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Editors’ Note
On Wendy Red Star
For the summer issue, we asked ten artists, scholars, and writers to respond to one artwork by Wendy Red Star, on the occasion of her traveling exhibition A Scratch on the Earth.
On Wendy Red Star
Peelatchiwaaxpáash/Medicine Crow (Raven), 2014
By Sheilah ReStackRed Star takes these images from the National Anthropological Archive, and frees them from stillness. She traces in red ink around objects; notates; adds speech balloons; explains; diagrams.
On Wendy Red Star
Peelatchiwaaxpáash/Medicine Crow (Raven), 2014
By Gina OsterlohThis shift in viewing from afar (abstract pattern) to up close (words and legibility) creates an enmeshed transition from picture viewing to reading—scanning across the picture plane vis-à-vis Red Star’s notations which range from literal description, historical account, personal observations that imbue humor, and contexts within Crow culture.
On Wendy Red Star
My Home is Where My Tipi Sits (Rez Cars), 2011
By Rebecca BengalBut what pulls me to Red Star’s rez cars is how alive and human they feel: how, even in their eternal stasis, you can’t help see them as still somehow in motion.
On Wendy Red Star
The Last Thanks, 2006
By Tiffany MidgeThe surreal cast of characters look like something from a South Park episode. The table is strewn with a cornucopia of American Spirit cigarettes and cash, dessert cakes, processed cheese, bologna, and Wonder bread.
On Wendy Red Star
The Indian Congress, 2021
By Karen ChernickMaybe it would have been impossible to fit them all into one frame. All five hundred delegates stacked into a single group portrait, an epic souvenir of every Native American who participated in the Indian Congress in Omaha, Nebraska in 1898.
On Wendy Red Star
Sweat Lodge, 2019
By Eva DíazWendy Red Star’s Sweat Lodge (2019) slyly flags this intimate, communal, and, well, sweaty aspect of domed film spectatorship, connecting it to the rounded structures customarily used in ceremonies by Native Americans of the Plains communities, including of her own Apsáalooké (Crow) tribe.
On Wendy Red Star
Monsters, 2019
By Erica LevinIn eight static long takes, Red Star and Winger-Bearskin undertake a day’s journey into this land, rambling with their dogs across sub-alpine prairies, wide-open rocky expanses, into labyrinthian limestone caves, and down trails that betray traces of settler encroachment in the form of abandoned railroad beds and barbed wire fences.
On Wendy Red Star
“My Home is Where My Tipi Sits” (2011)
By Christopher GreenThe taxonomic nature of the series evokes the specter of anthropological specimen sampling and natural science modalities through which Native peoples have historically been studied. But Red Star’s straight images of vernacular reservation architecture and materiality create a portrait of life on the rez that counters romanticization with a touch of grounded humor.
On Wendy Red Star
Portrait of Perits-Har-Sts (Old Crow) and with His Wife, Ish-Ip-Chi-Wak-Pa-I-Chis (Good or Pretty Medicine Pipe), 2017
By Susan HarrisSwathed in sumptuous tribal garments and adorned with opulent accessories, a Native American Crow chief and his young wife are the subjects of a black-and-white photograph taken in 1873 by a white photographer to commemorate their visit to Washington, DC.
On Wendy Red Star
Alaxchiiaahush/Many War Achievements/Plenty Coups, 2014
By Zoë HopkinsHow should we read these fields of red ink? As analysis? As adornment? As utterance? The convergence of all of this in a decisive act of archival intervention?
