Sargent's Daughters is pleased to present Our Side, the third solo exhibition of Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke (Crow), b.1981, Billings, MT) at the gallery.

This exhibition is presented in conjunction with the Spring 2023 release of Red Star's monograph Bíilukaa, published by Radius Books and featuring interviews with the artist, members of her extended family and scholars. The book's title, Bíilukaa, is in reference to what the Apsáalooke (Crow) call themselves: Our Side.

Our Side builds upon Red Star's research into historical photographs of Apsáalooke individuals and objects, with the artist drawing on both her personal collection and works held in museums and archives across the country. Red Star notes, “Since the time I left the Crow reservation I have encountered my tribe’s material culture in every city I have exhibited or occupied. It is incredible that so much of my community’s history and material culture is kept in the vaults of these institutions hundreds of miles away from their source.” In this exhibition, Red Star revives these objects, often rendered inert in institutional collections, by making them accessible to her audience and incorporating them into new narratives.

The exhibition includes two distinct bodies of work; the first are photographic prints originally produced for Bíilukaa, reimagined as a dynamic installation in the gallery. Drawing entirely from images sourced from Red Star’s personal archive, the works in this series layer together images taken by the artist of cultural objects and photographs found in public collections. Images of dresses, moccasins, fans and other items are contextualized with historic black and white images of Apsáalooke people putting similar objects into use.

Surrounding them, Red Star’s annotations, and occasionally images of her hands or notes, interpret, contemporize, and comment on these archival traces.

The second body of work consists of large-scale unique collages, which layer photographs on top of fabrics typical of Apsáalooke regalia. Once again drawn from Red Star’s archive, these works feature photographs of intricate Crow beadwork and plateau pictorials, many of which are in the artist’s personal collection. The images are enlarged and repeated, producing abstract compositions.

Both bodies of work serve to expand Red Star’s research-based practice by sharing and recontextualizing archival materials in the form of stylized and serialized compositions. By delving into the artist’s own records, the works depict a snapshot of her research and personal collection, restaging the processes through which Red Star has traced the textual and tangible history of her community into the present.

Wendy Red Star (b.1981, Billings, MT) was raised on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana and creates work that revises historical and contemporary narratives around Indigenous people and cultures through an interdisciplinary practice involving photography, sculpture, video, textile, and performance. Her work has appeared in solo exhibitions at the Anderson Collection at Stanford University (2022), San Antonio Museum of Art (2022),MASS MoCA (2022), Joslyn Art Museum (2021), and the Newark Museum of Art (2019), among others. Recent group exhibitions include The Drawing Center, New York (2022); The Broad, Los Angeles (2022); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2022); Wallach Art Gallery at ColumbiaUniversity, New York (2021); and The Momentary, Bentonville (2021), among others. She is a recipient of the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2018), Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2017), Betty Bowen Award (2016), and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2015). Her works are in the permanent collections of museums including the Museum of Modern Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Amon Carter Museum of American Art; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; Denver Art Museum; Baltimore Museum of Art; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; Birmingham Museum of Art; Williams College Museum of Art; and the British Museum.