Wendy Red Star: Her Dreams Are True

Red Star transforms archival photographs, crafts and other artifacts from museum collections across the US into multimedia assemblages bridging past and present Indigenous histories

This project, Her Dreams Are True, provides a new perspective on the role of archives, museum collections and personal memory in Wendy Red Star's work. Apsáalooke (Crow) artist Wendy Red Star works across mediums to reconsider and liberate archival photographs and materials from a fixed historical moment. Starting with the Crow Peace Delegation series (2014), This publication articulates the connections between Red Star's annotated 19th-century portraits and her more recent works that recontextualize hand-painted illustrations of artifacts in the Denver Art Museum's Indigenous collection. Red Star juxtaposes these with her own photographs of the Crow Nation's annual fair in Montana. Returning to her handwritten notes in the Bíiluuke series (2023), Red Star also provides a nuanced intervention with Apsáalooke heritage items from several public collections. More than a meditation on the past, Red Star's archival work looks to the future and offers a new perspective on rematriation.
Wendy Red Star (born 1981) was born in Billings, Montana, and lives and works in Portland, Oregon. She earned her BFA from Montana State University, Bozeman, and her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. Red Star's first solo exhibition, A Scratch on the Earth, opened at the Newark Museum of Art and toured to the San Antonio Museum of Art and the Columbus Museum of Art. She has received numerous awards and grants including a 2018 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, a 2022 Anonymous Was A Woman Grant and a 2024 MacArthur Fellowship.