By Holland Cotter

Pop and Jackson Pollock are the tent-pole names of the coming New York art year. But both here and nationally it will be exhibitions touching on the now under-censure subject of social justice that promises to give the season a sense of grit and purpose.

And looking ahead to April 2027, I anticipate with pleasure a major exhibition, “Wendy Red Star: Whispering Spirit,” with new portrait-based work by Red Star, a midcareer Apsáalooke artist, organized by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, a branch of the beleaguered Smithsonian Institution.

By Anna Lee

A new book gathers essays by the museum’s curators, researchers, librarians, and conservators on everything from Renaissance portraiture to the work of Wendy Red Star.

“It is that miraculous connection between artist and subject, the self and the world beyond, that is the fever dream of all great art,” Dale Tucker, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s senior editor, writes in Points of View: 100 Connections to Art.

Our annual look at the talents defining the country’s creative landscape right now

The Wallpaper* US400 celebrates Creative America in all its dazzling breadth and diversity. Our snapshot of the people who are shaping the country’s creative landscape in 2026 spans community builders, tastemakers, business leaders and more. It’s all a testament to the abundance of stellar talent that’s defining the discourse here in the United States – and the world more broadly. Here are the names to know in America now.


Declare invites a chorus of American authors, artists, and artisans to reflect on our country’s inaugural words in a handcrafted, printed testament to the American experiment.

On the occasion of the 250 anniversary of the publication of the Declaration of Independence and the birth of the United States of America, Arion Press is pleased to announce a collaborative partnership with Thomas Jefferson's Monticello to produce a landmark commemorative edition and the launch of a suite of related programming.

Featuring more than eighty ambitious and thought-provoking projects, including major new commissions, the 2026 NGV Triennial offers a global journey through contemporary art and design. Unfolding across all four levels of NGV International, the fourth NGV Triennial brings together the work of some of the most respected artists and designers from around the world, while amplifying the voices of emerging talents. Spanning painting, video, sculpture, installation, fashion, textiles, ceramics and design, the exhibition places contemporary works in dialogue with the NGV’s historical collections.

Remixing transforms the familiar into something new. In the recording studio, music producers layer tracks, shift tempos, and sample old melodies, creating fresh soundscapes with the echoes of the past. Remixed: Entwined Histories and New Forms explores this sonic alchemy as a conceptual, visual strategy in art that “remixes” both physical objects and immaterial legacies.

The exhibition showcases work by twenty artists drawing on historical imagery. They make use of archival photographs to reenvisage pictorial space, creating multivalent and sometimes fantastical works that transcend received narratives. The pictures are recontextualised and transformed into imaginary worlds where art acts as a healing force.

Winter Count: Embracing the Cold reflects on winter’s significant impact across diverse cultures and artistic expressions. Featuring more than 150 works from the early 19th century to the present, this exhibition brings together Indigenous, Canadian settler and European perspectives on the subject.

Wendy Red Star, of the Piegan clan and from the district of Pryor, engages in a multidisciplinary artistic practice grounded in the history and cultural knowledge of the Apsáalooke (Crow) people. Raised on the Crow reservation in Montana, her work reflects her deep connection to her community, culture, and land. Her work has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Portland Art Museum, among many others, and also exists in the collections of institutions including the Museum of Modern Art and the British Museum. In 2024, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She was born in Billings, Montana, and lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

Her Dreams Are True provides a new perspective on the role of archives, museum collections, and personal memory in Apsáalooke (Crow) artist Wendy Red Star’s prints and photographs. 

Wendy Red Star is this year’s recipient of Dickinson College’s prestigious Arts Award. The Dickinson College Arts Award honors an individual or group who has made an outstanding contribution to the creative or performing arts.

Montana State University alumna awards Wendy Red Star an honorary doctorate at its spring commencement ceremony on Friday, May 9. “I’m really excited that Native students can see that I’ve been awarded an honorary doctorate,” said Red Star, whose work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, and the British Museum in London. “That’s really important to me, because I know if I was an undergrad student and saw that, that would be so inspiring.”

CULTURED invited a range of artists whose work engages with the nature and environment—including Anicka Yi, Sarah Meyohas, Wendy Red Star, and Alexis Rockman—to reflect on the most influential work of environmental art of the 20th and 21st centuries so far. Their selections span speculative ecosystems, light-based installations, and regenerative landworks. Some of the works chosen are poetic, others prophetic—and all have lingered in the minds of the artists who selected them.

By Lauren Gallow

In 2024, Tippet Rise Art Center in Montana permanently installed a glass and granite sculpture called “The Soil You See…” by the artist Wendy Red Star, who grew up on the nearby Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation. The sculpture, which resembles a giant blood-red fingerprint, is inscribed with the names of 50 Apsáalooke chiefs who were coerced by the U.S. government into using their thumbprints to cede their tribal lands. Today, the center’s guided tours incorporate information on the Apsáalooke people.

This exhibition, curated by the renowned artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation), provides a provocative survey of contemporary Native American art across media.  Indigenous Identities features 97 living artists that represent over 74 Indigenous nations and communities from across North America and includes painting, works on paper, photography, ceramics, beadwork, weaving, sculpture, installation, and video.  

For the first time in 15 years, the Seattle Art Museum presents a new installation of its American art galleries, reinterpreting its historical collection to meet the present moment. The result of an extensive collaboration among SAM curators, staff, artists, and community advisors, American Art: The Stories We Carry brings SAM’s historical American art collection into conversation with its Native art collection, its modern and contemporary art collection, a gallery curated by artist Inye Wokoma, and new commissions by artists Wendy Red Star and Nicholas Galanin. 

