By Alisha Wexler
“It feels almost like being reunited with an old friend,” says Wendy Red Star as she reflects on the bittersweet emotion of discovering locked-away aspects of her Crow heritage across digital collections, auctions, eBay, and museum archives. “It’s thrilling but there are moments of deep sadness.” Now her findings have made their way to Roberts Projects, on view from July 13 until August 24.
This LA exhibition is a full-circle moment of sorts for the Portland-based multidisciplinary artist, who hasn’t had a solo show in Los Angeles since she earned a master’s degree from UCLA in 2006. Now, Roberts Projects marks her second in one month—“Stirs Up the Dust,” an exhibition dedicated to the garments of the powwow, opened last week at the Autry Museum of the American West in Griffith Park.
Throughout her practice, the Apsáalooke (Crow) artist has built an archive of lost names and art forms of Indigenous tribes from the North American plains, which she translates into compelling artworks—including those on display at Roberts Projects and the Autry Museum, as well as a concurrent exhibition at Gathering London and a large-scale sculpture at Tippet Rise Art Center in Montana.
In Los Angeles, the main space of Roberts Projects’ gallery is covered wall-to-floor with a grid of 184 painted studies of striking geometric designs in rich primary colors. For the exhibition titled “Bíikkua (The Hide Scraper),” Red Star recreated bishkischés, a term by the Crow tribe that describes traditional rawhide cases. Amidst intersecting shapes, lines, and zigzags, viewers will find themselves immersed in the overlooked craftsmanship—with titles restoring the lost names of these Native women with those from her research such as All She Has Is Yellow, as well as her own great-great-grandmother’s, Her Dreams Are True.
“It’s almost like communing with this other woman,” says Red Star of her process. She starts with painting on Japanese printmaking paper to create a buff-wash to mimic rawhide before she outlines the patterns in blue, red, green, and yellow. The original method involved arduous physical labor—hunting, skinning, scraping, and soaking hides, and carefully but quickly painting them before they dry. “They’re made of the earth and a kind of roadmap of the environment, tied to place, to language, to the land,” she explains.
“You have to step out of a sort of Western colonial framework that we’ve all been raised in to see these. Crows would never think of them as art,” the artist tells me as she prepares for the opening of her current solo show at Gathering London, “In The Shadow of Paper Mountains,” which runs through September 1. The exhibition features a mountain-range installation resembling a pop-up greeting card, 12 buffalo paintings, and sculptures of headless golden deer.
Meanwhile in Montana, another work of Red Star’s is on display: a large, semi-transparent red glass thumbprint titled The Soil You See…, 2023. Tippet Rise’s newly acquired eight-foot-tall sculpture arrived from Washington D.C. this summer—where it was conceived to question American monuments of the past and stories of Native communities that went untold. Now it stands newly erected against a backdrop of the Beartooth Mountains of Crow Country where Red Star once lived, bearing the names of 50 local Apsáalooke chiefs within its swirling ridges. "The soil you see is not ordinary soil—it is composed of the dust of the blood, flesh, and bones of our ancestors,” read the words inscribed on the monument. The quote comes from a Native scout named Curly, taken from a speech he delivered in Washington D.C., Red Star tells me. “I feel humbled and honored knowing it's back home,” she adds of the work.
Red Star’s fruitful moment expands upon her ongoing mission to honor unnoticed and misrepresented Indigenous narratives. Under the artist’s meticulous hand, past and present converge in a powerful dialogue with land, legacy, and cultural preservation. In her past self-portrait series “Four Seasons,” 2006, she used elements of kitsch and humor to subvert colonial pop-culture stereotypes by staging herself within fabricated dioramas populated by inflatable animals and artificial flora. In her multimedia work 1880 Crow Peace Delegation, 2014, she explored identities and complexities of Crow tribal leaders through manipulated archival portraits.
Now from Montana to London to Los Angeles, Red Star embraces the current momentum. “It feels like a homecoming in a way,” she says of her return to LA. Despite her hectic schedule, she speaks with enthusiasm about this productive time. “I’m in this magical spot right now where ideas are flowing,” she reflects. “At first, it was a tortuous struggle to have them come, but now it’s like a faucet.”
Wendy Red Star: "Bíikkua (The Hide Scraper)" is on view at Roberts Projects from July 13 to August 24, 2024 at 442 South La Brea Avenue Los Angeles, California 90036.
