Wendy Red Star: The Maniacs (We’re Not The Best, But We’re Better Than The Rest)

Univers ity Art G allery, Ne w Mex ic o State Unive rsity, L as Cruc e s

WENDY RED STAR The Maniacs (We’re Not The Best, But We’re Better Than The Rest) January 26 – March 16, 2018 University Art Gallery New Mexico State University Las Cruces, New Mexico

Table of contents FOREWORD by Marisa Sage ......................................................................... 3 A REFLECTION ON THE MANIACS by Wendy Red Star ....................... 8 – 9 THE MANIACS: CELEBRITY DAD AND RELATIONAL ROCK ‘N’ ROLL A CURATORIAL STATEMENT by Michelle J. Lanteri............................11 – 12 MINING “THE MANIACS” by Nadiah Rivera Fellah ........................... 16 – 17 WENDY RED STAR: THE ART OF REVERIE by Julie Sasse ................. 18 – 19 FUGITIVE DISRUPTIONS IN THE ARCHIVES OF DOMINANCE WENDY RED STAR’S FOUR SEASONS by Anna Marie Strankman ........... 20

Stage Installation, The Maniacs L-to-R: Kenneth Toineeta (bass guitar), Kevin Red Star (drums), and Wallace Red Star Jr. (lead vocalist and guitar), 1960s

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S P ONSORS

National Endowment for the Arts, Art Works Friends of the University Art Gallery

E X H IB ITI ON

Michelle J. Lanteri, Guest Curator & Catalogue Editor Marisa Sage, Project Director & Gallery Director Jasmine Woodul, Gallery Manager & Artist Liaison

DESIG N & PHOTOGRAPHY

Laura Turón, Catalogue Designer Mónica Martínez, Photographer Katelyn LaPage, Gallery Graphic Designer

G ALLE RY ASSI STAN TS Flannery Barney Saleha Butt Amanda Castillo-Camacho Karen Conley Maggie Day Fernando Enriquez Tiago Finato

PA RT NERS

Department of Art, New Mexico State University University Museum, New Mexico State University Department of Theatre Arts, New Mexico State University Creative Media Institute, New Mexico State University College of Arts and Sciences, New Mexico State University Art Obscura, Las Cruces, New Mexico City of Las Cruces, New Mexico Mas Art LLC. Frame and Art Supplies, Las Cruces, New Mexico Dragonfly, Las Cruces, New Mexico Special thanks to Julia Barello, Academic Department Head, Department of Art, and Adam Labe, Safety Technician, Department of Art All artwork © Wendy Red Star.

All exhibition images © Mónica Martínez and the University Art Gallery, New Mexico State University.

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FO REWORD

It was the University Art Gallery’s great pleasure to host the multi-talented, multimedia contemporary artist, Wendy Red Star, and her very personal exhibition, The Maniacs (We’re Not The Best, But We’re Better Than The Rest). Michelle J. Lanteri, the University Art Gallery’s Graduate Assistant turned Interim Director, championed Red Star’s work and shepherded this exhibition and catalogue as its thoughtful curator.

The first time I viewed Wendy Red Star’s work, I was struck by the timeliness, cunning humor, and radical universal truths revealed by her female-forward perspective. Watching Red Star work during the weeklong exhibition installation process proved her a fierce and daring artist with comprehensive perspectives on race, feminism, pop culture, Native American cultures and histories, fashion, family, community, and music. Her innate inquisitiveness inspired great exploration, experimentation, and chance within her exhibition—a perfect reflection of the gallery’s mission to create a laboratory-like environment for our campus and regional community to interact with contemporary artists and witness the evolution of practice and research as artworks unfold.

This exhibition opened at a key moment in the history of the University Art Gallery as we look towards the opening of a new visual arts facility. The new University Art Museum will integrate the recently acquired Wendy Red Star’s Four Seasons series into the future of our university’s community, when they are studied and learned from in our new Zane Bennett Collection Study Room, and contemplated in our new Bunny Conlon permanent collection gallery.

