Wendy Red Star (b.1981, Billings, MT) lives and works in Portland, OR. An enrolled member of the Apsáalooke (Crow) Tribe, Red Star works across disciplines to explore the intersections of Native American ideologies and colonialist structures, both historically and in contemporary society. Drawing on pop culture, conceptual art strategies, and the Crow traditions within which she was raised, Red Star pushes the conversation surrounding Native American perspectives in new directions.

Red Star has exhibited in the United States and abroad at venues including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY); Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY), The Broad (Los Angeles, CA); the Getty Museum (Los Angeles, CA); Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain (Paris, France); Seattle Art Museum (Seattle, WA);  Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR); the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (Chicago, IL) ; St. Louis Art Museum (St. Louis, MO); the Contemporary Austin (Austin, TX);  Minneapolis Institute of Art (Minneapolis, MN);  Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MassMoCA) (North Adams, MA); the Drawing Center (New York, NY); and the Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland, OH), among others. Her monumental sculpture, The Soil You See…, was included in Beyond Granite: Pulling Together, the first curated outdoor exhibition in the history of the National Mall (Washington, D.C), organized by Monument Lab in 2023. The work was then acquired by Tippet Rise Art Center (Fishtail, MT). Red Star’s was included in Acts of Resistance: Photography, Feminisms and the Art of Protest exhibition at South London Gallery, in partnership with the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, UK).

Her work is in over 60 public collections, including be the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY); the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY); the Guggenheim Museum (New York, NY); the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art (Los Angeles, CA); the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (Fort Worth, TX); the Denver Art Museum (Denver, CO); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AK); the Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore, MD); the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA); the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University (Durham, NC); the Birmingham Museum of Art (Birmingham, AL); the Williams College Museum of Art (Williamstown, MA); San Antonio Museum of Art (San Antonio, TX); and the British Museum (London, UK), among others. 

Red Star holds a BFA from Montana State University, Bozeman, and an MFA in sculpture from University of California, Los Angeles. She served as visiting lecturer at institutions including Yale University (New Haven, CT), the Banff Centre (Banff, Canada), National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne (Melbourne, Australia), Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH), and CalArts (Valencia, CA). In 2017, Red Star was awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, and in 2018 she received a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. In 2022, Red Star was an Anonymous Was A Woman Grant recipient. Red Star was named a 2024 MacArthur Fellow.

Her first career survey exhibition, Wendy Red Star: A Scratch on the Earth, was on view at the Newark Museum (Newark, NJ) through May 2019, and traveled to the San Antonio Museum of Art (San Antonio, TX) in 2022 and the Columbus Museum of Art (Columbus, OH) in 2023. Red Star’s monograph Delegation was co-published by the Aperture Foundation and Documentary Arts in May 2022 and was named one of Vanity Fair’s best art books of 2022. Red Star’s artist book Wendy Red Star: Bíilukaa, which documents the symbolism and material culture of the Biílukaa (Apsáalooke), was published by Radius Books in April 2023. She is represented by Sargent's Daughters.