Four Seasons (Entire Set)
Artist: Wendy Red Star (American, Crow, born 1981)
Date: 2006
Dimensions:
With Border: 23 × 26 in. (58.4 × 66 cm)
Image: 21 × 24 in. (53.3 × 61 cm)
Medium: Archival pigment print on Sunset fiber rag
Classification: Photographs
Credit Line: Gift of Dr. Loren G. Lipson
Object number: 2019.13A-D
Label Text:Wendy Red Star was raised on the Apsáalooke (Crow) Reservation in Montana, and her work is powerfully informed by her cultural heritage. Using a range of media—including photography, sculpture, video, and performance—Red Star examines the intersection of Native American ideologies and colonialist structures, both in historical and in contemporary society.
Created in 2006, Four Seasons is Red Star’s most iconic work to date. In each of these highly staged and choreographed photographs Red Star, dressed in traditional Crow garb, inserts herself into a faux seasonal landscape decorated with materials such as plastic flora and fauna and cardboard cutouts of animals. In so doing she draws attention to mainstream American culture’s tendency to create one-dimensional narratives and stereotypes in relationship to Native American experience, past and present. The visual references in Red Star’s images range from 1970s Western landscape photography to the once widely popular diorama displays in natural history and anthropological museums. Utilizing imagery that is at once familiar and absurd, Four Seasons poses important questions about the complexity underlying Native American identities and who owns representation.
Created in 2006, Four Seasons is Red Star’s most iconic work to date. In each of these highly staged and choreographed photographs Red Star, dressed in traditional Crow garb, inserts herself into a faux seasonal landscape decorated with materials such as plastic flora and fauna and cardboard cutouts of animals. In so doing she draws attention to mainstream American culture’s tendency to create one-dimensional narratives and stereotypes in relationship to Native American experience, past and present. The visual references in Red Star’s images range from 1970s Western landscape photography to the once widely popular diorama displays in natural history and anthropological museums. Utilizing imagery that is at once familiar and absurd, Four Seasons poses important questions about the complexity underlying Native American identities and who owns representation.
Not on view