On behalf of the University Art Gallery, I wish to thank all those who made Wendy Red Star: The Maniacs (We’re Not The Best, But We’re Better Than The Rest) and the accompanying catalogue possible. Without the generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts, this exhibition would not have been possible. To Wallace Red Star Jr. and family, thank you for the use of your family mementos, images, and albums—may the epic history of The Maniacs live on for eternity. We also thank the Department of Art, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Friends of the University Art Gallery, Anna Strankman, Amy Lanasa, Larissa Lury, Julie Sasse, Nadiah Rivera Fellah, Nataanii Means, Tufawon, The Arcturians, Blazin Productions, Deret Roberts, Jasmine Woodul, and the entire gallery staff.

—Marisa Sage Director, University Art Gallery

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A REFLECTION ON THE MANIACS

By Wendy Red Star

The Maniacs (We’re Not The Best, But We’re Better Than The Rest) pays tribute to my father Wallace Red Star Jr.’s rock band, active from the late 1960s to the late 1970s. The show presents an archive of memorabilia including family photographs, promotional images, set lists, cover records, and an interview that traces the band’s history. A flag depicting multiple images of Wallace in Marine combat gear references his Vietnam service and pays homage to the first iteration of The Maniacs, a trio of fellow Marines who played gigs during off-duty hours and played Marine charity events.

The exhibition follows a photo-based timeline sourced from Red Star family photo albums.

Notes are written directly on the walls in graphite, highlighting details from the images. Old slides are reproduced into large-scale photographs, notably an image of Wallace (age eight) playing a Stella guitar, and continue the length of the gallery.

Wallace Red Star Jr. (b. 1941) was raised on the Crow Indian reservation in southeastern Montana. At age five, he was trained in classical guitar; at nine, he played old standards in a trio with adult violinist Jim Medicinetail and saxophonist Dale Kindness. The trio played across the Crow reservation and off the reservation in Hardin, Montana. At age 18, Wallace joined the Marine Corps; while stationed at Camp Pendleton, he played rhythm and lead guitar in an off-duty band, the original Maniacs.

After his military service, Wallace returned to the Crow reservation and started a second all-Crow version of The Maniacs, active until 1977 in Lodge Grass, Montana, on the Crow reservation. Wallace was lead guitar and vocalist; original members included Kevin Red Star (drums) and Kenneth Toineeta (bass guitar). The Maniacs played mostly covers with an impressive repertoire of over 300 songs and performed all over Montana, including all seven Indian reservations in the state, all seven districts on the Crow reservation, and parts of Wyoming. The Maniacs also played private events, bars, the annual Crow Fair, and impromptu sessions on the streets of Lodge Grass. A typical set list covered by The Maniacs included “Night Train,” “Stand By Me,” “House of the Rising Sun,” “Memphis,” and “Johnny Be Good.” The band’s slogan was, “We’re Not The Best, But We’re Better Than The Rest”; their mascot was a goat.

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The Maniacs expanded to five members in 1970, with a new lineup including Wendell Red Star (bass guitar), Aaron Red Star (drums), Cyrus Gros Ventre (rhythm guitar), and Tina Williams Heavy Runner (vocalist); Wallace remained as lead vocal and guitar. The band was known to play a generous four session set, charged 50-cent admission, and sometimes earned hundreds of dollars in a night. A highlight for the band was winning the battle of the bands in Sheridan, Wyoming—a rough town with simmering racial tension between white farmers and Native people. Tragedy struck in 1977 when Wendell Red Star passed away, ultimately ending the band for good. Wallace Red Star Jr. buried his guitar in his brother’s coffin, and the band slowly parted ways, never to play again as a group. Fans of the band still mention the dance parties they attended in the streets of Lodge Grass and still remark, “The white people had The Beatles, and we had The Maniacs.”

Arranged in the first of three spaces in the gallery are large-scale promotional images of the band with a collection of vinyl records displayed on the walls, two listening stations that play records from The Maniacs’ set lists and a third listening station playing an audio interview about the band between Wendy and Wallace. In the second space of the gallery, a mock stage covered with a green shag rug and flanked by orange curtains showcases guitars, amps, and a drum kit. Two life-size promotional images of The Maniacs act as backdrops on opposite walls.

Upon exiting this gallery, the third space is a merchandise store with t-shirts, bandanas, cards, and trucker hats branded with images from the band, giving the audience an opportunity to take a small token of the legacy of The Maniacs with them.

Although there are no known recordings from the time the band was active, the band has garnered a legendary presence that lives on in the memories and stories of the Crow community and beyond.

