Wendy Red Star (born 1981) made her first big move off the Crow reservation to attend Montana State University in Bozeman. During one of her study sessions she discovered an image of Medicine Crow, an Apsáalooke chief, in a random book in the university library. Enamored by his image, she made a xerox copy and kept the chief’s image in her sketchbook. A decade later, in 2014, she revisited this image to create an exhibition at the Portland Art Museum titled Medicine Crow & the 1880 Crow Peace Delegation.

Bíilukaa builds upon this theme of researching historical photographs of Apsáalooke individuals and material culture, with the artist drawing on both her personal collection and works held in museums and archives across the country. Red Star notes, “Since the time I left the Crow reservation I have encountered my tribe’s material cultural in every city I have exhibited or occupied. It is incredible that so much of my community’s history and material culture is kept in the vaults of these institutions hundreds of miles away from their source.” The text features interviews with the artist and members of her extended family and scholars, alongside new works of primarily collaged photography.

Red Star has chosen the title Bíilukaa in reference to what the Apsáalooke call themselves: Our Side. Bíilukaa is the book Red Star wishes she could have read when setting out as a young artist, a book that educates the public about collections and archives, while also honoring her family and community.

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.

“Native America” considers the wide-ranging work of photographers and lens-based artists who pose challenging questions about land rights, identity and heritage, and histories of colonialism. Several contributors revisit or reconfigure photographic archives—from writer Rebecca Bengal’s look at the works of Richard Throssel and Horace Poolaw, to artist Duane Linklater’s intervention in a 1995 issue of Aperture, “Strong Hearts,” the magazine’s first volume devoted to Native American photographers.

“I was thinking about young Native artists,” says Red Star, “and what would be inspirational and important for them as a road map.”

That map spans a diverse array of intergenerational image-making, counting as lodestars the meditative assemblages of Kimowan Metchewais and installation works of Alan Michelson, the stylish self-portraits of Martine Gutierrez, and the speculative mythologies of Karen Miranda Rivadeneira and Guadalupe Maravilla. “Native America” also features contributions by distinguished writers and curators, including strikingly personal reflections from acclaimed poets Tommy Pico and Natalie Diaz.

With additional essential contributions from Rebecca Belmore and Julian Brave NoiseCat, as well as a portfolio from Red Star, the issue looks into the historic, often fraught relationship between photography and Native representation, while also offering new perspectives by emerging artists who reimagine what it means to be a citizen in North America today.

Format: Paperback / softback

Publication date: 2020-09-08

Measurements: 9.25 x 12 x 0.6 inches

ISBN: 9781597114851

The theme of this issue is “High/Low” and, fittingly, we at LARB feel two ways about it. On the one hand, we’re truly floating high. The pieces in these pages tackle everything from fine art to the latest Hollywood productions from exciting, unusual angles, putting disparate genres and themes into fruitful conversation with each other. Here fiction and nonfiction, architecture and photography, songcraft and poetry, crime writing and comedy mingle freely without jostling for a loftier hierarchal position. Indeed, the current issue perfectly embodies LARB’s central aims — aims we’ve followed for 10 lively years: to break down traditional barriers and to encourage a rigorous yet openminded and soulful engagement with the broader culture.

So what’s to feel low about? Simple. With this issue we’re bidding farewell to Medaya Ocher, LARB’s brilliant longtime Managing Editor, under whose imaginative and discerning leadership the Quarterly Journal became what it is: one of the most groundbreaking, consistently surprising, unfailingly rewarding literary venues in the nation. We take comfort in the knowledge that Medaya is moving on to bigger and brighter things, and though our world will be less luminous without her, we’ll make sure that the Quarterly Journal continues to shine.

Boris Dralyuk and Sonia Ali