WENDY RED STAR

Red Star grew up with Star Quilts on the Apsáalooke reservation in Montana, encountering them at clan gatherings, powwows, graduations and giveaways. Alongside Pendleton blankets, they were among the most prized gifts she remembers being exchanged; an elaborate quilt made entirely in satin carried particular status. The Star Quilt has its own history of transformation. In the late nineteenth century, Native women across the Plains learned Euro-American sewing and quilting techniques through missionaries, churches and government assimilation programs. Plains women took up these introduced methods and made them their own. Star Quilts became embedded within existing practices of honoring and exchange and developed distinctive approaches to color and composition. A form introduced within a colonial project became, through the hands of Native women, something culturally specific and deeply valued within their communities.

The artist also came to recognize a visual language in the Native Star Quilts around her: diamonds cut from solid-colored fabrics rather than prints, with the complexity of the composition generated through arrangements of saturated color. False Stars begins with this relationship between the diamond and color, then asks how little of the quilt is necessary for the star to remain. Working with earth pigments, mirrors, acrylic beads, watercolor, gouache and paper, Red Star retains the quilt’s underlying structure—diamond, color, repetition, assembly—while largely dispensing with the materials of quilting itself.

In two corner installations, mounds of colored earth pigment form the diamonds of a partial star on the floor. Mirrors meeting at ninety degrees produce the remainder through reflection. Two freestanding mirror sculptures apply the same principle to thousands of solid-colored acrylic beads, with quarter-star compositions multiplying into complete patterns as the viewer moves around the work. In each case, most of the star has no material existence at all.

The mirror works developed from a practical technique Red Star encountered while learning to make a Star Quilt. In an instructional DVD, a quilter demonstrated how two small mirrors placed at right angles around a quarter-star could reflect a complete pattern, allowing her to test a color arrangement before committing to the labor and materials of an entire quilt. Red Star enlarges this modest tool into a sculptural device. The resulting combination of mirrors, earth and reflected image unexpectedly enters into conversation with Robert Smithson’s mirror displacements. Rather than beginning with that art-historical reference, however, Red Star arrives there through the practical intelligence of quilt making.

The works on paper approach this same question through painting. Red Star saturates thin sheets of Japanese Sumi paper with watercolor, cuts the colored paper into individual diamonds and folds and assembles them into large stars. Water wrinkles and buckles the paper, leaving it with an almost textile-like surface. The stars are loosely adhered to Rives BFK paper painted in dense fields of opaque gouache, allowing their folds and irregularities to remain visible. Across the exhibition, color continually changes physical condition: loose mineral pigment becomes a mound; watercolor penetrates paper; gouache becomes an opaque field; acrylic becomes thousands of discrete units. The star, meanwhile, persists.

False Stars is less concerned with recreating the Star Quilt than in what its structure can withstand. Cloth disappears. Stitching disappears. A complete star can be made from a quarter of one. Paper can begin to behave like textile, and reflection can stand in for matter. These transformations extend a history already contained within the Star Quilt itself: a form that became significant across Plains communities not by remaining fixed, but by being taken up, altered and made specific. In False Stars, Red Star puts the star through that process once again.

On April 9, 2027, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery will present Wendy Red Star: Whispering Spirit, an exhibition of all new work by Red Star. Spanning seven galleries, this site-responsive exhibition will mark the first time the National Portrait Gallery has presented an exhibition of this scope and scale. Wendy Red Star: Whispering Spirit is curated by Charlotte Ickes, curator of time-based media art and special projects, with curatorial assistant Amy Swartz. The exhibition will remain on view through January 30, 2028.

About Wendy Red Star

Wendy Red Star (b. 1981, Billings, MT; based Portland, OR), of the Piegan clan and from the district of Pryor, engages in a multidisciplinary artistic practice grounded in the history and cultural knowledge of the Apsáalooke (Crow) people. Raised on the Crow reservation in Montana, her work reflects her deep connection to her community, culture and land. Red Star sees her artistic practice as inseparable from her Apsáalooke identity and foregrounds the importance of amplifying Native women’s voices in contemporary art.

Red Star’s art approaches U.S. history through an Apsáalooke lens, placing Apsáalooke experiences, traditions and stories alongside the narratives that have shaped America’s understanding of its past. Through photography, sculpture, video and fiber arts, her work emphasizes Apsáalooke cultural practices and knowledge transmission, especially within her own family and community. Her practice is grounded in rigorous research and archival materials, bringing Apsáalooke histories into sharper relation with U.S. history and revealing the structures embedded in the archive.

Red Star holds a BFA from Montana State University, Bozeman, MT, and an MFA in Sculpture from University of California, Los Angeles, CA. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2024 and received both the Bonnie Bronson Fellowship and the Infinity Award in Contemporary Photography and New Media that same year. Additionally, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in 2025 from Montana State University, Bozeman.

In 2019, Red Star had her first career survey exhibition, Wendy Red Star: A Scratch on the Earth, at the Newark Museum, Newark, NJ, which traveled to the San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, TX, and the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH. Recent exhibitions include Wendy Red Star: Her Dreams Are True, The Trout Gallery, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA (2025); One Blue Bead, Sargent’s Daughters, New York, NY (2026); Taking Back Our Space: Photographic Perspectives, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2026) and A Kind of Paradise: Colonial-Era Photography in Contemporary Art, Museum Rietberg, Zürich, Switzerland. Red Star will be included in the National Gallery of Victoria’s Triennial (2026). In 2027, the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C., will present a major solo exhibition of her work.

She has exhibited in the United States and internationally at venues including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Fondation Cartier pour l’ArtContemporain, Paris, France; Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; and Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN. Her work is featured in numerous public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; British Museum, London, UK; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; National Museum of the American Indian, New York, NY; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; and Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY, among others.

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