The purpose of the exhibition is to continue to build on the dream that The Maniacs once provided, a root to escape from the mundane into the world of trending music made possible through the talents of local guys—members from the community. The exhibition will continue to share the memory of an unconventional reservation band from Montana.

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ART IST ’S BIO Artist Wendy Red Star works across disciplines to explore the intersections of Native American ideologies and colonialist structures, both historically and in contemporary society. Raised on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana, Red Star’s work is informed both by her cultural heritage and her engagement with many forms of creative expression, including photography, sculpture, video, fiber arts, and performance. An avid researcher of archives and historical narratives, Red Star seeks to incorporate and re-cast her research, offering new and unexpected perspectives in work that is at once inquisitive, witty, and unsettling. Intergenerational collaborative work is integral to her practice, along with creating a forum for the expression of Native women’s voices in contemporary art. Red Star holds a BFA from Montana State University, Bozeman, and an MFA in sculpture from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

CURAT OR’S BIO Michelle J. Lanteri is the guest curator and catalogue editor of Wendy Red Star: The Maniacs (We’re Not The Best, But We’re Better Than The Rest) for the University Art Gallery at New Mexico State University. Lanteri is a Mellon Pre-Doctoral Fellow in Native American Art History at the University of Oklahoma and a regular contributor to First American Art Magazine. She earned a master of arts degree in Art History and Native American Studies with a Museum Studies graduate certificate at New Mexico State University. Lanteri’s research and curatorial practice focus on contemporary Native American artists in localto-global contexts. She has presented at the College Art Association and Southeastern College Art Conferences and has served in curatorial roles at the University Museum at New Mexico State University and the Greenhill Center for North Carolina Art.

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The Maniacs: Celebrity Dad and Relational Rock ‘n’ Roll A Curatorial Statement

By Michelle J. Lanteri, M.A.

Portland, Oregon-based artist Wendy Red Star’s (Apsáalooke [Crow], b. 1981) exhibition, Wendy Red Star: The Maniacs (We’re Not The Best, But We’re Better Than The Rest), honors her father Wallace Red Star Jr.’s musical career and service in the Marines, transforming the contemporary art cube into a “rock celebrity” hall of fame. Focusing on The Maniacs, her father’s 1960s-70s all-Crow Indian rock ‘n’ roll and blues band, Red Star designed a multisensory installation to imbue the locally-renowned musicians with monumental celebrity status and give form to the strong, positive impact they had on many Crow people in southeastern Montana. Influenced by Motown, The Maniacs masterfully performed over 300 songs by pivotal artists like Chuck Berry, Santana, Little Richard, James Brown, and B.B. King. They infused the international sounds of rock into the Crow community of the 1960s and 1970s—binding relationships between people through the expressions of a worldwide generation of musicians who pushed rock ‘n’ roll to new depths.

In The Maniacs, Red Star entangles the past with the present, commemorating the phenomenon of her father’s Crow Indian band through the global perspectives of her conceptual art practice, influenced early on in her career by UCLA graduate school mentors Catherine Opie, Nancy Rubins, Mary Kelly, and the late Chris Burden (1946-2015). The exhibition’s first iteration at the University Art Gallery bears significance with regard to contemporary art venues, as university museums and galleries often “allow the greatest degree of artistic agency” and “demonstrate the strongest alliances with the field [of contemporary Native photography],” as scholar Veronica Passalacqua describes.1 In Red Star’s re-articulation of her family’s snapshot pictures as celebrity memorabilia, these photographs, now in the medium of monumental imagistic objects, generously perform the artist’s gesture of homage to her father, Wallace Red Star Jr., and The Maniacs band. This body of archival images—the visual and historical glue of The Maniacs exhibition—demarcates a collective materiality that Passalacqua calls a “sovereign intellectual space” or “territory.”2 In Red Star’s candid photo-timeline of her father and The Maniacs’ musical touchstones, these heroic images set a path in motion for viewers to encounter the artist’s largerthan-life, self-annotated snapshot album at a close level of engagement.

