Wendy Red Star: Genius

Portland-based Apsáalooke/Crow visual artist Wendy Red Star (b. 1981) has been selected as a MacArthur Fellow for 2024. A MacArthur Fellowship – the so-called “genius grant” – comes with a stipend of $800,000 paid out in equal quarterly installments over five years. The monetary award is unrestricted meaning it can be spent however the honoree chooses.

A MacArthur Fellowship represents arguably the highest achievement a creative can earn. It inarguably represents life-altering monetary support in pursuit of that creativity.

The process for selecting MacArthur Fellows can be described as secretive. Nominees are brought to the program's attention through a constantly changing pool of invited external nominators chosen from as broad a range of fields and areas of interest as possible. Nominations are evaluated by an independent selection committee composed of about a dozen leaders in the arts, sciences, humanities professions, and for-profit and nonprofit communities.

There is no application. There is no short listing. There is no awards ceremony.

Three criteria are used for selection: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishments, and potential for the Fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.

In the words of the MacArthur Foundation, the organization behind the fellowship program, the aim is “to identify extraordinarily creative individuals with a track record of excellence in a field of scholarship or area of practice, who demonstrate the ability to impact society in significant and beneficial ways through their pioneering work or the rigor of their contributions.”

Winners receive the life changing news out of the blue. The designees for 2024 were made public on October 1.

Becoming an Artist

Red Star grew up on the Apsáalooke Reservation in southern Montana. She was not destined for a career in the arts.

“I had a horrible time in my high school art class because it focused on realistic drawing and I really had a hard time,” Red Star told me during a 2023 interview centering around an exhibition of hers at the Columbus (OH) Museum of Art. “I thought, ‘if this is what art is, then I certainly can't do it.’”

Red Star has become a global contemporary art superstar, but her practice has never taken drawing as it’s foundation. Over a 20-year career, she has produced a stunning archive of photography, textiles, and mixed media installations exploring themes of Apsáalooke history, the indigenous roots of feminism, and contemporary life on the reservation.

She credits her Montana State University professors with encouraging her to believe she could be an artist while not a draftsman.

“I enrolled in graphic design and as part of graphic design, you had to take some core art classes,” Red Star remembers. “I had taken a 3-D art class and that's when I was exposed to all these new mediums, not just bronze sculptures of elk, but actual conceptual works and that's when I was like, ‘Oh, there's something here for me. There's something that I can work with here.’”

Work with it she has. Red Star’s name has become a fixture inside America’s most prestigious art museums, rarified space for any artist, let alone a female Native American artist.

Detail of Wendy Red Star, 'The Indian Congress,' (2021, reconstructed 2024) at the Joslyn Art Museum

Where to See Wendy Red Star Artwork

From the Seattle Art Museum to the San Antonio Museum of Art to the Denver Art Museum, sooner or later, travels in the arts across the West will lead to Red Star.

Two opportunities for experiencing her work stand above the others. The first, at Tippet Rise sculpture park in Montana, has been previously profiled by “Essential West.” The second comes at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha where The Indian Congress was first commissioned and exhibited in 2021, and subsequently reinstalled following the museum’s renovation and exhibition opening in September of 2024.

The intricate photography piece highlights Red Star’s unique vision, dogged research, and dedication to resurfacing Native American history.

In 1898, citizens of 35 Native American nations arrived in present-day North Omaha to attend the Indian Congress. Indian Congress places visitors among those in attendance.

The unprecedented convening coincided with the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition – Nebraska’s world’s fair. Over two million fairgoers viewed Expo displays showcasing American agriculture and industry. They also toured Native American encampments and attended Wild West shows, events entwining anthropology and entertainment.

The point being made was clear: American technology and Manifest Destiney had prevailed over the hopelessly nonprogressive “natives.”

James Mooney, the Smithsonian anthropologist charged with organizing the congress, was explicit in his interest in making the camps, “as thoroughly aboriginal in every respect as practicable,” rejecting delegation members’ contemporaneity according to Annika K. Johnson, Associate Curator of Native American Art at the Joslyn Art Museum. She worked closely with Red Star on the project.

“(The Indian Congress is) quite sharp in its critique of the exploitation of congress members during the fair, who essentially had to perform their identity through staged battles and ceremonies,” Johnson told me when I wrote about Indian Congress in 2021. “Fairgoers bought tickets to see these staged events and wander through the camps and peek inside people’s lodges, so the Native people were put on ethnographic display. It speaks to the commodification of Native culture.”

The artwork features roughly 600 cutout figures, photographs originally taken by Frank Rinehart (1861–1928) in his studio in downtown Omaha. Exceptional for his time, Rinehart recorded these individuals’ names and tribal identities, preserving an invaluable record of delegation members and their families, including many Apsáalooke.

Detail of Wendy Red Star, 'The Indian Congress,' (2021, reconstructed 2024) at the Joslyn Art Museum. 3

“Each photo was meticulously cut out by Wendy, so details such as staffs, hair roaches (a type of hair piece), war bonnets and even earrings are defined through the cutout process and cast shadows on the tiered table and walls,” Johnson explains. “The enormous number of photographs is somewhat overwhelming–an intentional decision on Red Star’s part meant to convey the magnitude of the congress and to reunite the 35 tribes that travelled to Omaha from the Southwest to the Great Plains and Canadian-US border.”

One can easily find themselves lost inspecting the faces and clothing.

Red Star visited Omaha in December 2019 to begin conceptualizing the project. Over a few days of research, she visited Rinehart’s old studio in the Brandeis building downtown. She visited his gravesite and what’s now Kountze Park where the center of the exposition was. Red Star and Johnson also drove around North Omaha searching for the approximate location of the Indian Congress camp, which wasn’t marked on historic maps of the Expo. It’s less than a mile from the museum.

“American flags, banners and bunting hang from the ceiling and tables, surrounding the photographs with nationalist fanfare, drawing out the tension between the U.S.’s horrible 19th century Indian policy, and the presence of Indian Congress members at a world’s fair that celebrates the U.S.’s expansion onto Indigenous lands,” Johnson explains.

One year after the Indian Congress, Rinehart photographed Apsáalooke people on their homelands in Pryor, MT — Red Star’s hometown.

For The Indian Congress, this second group of portraits faces the first against a backdrop of Baápuuo (Where They Shoot The Rock), a sacred site and home to powerful beings known as the Awakkulé (Keepers Of The Land).

Red Star’s career started with a bang in 2006 thanks to her provocative Four Seasons photography series. They are among the most powerful and oft-exhibited fine art photographs taken this century. She was barely 25 at the time. She hasn’t slowed down since. Just now entering her mid-40s, with the wind of a MacArthur Fellowship at her back, it’s enticing to wonder where her creativity may lead next.