Wendy Red Star, “Accession”

The digital prints in Wendy Red Star’s NYC debut were occasioned by her five-month stint as an artist-in-residence at the Denver Art Museum between 2016 and 2017, where Red Star (who was raised on the Crow reservation in Montana) encountered an archival trove of watercolors illustrating clothing, moccasins, leggings, belts, elk tooth dresses and other Native American artifacts held in the museum’s collection. Created by artists employed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the New Deal, these renderings included detailed descriptions on the back, and it was no small irony for Red Star that white artists hired by the Federal government got to spend so much time communing with the handiwork of her people. As redress for what was effectively a co-opting of her heritage, Red Star offers a series of photomontages that juxtapose the WPA renderings with her own photos of contemporary Native Americans wearing similar garb during an annual festival on her reservation.