Wendy Red Star | Delegation
May 26 – June 25, 2022
Sargent’s Daughters downstairs gallery
Wendy Red Star: Delegation
Delegation, installation view
Untitled (Rez Pop A), 2017, Fabric with photograph, 19 x 25 inches
Untitled (Rez Pop B), 2017, Fabric with photograph, 19 x 25 inches
Untitled (Rez Pop C), 2017, Fabric with photograph, 19 x 25 inches
Untitled (Rez Pop D), 2017, Fabric with photograph, 19 x 25 inches
Amnía (Echo), 2021, Archival ink on paper, board, 66 1/2 x 98 1/4 x 19 inches
Indian Woman Sitting, 2005, pigment print, 31 x 21 inches
Delegation, installation view
Wendy Red Star | Delegation
May 26 – June 25, 2022
Sargent’s Daughters downstairs gallery
Aperture is thrilled to present Delegation, the first comprehensive monograph by Apsáalooke (Crow) artist Wendy Red Star, whose photography recasts historical narratives with wit, candor, and a feminist, Indigenous perspective. The publication release coincides with a solo exhibition by Red Star at Sargent’s Daughters gallery in New York.
Red Star centers Native American life and material culture through imaginative self-portraiture, vivid collages, archival interventions, and site-specific installations. Whether referencing nineteenth-century Crow leaders or 1980s pulp fiction, museum collections or family pictures, her practice questions the role of the photographer in shaping Indigenous representation.
Including a dynamic array of Red Star’s lens-based works from 2006 to the present and a range of essays, stories, and poems by award-winning historians and writers, Delegation—a copublication with Documentary Arts—is a spirited testament to an influential artist’s singular vision. It builds upon the success of Aperture magazine’s Fall 2020 issue, “Native America,” and the traveling exhibition Native America: In Translation, curated by Red Star.
Delegation features a wide-ranging conversation with Josh T. Franco, in which Wendy Red Star discusses her personal and family history; education; collaborations with her daughter, Beatrice; and the ways her photographic process has evolved. Essays by Jordan Amirkhani, Annika K. Johnson, Julia Bryan-Wilson, and Tiffany Midge consider the themes of self-portraiture, Native photographic archives, and satire and appropriation in Red Star’s work. National Book Critics Circle Award–winning poet Layli Long Soldier contributes two moving visual poems made in collaboration with Native and First Nations communities in the US and Canada. Delegation also features a dynamic and tactile design by Emily C. M. Anderson that reflects Red Star’s work across mediums and her attention to pattern and texture in collage.
Red Star’s solo exhibition, also titled Delegation, will open at Sargent’s Daughters on May 26 and remain on view through June 25. It will present new work produced for the Aperture publication, as well as works from the last several years that have never been shown in New York. The gallery will host a closing reception and book signing with the artist on Saturday, June 25.
In addition, the Aperture PhotoBook Club will host a conversation with Red Star regarding her new volume on Wednesday, June 29. A limited-edition print release of Red Star's 2005 photograph, Indian Woman Sitting, will also accompany the monograph, with proceeds supporting Aperture's not-for-profit publishing, educational and public programs.
News
Book Signing & Discussion with Wendy Red Star and Aperture
June 25, 3-5pm at Sargent’s Daughters
Join Aperture and Sargent’s Daughters to celebrate the launch of Delegation, the Apsáalooke (Crow) artist Wendy Red Star’s first monograph, copublished by Aperture and Documentary Arts.
Coinciding with the closing reception of Red Star’s solo exhibition “Delegation” at Sargent’s Daughters, Red Star will be in conversation with Brendan Embser, senior managing editor of Aperture magazine and editor of Delegation. Following the discussion, Red Star will sign copies of her book.
Red Star’s photography recasts historical narratives with wit, candor, and a feminist, Indigenous perspective, centering Native American life and material culture through imaginative self-portraiture, vivid collages, archival interventions, and site-specific installations. Whether referencing nineteenth-century Crow leaders or 1980s pulp fiction, museum collections or family pictures, Red Star’s practice questions the role of the photographer in shaping Indigenous representation.
Aperture Limited Edition Prints of Indian Woman Sitting (2005)
Indian Woman Sitting, 2005
Pigment Print
31 x 21 inches
Wendy Red Star: Delegation
Delegation is the first comprehensive monograph by Apsáalooke/Crow artist Wendy Red Star, whose photography recasts historical narratives with wit, candor, and a feminist, Indigenous perspective.
Red Star centers Native American life and material culture through imaginative self-portraiture, vivid collages, archival interventions, and site-specific installations. Whether referencing nineteenth-century Crow leaders or 1980s pulp fiction, museum collections or family pictures, she constantly questions the role of the photographer in shaping Indigenous representation. Including a dynamic array of Red Star’s lens-based works from 2006 to the present, and a range of essays, stories, and poems, Delegation is a spirited testament to an influential artist’s singular vision.
Copublished by Aperture and Documentary Arts
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Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 272
Number of images: 280
Publication date: 2022-06-14
Measurements: 8 x 10.25 x 1.13 inches
ISBN: 9781597115193
Contributors
Artworks by Wendy Red Star. Contributions by Jordan Amirkhani, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Josh T. Franco, Annika K. Johnson, Layli Long Soldier, and Tiffany Midge.
Wendy Red Star (born in Billings, Montana, 1981) is an Apsáalooke artist based in Portland, Oregon. Her work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions and is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum; Saint Louis Art Museum; and IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe. Red Star guest edited Aperture magazine’s Fall 2020 issue, “Native America.”
Jordan Amirkhani is an art historian, educator, and critic based in Washington, DC.
Julia Bryan-Wilson is the Doris and Clarence Malo Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author, most recently, of Fray: Art and Textile Politics (2017).
Josh T. Franco is an artist and art historian from West Texas. He is national collector at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
Annika K. Johnson is associate curator of Native American art at the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha.
Layli Long Soldier is an Oglala Lakota poet, writer, artist, and activist. She is author of the chapbook Chromosomory (2010) and the poetry collection Whereas (2017), which won a National Book Critics Circle award and was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Awards.
Tiffany Midge is a poet, writer, and editor. She is author of several books, including the poetry collection The Woman Who Married a Bear (2016) and the memoir Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s (2019). She is a Hunkpapa Lakota enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux.