Wendy Red Star
The artist talks about therapy, community gossip as oral history, and why her best ideas never happen at a desk.
Oriana E. Gonzales, DaeQuan Alexander Collier, Wendy Red Star, Caroline Nieto
Louise Bourgeois once called art “a guaranty of sanity,” reminding us how high the stakes of creativity can be. With this series, we talk to artists in their studios, where the work actually happens. We ask how play and ritual keep them grounded, and what they’d say to anyone stuck in a creative rut. In our conversations, we quickly realized that play is not only a diversion, and not only for children—play is a method, it’s agency, it’s a way of staying true to one’s self while working through emotionally heavy material. Play can hold history, loss, the archive, and other things institutions were not made to.
“I was a super-curious kid,” says Wendy Red Star, the Apsáalooke (Crow) artist whose red-ink markup of 1880s delegation portraits—at once factual, sharp, and slyly funny—recasts the colonial archive through Crow eyes. Her curiosity, she tells us, is the thread that connects her to her inner child. For Red Star, the humor in the work is not relief from the hard histories she handles; it’s a tool her community has always held on to. Much of her work’s inspiration comes from time spent outdoors before she even enters the studio. In the course of our visit, each artist leaves us with an offering—a memory, a place, a way back to the work. Read on and take one with you.
Oriana Gonzales: Since we’re thinking about play in art, we wanted to kick things off by talking about when you were a kid. Were there any childhood experiences that led you to art-making?
Wendy Red Star: I was a super-curious kid. I was diagnosed in first or second grade with dyslexia, but it was the 1980s idea of what dyslexia was, which at the time was that your eyes weren’t tracking fast enough. I’m now learning that your brain is wired differently and information comes in differently. I think it was a combination of being super curious, having dyslexia, but also having major access to nature and animals.
My dad decided to get my grandfather’s land out of lease when I was probably about eight. So I would go with him to the ranch and he would be on a tractor for eight hours. He would set me up with food and saddle my horse, and my day was just spent exploring. When I think about that, I wouldn’t do that to my kid, but it was pretty awesome. I also was sort of a lone wolf, and I became super obsessed with horses. My cousins weren’t as into them, so I would just be with the horses. Or there were a lot of little rivers and creeks, so I would have water shoes and investigate what was in there. And I think that pretty much equates to my art practice today. I’m super curious and into researching, and also kind of a lone wolf.
OG: What would you say is your relationship to your inner child now? How does it show up in your personal life and work?
Well, I love her. I think it’s important to talk about therapy. And I’ve done a lot of therapy. I used to have a really mean inner voice that was very militant. Doing all of the therapy work, I’ve discovered that my inner child is really resilient, really incredible, and is the one that is super adventurous and into trying new things. I think the relationship that I’ve been able to connect back with myself has been really important and it’s fairly new. It’s been a few years that I’ve been just really nice and supportive to myself. That sounds kind of weird, but I think it’s really helped me with ideas. If things don’t work out, I’m so much nicer to myself and will get up and try something else.
“I feel like the inner-child curiosity is a big part of play for me because it takes me to places that are so unexpected, with big payoffs.” -Wendy Red Star
DaeQuan Alexander Collier: What role does “play” have in your practice? Do you see that as a means of restoration or as a process, or both?
I think it’s curiosity. That has always been the thread through childhood to now. A lot of times it’s just a simple, “Why is that?” I was always that kid asking, “What does that mean?” That takes me on all these really strange, incredible adventures, meeting interesting people. I feel like the inner-child curiosity is a big part of play for me because it takes me to places that are so unexpected, with big payoffs.
OG: How do you track that kind of development over time with your relationship to play?
I did a late night in the studio yesterday. I have a show at the National Portrait Gallery next year, a solo show, and it’s going to be about the last chief of the Crow Nation. His name was Chief Plenty Coups. And I’m creating 100 3D-printed busts based on a bust that he had made in the 1900s in Washington, DC. So far I have 40 of them in my studio. They’re white right now, but his original bust was painted. And so I’ve been painting them.
