Wendy Red Star | Travels Pretty

First Floor

Spring Studios, New York, NY

May 11 – 14, 2023

Travels Pretty is an exhibition of 12 new artworks by Wendy Red Star (b. 1981, Billings, MT) originally presented by the Public Art Fund on 300 JCDecaux bus shelters in New York City, Chicago, and Boston.

For the Independent Art Fair, Red Star has created print editions under the same title, Travels Pretty, which will be presented alongside Red Star’s personal collection of archival parfleche pieces. Raised on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana, Red Star reshapes dominant narratives by casting light on the complex histories of Native Americans through a feminist Indigenous lens. 

In Travels Pretty Red Star explores parfleches, vibrantly painted rawhide bags made by certain nomadic tribes of the North American Great Plains. Parfleches constitute one of the great traditions of imagery created by Native artists. Painted with intricate geometric designs, these carrying cases were used by the Apsáalooke and other tribes to store and transport food and personal possessions. These “suitcases” were traditionally made by women and served as a compelling and creative means of self-expression. Visually weaving together stories across generations, Red Star created this dynamic body of work with travel in mind. 

Through this series of vibrantly colored acrylic paintings, Red Star masterfully reinterprets parfleche designs by looking through the collections of major museums that house Apsáalooke cultural material. Mining the archives of the American Museum of Natural History (New York), the Brooklyn Museum (New York), the National Museum of the American Indian (New York), the Field Museum (Chicago), and the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology at Harvard University (Cambridge), she meticulously researched the lore and making of parfleches. 

Each work includes handwritten texts with phrases referencing different aspects such as their history (“visual language of the Apsáalooke”, “handed down from one generation to the next”, “greatest numbers made in the late 1750s to 1880s”, “found in nearly all museum collections that have Apsáalooke cultural material”); how they were used (“meat bag”, “hung from horse”, “far west trade”); descriptions of the designs (“diamond represented sand lizard / protection for the owner”, “large hourglass”, “candy cane stripe”); how they were made (“mother taught her daughter”, “rawhide considered women’s craft”, “two weeks to complete”), and what the pigments are made from (“fish roe”, “pounded fine berries”, “green from fresh algae”). To celebrate the thousands of women who painstakingly created the parfleches but are not credited with the craftsmanship, Red Star titled each of the 12 paintings after women from the Apsáalooke tribe, whose names she found in the 1885 Crow Census.

By taking the parfleches outside the museum walls, where many are currently housed, and re-imagining them for city streets in larger-than-life compositions, Red Star celebrates their histories and makers. For Red Star, these works are markers of the Apsáalooke people and represent the resilience of her community.

Text courtesy of the Public Art Fund, Travels Pretty was curated by Public Art Fund Adjunct Curator Katerina Stathopoulou.

Wendy Red Star (b.1981, Billings, MT) was raised on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana and creates work that revises historical and contemporary narratives around Indigenous people and cultures through an interdisciplinary practice involving photography, sculpture, video, textile, and performance. Her work has appeared in solo exhibitions at the Anderson Collection at Stanford University (2022), San Antonio Museum of Art (2022), MASS MoCA (2022), Joslyn Art Museum (2021), and the Newark Museum of Art (2019), among others. Recent group exhibitions include The Drawing Center, New York (2022); The Broad, Los Angeles (2022); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2022); Wal- lach Art Gallery at Columbia University, New York (2021); and The Momentary, Bentonville (2021), among others. She is a recipient of the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2018), Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2017), Betty Bowen Award (2016), and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerg- ing Artist Grant (2015). Her works are in the permanent collections of museums including the Museum of Modern Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Amon Carter Museum of American Art; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; Denver Art Museum; Baltimore Museum of Art; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; Birmingham Museum of Art; Williams College Museum of Art; and the British Museum.

Press

Cultured Mag | May 10, 2023

The New York Times | May 11, 2023