From exploring her cultural heritage to the role of Native women, Wendy began working as a visual artist to reflect on her upbringing and early life. She was raised on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana, and today, her work draws from discoveries in archival records, oral tradition, and a deep-rooted passion for adding to public knowledge about her ancestry.
Wendy engages with a wide range of artistic mediums, such as sculpture, performance, photography, video, and fiber arts, but doesn’t let any single form define her work. “I am creating an art history of Apsáalooke aesthetics. Each project I do is a different medium, and often, it’s a medium that I know nothing about,” she explains.
Historical photography is especially important in Wendy’s process. She treats photographs as starting points rather than finished documents, in her work, spending time questioning and reimagining them. She describes her practice as a way of building Apsáalooke-centered art history, one that does not rely on Western systems of value or expression. Instead, her creations challenge the assumption that Indigenous cultures only belong in the past, and showcases the resilience and ongoing evolution of Apsáalooke life today.
Humor plays a crucial role in Wendy’s work, particularly in her portraits. Many of these images, featuring Wendy and her daughter, cleverly poke fun at the tired clichés and stereotypes often utilized to represent Native people. We can’t help but smile at their playful facial expressions—they make us rethink every stereotype we’ve ever encountered. By exaggerating or flipping these common tropes, Wendy draws us in and then asks us to question where those images come from and why they keep circulating. The humor doesn’t distract from hard truths, but rather creates space for deeper reflection and conversation. Wendy’s work reminds us why these stories matter so much: “I know that my work confronts people with subjects they’re not comfortable thinking or talking about, but if there’s a reprieve in there through humor, it’s so powerful,” she said in a 2024 interview.
I know that my work confronts people with subjects they’re not comfortable thinking or talking about, but if there’s a reprieve in there through humor, it’s so powerful.
Her mid-career retrospective exhibition, “Wendy Red Star: A Scratch on the Earth,” grew out of her reflections on how museums present Native cultures to the public. During a visit to the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, where she hoped to find Crow objects, she noticed that Native materials appeared only after galleries filled with dinosaur skeletons. Watching the public move through these spaces, she realized how easily the display might suggest that Native cultures no longer exist. In her response to this, Four Seasons (2006), Wendy staged a series of photographs, placing herself inside constructed dioramas of colorful Montana landscapes. The scenes are intentionally artificial, composed of painted backdrops and theatrical staging to mimic the aesthetic of museum displays.
Against this staged backdrop, Wendy wears an elk tooth dress, a piece rich with both cultural and personal significance. Traditionally made by women in the Crow community, these dresses hold histories of craft, labor, and family connection. In her photographs, Wendy brings Crow women into spaces that have historically erased them.
Her work with archives really comes to life in her annotated photographic series based on nineteenth-century images of Medicine Crow, a respected Crow leader and warrior. These photographs, originally by Anglo-American photographer Charles Milton Bell, have circulated widely over the years, often separated from their context and even repurposed for commercial use. Wendy was especially struck when she first saw one of these images repurposed to advertise tea bottles—an example of how Indigenous people are frequently turned into decoration rather than recognized as real individuals. She took preserved images and altered their reproductions, adding arrows, outlines, and notes to highlight who Medicine Crow was, what he wore, and other details she uncovered in her research. The resulting pieces invite us to slow down and take a closer look at the full story.
At the heart of Wendy’s work is the matrilineal structure of Crow society, where descent and inheritance are traced through the mother’s side. She especially highlights the matrilineality of her tribe in her series Apsáalooke Feminist (2016), a set of photographic stills where she uses archival pigment prints to blend tradition and modernity. She and her young daughter, Beatrice, pose in handmade elk tooth dresses among vibrant patterns, bold colors, and carefully arranged objects. The bright, saturated hues pull your eye toward the textiles and designs, while backgrounds inspired by Pendleton blanket patterns ripple behind them, breaking the stillness usually seen in portrait photography. Instead of relying on the background for stability, the mirrored stances of mother and daughter anchor each image, showing how Crow knowledge and tradition pass from one generation to the next. While the word “feminism” itself comes from Western history, Crow society’s matrilineal structure is inherently feminist, and Wendy uses this series to explore feminism’s limits and boundaries.
The paths I trace reflect how I was taught to move through the world, with focus, self-reliance, and an attentiveness to what endures beyond record or category…
Wendy herself refers to her work as a kind of education. With a BFA from Montana State University, Bozeman, and an MFA in sculpture from University of California, Los Angeles, she takes history off the page and makes it feel personal and lived, letting her work speak without needing a linear explanation. Time in her art is not chronological; instead, it unfolds through recurring themes and the connections between people, objects, and stories. Wendy recognizes how often history is flattened into something abstract. Through her work, she invites us to see it as experienced, familial, and continuous—to look at both the past and present with greater clarity and curiosity, and to keep learning about Indigenous histories. After all, Indigenous history is United States history. “The paths I trace reflect how I was taught to move through the world, with focus, self-reliance, and an attentiveness to what endures beyond record or category,” she says. Wendy lives and works in Portland, Oregon.
Congratulations, Wendy Red Star!
© Gina Dea (3/18/26)—Special for FF2 Media®
EDITOR’S NOTE: FF2 Media is proud to post Gina’s profile of Wendy in honor of Women’s History Month!
LEARN MORE / DO MORE
To learn more about Wendy Red Star, visit the MacArthur site here.
Read Wendy’s full Harper’s Bazaar interview.
Watch her MacArthur Foundation video interview.
Browse Wendy’s official website.
CREDITS & PERMISSIONS
Featured Photo & Bottom Photo: With gratitude to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
High-resolution photos of all MacArthur Fellows — in this case Wendy Red Star — are available for download, including use by media, in accordance with their copyright policy.
Middle Photo: Wendy Red Star, “Ashkaamne (matrilineal inheritance),” 2019 downloaded from Wikipedia.