Thus, Red Star’s The Maniacs, as a “hall of fame” museal exhibition, embodies a threedimensional personal cache of memories of her father’s life in music and service in the Marine Corps. The artist reveals the intertwining of these events through visual and aural textures— including her father’s stories, her timeline of archival photographs and handwritten notes, and

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the rock ‘n’ roll records and monumentally-scaled set lists of music that The Maniacs played for their audiences. Through an amalgam of installations, Red Star offers viewers an interpretive, sculptural environment of Crow Indian community culture that reflects the reciprocal orientation of her research-based methodologies that ground her interdisciplinary art practice.

Made of Pendleton blankets, a group of four of the artist’s high fashion, hand-stitched suits visualizes the Crow people’s immense valuation of a Pendleton blanket, as a gift that underlines important events throughout one’s life. Enunciating the specificity of experience, the Crow Tribe of Indians national flag locates Wallace Red Star Jr., The Maniacs, and the artist’s histories and home. Two colors, orange and green, designate the particularity of The Maniacs’ rock ‘n’ roll brand. Sourced from an original band poster, this palette shapes Red Star’s retro design of The Maniacs’ stage—a symbolic architecture and an instrumental support that re-enacts the band’s more than ten years of performances. Lining the walls of the exhibition’s merch store, The Maniacs’ orange and green infuse an intense, fandom-like vibrancy into the space. An area for audiences to share stories within the exhibition and beyond, the merch store calls out the band’s resonance in the Crow community; it expands their local celebrity status into a global sphere through audiences’ purchases of The Maniacs’ photo-imprinted memorabilia.

Using sights and sounds, Red Star remembers the presence of The Maniacs through her multilayered mapping of stories, objects, images, songs, and a visual timeline. She simultaneously gives and returns voice to this band that served as role models and played blues and rock ‘n’ roll as distinguished musicians for their local fans, friends, and families. A dedication to her father, Red Star’s The Maniacs (We’re Not The Best, But We’re Better Than The Rest) moves between memories in her monumental re-imagining of a living snapshot album that commemorates the centrality of rock ‘n’ roll to the young adults of the Crow community in the 1960s and 1970s and this generation of people internationally that relied on rock music as a space of solidarity. At the University Art Gallery, Red Star’s constellation of mementos juxtaposes interdisciplinary synthesis with site-specificity in her sculptural, kinetic reunion of The Maniacs. Red Star’s heroic narration of Wallace Red Star Jr. and The Maniacs’ histories fuses into a complex, relational exhibition—one shaped by integrity, intergenerational memory, and a love for one’s family, community, and of course, rock ‘n’ roll.

1. Veronica Passalacqua, “Finding Sovereignty through Relocation: Considering Photographic Consumption,” in Visual Currencies: Reflections

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on Native Photography, eds. Henrietta Lidchi and Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie (Edinburgh: National Museums Scotland, 2009), 24.

2. Ibid., 20.

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Concert: Indigenous Rockers, Rappers, and Activists March 9, 2018, Plaza de Las Cruces

The Arcturians

Nataanii Means and Tufawon

Blazin Productions, Nataanii Means, and Tufawon

Curatorial Panel: Considering Contemporary Art March 8, 2018, University Art Gallery

(L to R): Michelle J. Lanteri, Marisa Sage, Nadiah Rivera Fellah, Julie Sasse

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EVENTS + PROGRAMMING

Tufawon

Q&A with the Artist: A Conversation with Wendy Red Star and Michelle Lanteri

January 25, 2018, New Mexico State University

(L) Michelle J. Lanteri, (R) Wendy Red Star

Opening Reception: Wendy Red Star: The Maniacs (We’re Not The Best, But We’re Better Than The Rest), January 26, 2018, University Art Gallery

ASSOCIATED FOUR SEASONS EXHIBITION Wendy Red Star: An Inscription of Identity Guest Curated by Michelle J. Lanteri January 26-May 30, 2018, University Museum

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MINING “THE MANIACS”

By Nadiah Rivera Fellah, M.Phil.

