Spring

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Spring

Artist Wendy Red Star (American, Crow, born 1981)

Date2006

DimensionsWith Border: 23 × 26 in. (58.4 × 66 cm)
Image: 21 × 24 in. (53.3 × 61 cm)

MediumArchival pigment print on Sunset fiber rag

ClassificationPhotographs

Credit LineGift of Dr. Loren G. Lipson

Object number

2019.13C

Not on View

Label TextWendy Red Star explains, “I work across disciplines to explore the intersections of Native American ideologies and colonialist structures, both historically and in contemporary society.” Her work is informed by her experience growing up on the Apsáalooke (Crow) Nation in Montana, as she confronts stereotypes about Native Americans while deploying symbols drawn from powwow and reservation culture. Created in 2006, Four Seasons is Red Star’s most iconic work to date. In each of the four highly staged and choreographed photographs Red Star, dressed in traditional Crow garb, inserts herself into a faux seasonal landscape (in this case spring and fall) 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 experiences, past and present. The visual references in Red Star’s images range from the once widely popular diorama displays in natural history and anthropological museums to panoramic images of the Western landscape commercially produced in the 1970s. Utilizing imagery that is at once familiar and absurd, Four Seasons poses critical questions about the complexity underlying Native American identities and agency over representation.Published ReferencesNottage, James H., ed., Art Quantum: The Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art, 2009, Indianapolis, Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, in association with University of Washington Press, pp. 81-87, repr. (col.) pp. 88-85.