Native America: In Translation, curated by artist Wendy Red Star, assembles the wide-ranging work of nine Indigenous artists who offer contemporary perspectives on memory, identity, and the history of photography. “I was thinking about young Native artists and what would be inspirational and important for them as a road map,” said Red Star. 

This road map spans intergenerational image makers representing various Native nations and affiliations, and working in photography, installation, multimedia assemblage, and video. Among them, the late Cree artist Kimowan Metchewais investigates landscape and language through his evocative Polaroids. And the stylish self-portraits of Martine Gutierrez pose as fashion ads and question conceptions of ideal beauty. 

Interview by Tara Anne Dalbow

Growing up on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana, Wendy Red Star witnessed the ways her cultural heritage was practiced, performed and integrated into the daily lives of her tribe. These customs seemed deeply disconnected from the displays in history museums that rendered her people as ancient artifacts. Spanning self-portraiture, archival imagery, large-scale installations, mixed-media collage and performance, Red Star’s practice interrogates and undermines representations of Native Americans as primitive peoples and foregrounds the dynamism of contemporary Indigenous experience.

By Joel E. Mendoza

“Maybe ‘apocalypse’ is the opportunity we are looking for, even if we don’t quite know it yet.” This message from Santa Clara Pueblo sculptor Rose B. Simpson is printed at the feet of her over-eight-foot-tall figurative sculpture “Ground (Witness)” (2016) at the Autry Museum of the American West. The artist’s evocative “maybe” can provide a generative perspective in this political moment, as many Indigenous communities continue to survive the apocalyptic reality of European settler colonialism. 

By Ariana Marsh

Upon exiting the parking lot at Tippet Rise Art Center in Fishtail, Montana, visitors follow a path up a small ridge, which soon gives way to a painterly panorama of soft valleys, jagged mountains, and the region’s infamously vast sky. There, stamped across the landscape, as if to claim it as its own, is a blood-red fingerprint the size of a giant’s. Its swirls and ridges are encased within glass that is anchored to a rough granite rock, and on sunny days, the sculpture glitters and glows, as if charged from beyond by the very ancestors it honors

Interview by Shaquille Heath

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” During my conversation with Wendy Red Star, I kept thinking about Shakespeare not only because of the alluring way in which Red Star talks about her work as inherently possessing a divine sense of poetry in itself, but specifically because of that famous verse, which references the fact that names do not inherently change who or what we are. But even the most famous poets make mistakes—and this might be one of his.

Roberts Projects congratulates Wendy Red Star who is a recipient of the 2024 MacArthur Fellowship. 

The fellowship is awarded to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.

Roberts Projects is honored to announce representation of Wendy Red Star (Baaeétitchish – Does Things Well). This announcement follows the gallery’s first solo exhibition of Red Star’s work – Bíikkua (The Hide Scraper) – this past August.

Wendy Red Star, of the Piegan clan and from the district of Pryor, engages in a multidisciplinary artistic practice grounded in the history and cultural knowledge of the Apsáalooke (Crow) people. Raised on the Crow reservation in Montana, her work reflects her deep connection to her community, culture, and land.

Future Imaginaries explores the rise of Futurism in contemporary Indigenous art as a means of enduring colonial trauma, creating alternative futures and advocating for Indigenous technologies in a more inclusive present and sustainable future. Over 50 artworks are on display, some interspersed throughout the museum, creating unexpected encounters and dialogues between contemporary Indigenous creations and historic Autry works.

By Sara Roffino

For her current show, “Bíikkua (The Hide Scraper),” at Los Angeles’s Roberts Projects, Wendy Red Star stepped back from the humor that often carries through her work. Instead she dug into the Apsáalooke history of bishkisché, traditional leather pouches, to share a little-documented history of her people. Bishkisché were functional objects used to transport goods through the Great Plains. They were also creative expressions, meticulously designed and painted by Apsáalooke women and passed down through generations as keepsakes.

Wendy Red Star is known for photographing herself within elaborately constructed scenes, engaging the viewer directly and foregrounding her presence within narratives of her own design. In Stirs Up the Dust, from a series of celestial couture garments titled Thunder Up Above, Red Star reimagines the regalia associated with powwow, a circular dance celebration found throughout Indigenous Plains cultures including Red Star’s Crow Nation, in futuristic terms.  

By Bob Hicks

Wendy Red Star, who lives in Portland and whose work is in permanent art collections nationally and internationally from the British Museum to the Denver, Baltimore and Portland museums of art; the Metropolitan, Whitney, and Museum of Modern Art in New York; and beyond, has been named the winner of 2024’s Bonnie Bronson Visual Arts Fellowship.

The fellowship, named for the prominent Oregon artist who died in a mountain climbing accident in 1990, is awarded annually to an artist living and working in the Northwest. It comes with a $10,000 cash prize and the purchase of a piece of art to be added to the Bonnie Bronson Collection housed at Reed College.

By Robin Wander

Wendy Red Star: American Progress on view at the Anderson Collection at Stanford University is a solo exhibition of works by the artist Wendy Red Star, who was raised on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana. With historical research, Stanford student collaborations, large-scale installations, and images of sovereignty, Red Star asks viewers to grapple with the layered complexity of American history.