G uest Curator , Newark Museum & P h.D. C andidate, Art History, City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center

In The Maniacs exhibition, Wendy Red Star mobilizes the archive in unique and unexpected ways. The title of this essay references a well-known precedent for such a practice: Fred Wilson’s 1992 exhibition, Mining the Museum. Wilson famously made use of the Maryland Historical Society’s collection to create a display that spoke to stereotypical presentations—and misrepresentations—in museums. In one room, wooden-carved cigar-store Indians turned their backs on viewers to face photographs of actual Native American persons. In other displays, slave shackles were displayed among period silverware. Wilson’s re-installation made a radical statement, and it was meant to shock viewers from a typically passive mode of exhibition viewing. The critical eye he brought to mining the museum’s archive was transferred and extended to the public, who became implicated in their own role as complacent spectators in our country’s dominant historical narratives.

The practice of engaging in institutional critique through artist-arranged exhibitions was not new in the 1990s. The Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers’ Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (1968-71) disrupted traditional museum practices by appropriating and mutating them. He chose the image of the eagle as the only organizing principle for his “collection.” Broodthaers’ use of a fabricated archive gestures to the arbitrary nature of collections altogether, assembled and preserved according to principles that are significant for an individual or group of individuals at one moment in time.

Between these two examples, where does that put The Maniacs? What is an archive, and how do they construct narratives? Allan Sekula has proposed that the archive is little more than a bureaucratic tool of social control, and he has described the way in which nineteenth century policing practices developed to archive photographs of criminals in order to monitor and track their bodily movements.1 Sekula’s negative assessment is in line with what Derrida called the “patriarchive,” or the idea that all archives are inherently patriarchal in character.2 Given these adverse valuations, how does one recuperate an archive? How does one decolonize an archive? How does one make instead a “matriarchive?” I contend that Wendy Red Star views her archive not as a tool of social control, but as a utopian tool towards a collective memory of history, open and accessible, and mined and controlled by herself, a Native woman. Her actions assume an anthropological quality, documenting and preserving the relics of a culture and celebrating a history in the process.

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Detail, Handwritten Set List, Gallery Wall Wendy Red Star: The Maniacs (We’re Not The Best, But We’re Better Than The Rest), University Art Gallery

The Maniacs is different from Wilson or Broodthaers’ exhibitions in that Red Star does not mine an institutional collection, or an invented one, but that her own personal, family archive makes up much of the exhibition display. She organizes it, chronologizes it, enlarges it, and imagines its future beyond its termination. The archive in her hands becomes a living organism, a methodology for engaging with her history, culture, and relationship to the world. When one steps into The Maniacs, the immersive installation transports one into the private quarters of Red Star’s hometown and familial spaces. Listening booths become portals into private family conversations and oral histories of her father’s life and memories. Song lyrics and set lists are blown up beyond their recognition as the private notes they once were, becoming abstracted forms or defiant statements. Rather than being understood as a point of termination, The Maniacs is an origin story, the seeds from which resistant and alternative narratives can be told.

1. Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (1986): 3-64.

2. Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25, no. 2 (1995): 9-63.

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WENDY RED STAR: THE ART OF REVERIE

By Julie Sasse, Ph.D. Chief C urator & Curator of Modern, C ontemporary, and L atin A merican Art, Tucson Museum of A rt Long interested in concepts of visual identity and cultural relationships, Wendy Red Star’s The Maniacs (We’re Not The Best, But We’re Better Than The Rest) veers from her Four Seasons series, the iconic self-portrait photographs of the artist dressed in Apsáalooke (Crow) regalia and set within manufactured settings. In The Maniacs, Red Star turns her attention to her father, Wallace Red Star Jr., and his legacy as a member of The Maniacs, a regionally popular Crow Indian rock band in the 1960s and 1970s. This site-specific exhibition is anchored in personal music memorabilia, handwritten notations, and a visual timeline that runs along a long wall.

Together, these elements serve to contextualize Red Star’s family photographs and tell the story of her father’s place in time and cultural history.

Red Star’s The Maniacs installation is a tribute to her father, but it also serves to remind the viewer that not everything that happens in the lives of Native American persons follows the nostalgic ideals that Anglo-American viewers have come to expect. Wallace Red Star Jr.’s life as a military soldier and as a musician has deep connections to his cultural roots as much as it is tethered to the general popular culture of that era. In Red Star’s commemoration of The Maniacs, dubbed locally as the Crow Indians’ “The Beatles,” the documentation of her father’s band and life reveals the commonality of shared histories between cultures as well as the memories and the specificities of a segment of American life.

Red Star celebrates her father’s dualistic legacy in his position as an important figure in the Apsáalooke (Crow) community and for the respect he garnered outside the reservation.

