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Wendy Red Star is known for her playful yet poignant investigations of Indigenous identity. Weaving in references from pop culture to museological traditions throughout her work, the Montana-born, Portland-based Apsáalooke (Crow) artist redresses colonial narratives about Native Americans.
Isaakiiwaanníash (Plays With His Face) is part of a new series of screenprints that thread through Red Star’s immersive exhibition, “In the Shadow of Paper Mountains,” at London’s Gathering gallery. It marks her first commercial gallery show in Europe. Each print depicts a wounded bison and is based on George Catlin’s bison paintings from the 19th century.
A lawyer and artist, Catlin was celebrated in his time for his documentation of the American West, and his romanticized depictions of the Great Plains coincided with the U.S. government’s aggressive dislocation and violent eradication of both the region’s wildlife and its people in the mid 1800s. (The paintings he produced and objects he collected to form his “Indian Gallery” are now held in the Smithsonian in Washington D.C.)
George Catlin, Buffalo Bull, Grazing on the Prairie, (1832-33). Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
By invoking and remaking Catlin’s bison, Red Star reclaims the fraught history of these images. Each work is named for a Crow chief or leader, dating back to early European contact. For instance, in the early 1700s, Isaakiiwaanníash is said to have escaped death at the hands of an enemy by jumping off a cliff, using his bison-hide robe like a parachute.
Red Star has shown widely in the U.S., mostly in institutional shows. Only one work of hers has ever come to auction and, according to the Artnet Price Database, that was only last October when The Last Thanks (2006) sold at Sotheby’s for $15,240.
After a solo show with Sargent’s Daughters in New York, and a presentation at the Armory Show in 2021, Red Star’s work is starting to crop up on the international stage more frequently. In 2023, the British Museum featured her photographic prints in an exhibition of its new acquisitions. Earlier this year, her work was also featured South London Gallery’s exhibition, “Acts of Resistance: Photography, Feminisms and the Art of Protest.”