Wendy Red Star: rewriting history from an indigenous point of view

An artist who uses photography to question the colonial narrative and reclaim cultural memory

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Wendy Red Star, a Crow visual artist, activist and educator born in 1981, reconfigures history from a contemporary indigenous perspective through photography, installation, collage and archiving, challenging official narratives and making indigenous voices visible.

A visual narrative from the personal and the collective.

One of Red Star's best known projects is Four Seasons, a photographic series in which she portrays herself dressed in traditional Crow Nation attire in artificial settings that parody ethnographic museum dioramas. The result is a direct critique of the exoticism and decontextualization with which indigenous cultures have been presented in the Western imaginary.

Research, archiving and reappropriation.

Red Star dedicates a large part of her practice to research documents and photographs from the 19th and 20th centuries, many of them preserved in anthropological collections. Through annotations, graphic interventions and visual resignifications, she rescues the identities of historical indigenous figures that were dehumanized by the colonial gaze.

Her work recontextualizes these materials, giving them back agency, history and, above all, a name. As she herself states, it is about "filling in the gaps of history with the voices that were excluded".

Preseinternational presence and artistic legacy.

Wendy Red Star's work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Portland Art Museum and Mass MoCA, and is part of collections such as the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. In addition to her artistic career, Red Star is an active promoter of cultural education and the inclusion of indigenous perspectives in contemporary art.

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