Amnía (Echo)

 
 

Amnía (Echo), 2021

Archival ink on paper, board, custom pedestals, 66.5 x 98.25 x 19 inches

Photography is an integral aspect of Wendy Red Star’s multi-disciplinary practice. Amnía (Echo) captures Red Star’s singular approach to examining how photography supports the crafting of identity—personal and communal—by interweaving archival and contemporary images with historical narratives. The inspiration for the work is a black-and-white photographic portrait that Red Star found in the National Museum of the American Indian archives of her paternal great-great-grandmother, Her Dreams Are True, also known as Julia Badboy. Collaborating with her daughter, Beatrice, Red Star recreated the portrait, which was originally taken on the Crow Reservation in Montana ca. 1898–1910 by Fred E. Miller. Each portrait is rendered as a sculptural tableau in successively larger prints, mounted on board, and arranged behind one another. Through the successive composition, Red Star explores the Indigenous roots of feminism—a recurrent theme in her work—calling attention to the matrilineal structure of traditional Crow society.

– Text provided by the San Antonio Museum of Art