicles adorned with beadwork, saddles, Pendleton blankets, traditional regalia including elk-tooth dresses, and other markers of Apsáalooke pageantry—symbols of an enduring Tribal culture adapted for contemporary life. |
Detail from Wendy Red Star, Chiaxxúapilake (Fifty), 2025 |
Red Star likens these parade vehicles to “maps of identity,” offering insights into the families and lineages they represent. She collages her images onto backdrops of colorful satin fabric often worn under traditional regalia made of wool. “Incorporating both the outer regalia and the clothes underneath is a way of acknowledging the identity of the Apsáalooke people, not just in terms of how we celebrate publicly,” the artist shares. “It’s a window into what’s normally hidden or less visible; our public and private selves are set side-by-side.”
Turning objects into subjects and allowing them to speak, Red Star reveals forms that, as she has said, “represent a resilient and proud community…that overcomes obstacles to keep its culture alive.” |
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| Wendy Red Star (b. 1981, Billings, MT; lives and works in Portland, OR), of the Piegan clan and from the district of Pryor, is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice is deeply rooted in the community, culture, and history of the Apsáalooke (Crow) people.
Her first career survey, Wendy Red Star: A Scratch on the Earth, opened at the Newark Museum of Art in 2019 and traveled to the San Antonio Museum of Art and Columbus Museum of Art through 2023. |
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Her first career survey, Wendy Red Star: A Scratch on the Earth, opened at the Newark Museum of Art in 2019 and traveled to the San Antonio Museum of Art and Columbus Museum of Art through 2023. Her work has been presented internationally at institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, The Broad, J. Paul Getty Museum, and Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, as well as the 2023 Sharjah Biennial and 2026 NGV Triennial. A major solo exhibition will open at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, in 2027.
Red Star was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2024, the same year she received the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award. Other honors include an Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2022), Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2018), and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award (2017). Her monographs include Delegation (Aperture/Documentary Arts, 2022) and Wendy Red Star: Bíilukaa (Radius Books, 2023). Her work is held in more than 80 public collections, including the Guggenheim Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art. |
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Installation view of Wendy Red Star's works in 250 Years, Indigenous Futures at Haines |
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Images: 1 & 2) Wendy Red Star, Chiaxxúapilake (Fifty), 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson; 3) Portrait of Wendy Red Star. Courtesy the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles. Photo: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; 4) Installation view of 250 Years, Indigenous Futures. Photo: Shaun Roberts. |
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