To do so, she draws from family archives, which become a repository of memories and reveries of what might have been in the life of her father. Theorist Susan Stewart views the family album as a form of souvenir in which the images and objects do not necessarily trigger memories of a childhood actually lived, but rather a childhood manufactured from its material survivals.1 In this light, Red Star recreates her father’s time and place as a young man full of promise and creative energy. In that sense, she holds a mirror to her own life as an artist to find particularly verdant familial connections.

Red Star’s photographs, text, and objects reconstitute her father’s life in music as a liminal space between two cultures, between the past and present, and between father and daughter. Her installation honors his life in sentimental terms, framed in ways that look back with pride and respect for his creative spirit. By anchoring The Maniacs’ history in timelines, images, and texts, she marks time, retrieves the story of the band, and restores The Maniacs to a place both lived and romanticized. According to French theorist Roland Barthes, “Every photograph is a certificate of presence.”2 Red Star’s retelling of the story of The Maniacs through the collecting and ordering of images and objects recalls the myth and establishes the reality of a man, a band, a time, and a place.

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Wallace Red Star Jr., United States Marine Corps, 1960s, Photo Prints on Fabric Wendy Red Star: The Maniacs (We’re Not The Best, But We’re Better Than The Rest), University Art Gallery

1. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 145.

2. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980), 87.

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FUGITIVE DISRUPTIONS IN THE ARCHIVES OF DOMINANCE WENDY RED STAR’S FOUR SEASONS

By Anna Marie Strankman, M.A. C urator of Collections and Exhibitions , U niversity Museum , New Mexico State U niversity Guest curated by Michelle J. Lanteri, the University Museum’s exhibition of the Four Seasons series was titled Wendy Red Star: An Inscription of Identity. On loan from the University Art Gallery, Red Star’s Four Seasons photographic self-portraits were on view in association with Wendy Red Star: The Maniacs (We’re Not The Best, But We’re Better Than The Rest).

Anishinaabe writer and scholar Gerald Vizenor wrote, “Cultural pageantry, dioramas, and museum presentations picture the fugitive indian in the archives of dominance.”1 In her Four Seasons series, Wendy Red Star transmogrifies her nostalgia for her home in Crow Country, Montana via inspiration acquired during a 2006 visit to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (at the time she was pursuing her MFA at UCLA). Longing for visual reminders of her home on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation, Red Star instead encountered diorama displays of ethnographic simulations of generic Plains pastiche culture, situated in galleries adjacent to dinosaur exhibits. The perceptual static sparked by this encounter—by seeing her very real home and family legacy presented as paleo relics—inspired Red Star. “But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures,” as Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography.2 Installed in the galleries of the University Museum, the Four Seasons becomes an intervention of museum collections and exhibitions by simultaneously presenting and interrogating accepted visual narratives with humor and irony, with Red Star placing herself at the center of these forbiny (before the curtain) vignettes. Taking on the role of curator, Red Star selected and arranged each scene, finishing each with herself as subject, creating a refracted self-portrait.

The result—rather than an ethnographic simulation—offers an empowered contemporary Indigenous photographic presence of an Apsáalooke woman. Red Star’s overt simulacrum of an anthropological diorama subverts the viewer’s expectations of a so-called authentic portrayal of Native American culture and does so with the nimble adroitness of a dancer. It engages the viewer with richly saturated faux landscapes, which upon a closer look, begin to crumble at the edges, tipping the hand of her theatricality from simulacrum to burlesque. From within this vignette, the possibility of sovereign Indigenous landscapes is conjured and imparted to the viewer for gestation.

Wrinkles and creases, faux vista backdrops, an inflatable deer, AstroTurf (a favored material of the artist) as well as plastic flora and fauna complete this nimble gesture, bringing her carefully chosen props in stark contrast with the Apsáalooke elk-tooth dress she wears (a constant repetition within the changing seasons). Red Star sets all of these elements against the well-established trope of the four seasons, familiar to viewers by its perennial depictions in Asian and European art.

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1. Gerald Vizenor, Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 145.

2. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973), 15.

Wendy Red Star, Four Seasons, 2006, archival pigment prints Clockwise from top left: Fall, Indian Summer, Winter, Spring

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