I was like, “This is crazy! This is my job, like, sitting and painting the last chief of my tribe’s face 100 times?” I’ll have little moments of that. Who does that? Who creates a situation where they get to do this kind of thing? Not only that, but other people are invested in it and also learn from it and are interested. It’s these little breakthrough moments where I say, “This is real and this is amazing.”
DC: You spoke about being a “lone wolf.” Do you see play as a solitary thing? Do you like to also involve other folks? You’ve spoken about working with your daughter and art making with your daughter.
I think an older version of me would be, like, “I’m a hermit and I do everything myself,” but that’s not true. Collaboration has been such an important part of my practice and probably one of the most rewarding parts of my practice. For instance, collaborating with curators. Both the curators I’m working with at the National Portrait Gallery have done the research with me and traveled back to the reservation. That’s been really incredible for them to see my community, see the places I’m talking about. It’s really special.
As of late, I’ve been doing a lot of outside fabrication, or working with different fabrication teams. It’s been so interesting to just give them my concept and idea and then check in a week later and see how it’s coming into reality. It’s always amazing. I feel and have always felt that I do a lot of ancestral collaboration. A lot of my research and archives with the Chief Plenty Coups show—it’s been incredible where we find info on him and how he shows up in unexpected places.
DC: I love that. I’m going to steal that. Ancestral collaboration.
OG: Yes, I’m going to take a cue from you. That seems so related to your ancestors maybe telling you, “Be nicer to yourself, Wendy.” We’ve been thinking a lot about the red-ink annotations in your work and their wit. They could just look like decoration, but they’re really a methodology. How might play unlock things differently than research does for you? Or do you look at research as a form of play?
I have looked at research as play. The only reading that I actually do is when I’m doing research, because reading was actually really painful for me as a child. But I think for me, being in the community and doing the annotations on the 1880 Crow Peace Delegation all kind of ties back to my childhood growing up there. The humor I think that I bring to that is basically the community gossip that is around. The funny parts are really the community gossip. I love that about our community. It’s definitely one of our traits. It’s a way to remember things. It happens to be through a more humorous lens. The red ink was really about history class. I went to school just on the border of the reservation. It was a public school and it was Crow kids and white kids and mixed kids like myself. We never talked about Crow history, let alone really Native American history except for around Thanksgiving. I was really uninterested in history and what was being taught. It felt so distant and removed from me.
I realized once I started getting into the work that I do how fascinated I am with history and how it is historical gossip, basically. For me, it was remembering getting papers back with the red corrections or the bad grade. Red for me was my way of confronting that education that was not shared. I know that would have been really monumental for my peers, for the Crow kids to hear about their leaders, but more so, I think, the white kids. Because there was a lot of racism and looking down at the Crow kids and the mixed kids. I feel like if they had known the true history of the people in the community around there, things would have been different. The self-esteem would have been different.
OG: Does your return to that community knowledge e, that community gossip, feel like a ritual?
I don’t know if it’s ritual, more so that it’s very deeply intertwined in my subconscious. I’ll be looking at a historical photo or remembering something my dad said in a conversation on the phone and I’ll think, “Oh, that’s why this person is here or wearing this in this photo.” It’s waiting for moments to be connected. It’s just kind of locked in the memory. Growing up in the community, understanding the way we think about ourselves. I say “gossip” and I feel like it’s different from the Western sense of gossip. I really feel like it’s part of our oral history of the tradition of remembering things.
DC: Your work has this humorous, playful tone. Is that a choice you’re making in leaning into that? Do you feel like play allows you to speak more to these darker histories?
