Wendy Red Star

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.  

By Matt Stromberg

Bishkisché is an Apsáalooke term referring to rawhide containers used to transport goods great distances on horseback, produced by women in several North American Indigenous groups. Throughout her ongoing investigation into the history of bishkisché, Wendy Red Star made studies of 226 examples of these functional objects in the form of meticulously rendered paintings reproducing each one’s unique, richly colored geometric designs. Bíikkua (The Hide Scraper) features 184 of these works, each named for a woman in her tribe, in an attempt to reclaim the abstractions that have been subsumed into Western art history and pay homage to their origins and creators.

By Bob Hicks

Wendy Red Star, who lives in Portland and whose work is in permanent art collections nationally and internationally from the British Museum to the Denver, Baltimore and Portland museums of art; the Metropolitan, Whitney, and Museum of Modern Art in New York; and beyond, has been named the winner of 2024’s Bonnie Bronson Visual Arts Fellowship.

The fellowship, named for the prominent Oregon artist who died in a mountain climbing accident in 1990, is awarded annually to an artist living and working in the Northwest. It comes with a $10,000 cash prize and the purchase of a piece of art to be added to the Bonnie Bronson Collection housed at Reed College.