Wendy Red Star

Apsáalooke Feminist

Apsáalooke feminist, 2016

Series of 4 Archival pigment print, 35 x 42 inches

Edition of 4

In her series, Apsáalooke Feminist, Red Star photographed herself and her daughter wearing traditional elk tooth dress, representing her Crow heritage and emphasizing the matrilineality of her tribe. Red Star uses the title Apsáalooke Feminist to highlight the irony of using the term ‘feminist’ to describe the matrilineal culture of the Crow Nation. Though she regards feminism as an offspring of colonialism, Red Star believes that within the movement there should be room for an Apsáalooke feminism that is historically and culturally specific to Crow women. Intergenerational collaborative work is integral to her practice, along with creating a forum for the expression of Native women’s voices in contemporary art. Red Star wants Native women to have a place within the art world without being an anomaly or special division, but seen as a part of a current and evolving conversation.

In these dramatically scaled double portraits, [Red Star] extends themes of crossing generational lines to incorporate the participation of her daughter, Beatrice. The series revives the matriarchal legacies of Crow culture, using portraiture as the basis for social, political, and conceptual explorations. Each photograph in the four-part series is dominated by bright colors that animate and reinforce the potency of the image. The undulating lines of the digitized background pattern, based on the traditional designs of Pendleton blankets, destabilize the normally static horizon line of a photograph’s pictorial space. Instead, stability is gained through the direct and steady gazes of Red Star and Beatrice, who are dressed elaborately in elk-tooth dresses. The Apsáalooke Feminist series is a response to historical photographs of Crow Indians by Anglo-American photographers like Edward S. Curtis, which tend to focus on male chiefs and warriors. By inserting an arresting color palette, Red Star wanted to make an emphatic response to the historic black-and-white photographs that she felt falsely represented Crow culture. “We wear such vibrant colors,” she says. “It’s the element that is truly missing from all the historic photos.” In each picture in the series, mother and daughter mirror one another in attitude and stance, gestural details that reinforce the narrative of traditions passed from one generation to the next via strong female figures.

— Text from Wendy Red Star: A Scratch on the Earth, Newark Museum exhibition catalogue, 2019, Nadiah Rivera Fellah and Tricia Laughlin Bloom