I don’t even realize it. I know it’s funny, but it’s not that I’m leaning into it. It’s just how the community thinks of things and works. I feel like Crows are really fucking funny. But when I’m around other Native folks, they are also really funny. Especially in Montana with some of the other Plains tribes, we really rib each other. Crows had a lot of enemy tribes. When I’m around a Lakota person, I think the first thing we do is rib each other about the Little Bighorn battle, Custer’s last stand, and how the Lakota will say, “We helped Custer,” but the Lakota were able to kill Custer. I think sometimes people from the outside would be like, “Oh, that’s kind of brutal, kind of harsh,” but it’s really funny. It’s a way of relating to each other and our shared history.
Even before colonization, we were funny. I do think that humor really helps with trauma. It really helps with these heavy, devastating, unfair topics. Those are really hard to confront on a nervous-system level. It does mean psyching myself up to read or get into some of these topics because I know there’s always going to be something that’s really upsetting. But for me, the more interesting thing is survival and perseverance. That’s way more interesting. That relates exactly to my experience. The reason why I’m here on the planet is because of that spirit of survival.
OG: Returning to what you were saying about how it’s not really a ritual, but taps your subconscious, we know about the trajectory of when you get to the studio and start the work. Do you have a way that you tap into the subconscious when you’re at the beginning of a session? What do you do intentionally to get your creative juices flowing?
I don’t think that really happens in the studio for me. I felt like I was failing when I was in undergrad and grad school, where the way that I saw people get rewarded was when they were able to make things happen in their studio. I wouldn’t be able to until I went out and did something, like go to an antique store and look at objects. What I like to do now is go for a walk in the woods and then all the ideas come. That’s when I can go back into the studio and start working.
I’m not really a material-based artist. I really need to have a lot of space to think. That’s why I like to go out into the woods. I also gain inspiration by seeing interesting objects. I think that’s why archives are so important to me. Even going to see contemporary art in a museum. I’m the artist who’s trying to see how they install the piece. For me, the play comes from being in the world. And then I get to bring that back to the studio.
OG: That’s so fascinating what you said about the reward of the studio.
I feel like a lot of artists have similar experiences. Everybody comes at it in a different way. It would be cool if I could just be stationary in the studio. But that just hasn’t been the way for me. It would have been nice if I would have had a professor say, “That is just the way that you make work.” But they give you a studio, so I think they want you to be using them. I think the other thing with me is there’s a lot of being in my head, and then the execution is very quick. Once I get in the studio, things are made quite fast.
DC: We also wanted to know more about your studio space. Do you have objects that you’re tied to? What are the things in your environment that are in reach for you?
I have tons of books. A lot of books on anything Crow, but then a lot of interesting books that are other records of Plains museum exhibitions that have happened or ones over the past. I have started my own collection of historical items. Those are all in the studio. I love that. And then I’ve got three little dogs. They are a great source of entertainment and play for me. They run and rule the studio. I kind of feel a little bit like their servant.
I also like to watch a lot of really bad reality TV. Especially if I’m doing something that is a repeating pattern. Sometimes it’s music or podcasts. It’s great to talk with other artists and ask, “What are you listening to right now? Have you seen anything interesting?” To me, that is also my way of playing.
OG: Since we were just talking about how you don’t start in the studio, I’m curious about objects found in the places you seek outside that lead you back to the studio to make your work.
Here in Portland, I really am inspired by nature. There’s a place called the Gorge here and the Columbia River runs through it. It’s littered with waterfalls, and I love waterfalls. Going to look and chase waterfalls is one place that I get a lot of ideas from. I recently just bought a little A-frame on Mount Hood on five acres of land. And that is my place. You can hear the Sandy River from the porch. Hearing water, for me, is really healing and something so soothing. The dogs are like wild feral animals when we get to the mountains. It’s fun to see.
OG: I love that. I also have a mischievous dog, and they really do get you outside. If someone took play away from you completely, what would you fear losing? It strikes me that maybe this way of being outside is also the way you play.
I think being outside is what my childhood was. I think it connects back to the inner child. But I literally think I would not be me. That’s my identity. I wouldn’t be me.
“What’s really important about being an artist is that we have these ideas, and we’re the weird ones that actually make them into a reality.” -Wendy Red Star