Research, image-making, and material experimentation operate as a single movement in my practice. I work by gathering fragments into coherence, allowing histories to reassemble through form rather than explanation. Time in my work is layered and active—felt through repetition, return, and proximity rather than linear narration. Attention is both the beginning and the return point of my practice. The paths I trace reflect how I was taught to move through the world, with focus, self-reliance, and an attentiveness to what endures beyond record or category. History is not an abstract subject for me. It is lived, familial, and ongoing. My work is driven by a commitment to clarity—restoring specificity where it has been flattened, and allowing the intelligence of the past to surface on its own terms.


Wendy Red Star (b. 1981, Billings, Montana; lives and works in Portland, Oregon) is an Apsáalooke artist whose multidisciplinary practice is grounded in the histories, archives, and lived knowledge of the Apsáalooke Nation. Raised in the district of Pryor in Montana, her work grows from the stories passed through her family, the materials she encounters in historical records, and the lineage she carries forward. The places, people, and histories that shaped her early life continue to guide her research and artistic process.

Her practice is rooted in sustained attention to inherited stories, to archival traces, and to the ways Apsáalooke history lives across generations. She approaches historical materials through the lens of her own lineage, allowing relationships between memory, record, and lived experience to emerge through time and close looking. Her work grows from this process of gathering, listening, and assembling rather than from any impulse to explain or correct the historical record.

Red Star received her BFA from Montana State University, Bozeman, and her MFA in Sculpture from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award (2017), the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2018), the MacArthur Fellowship (2024), the Bonnie Bronson Fellowship (2024), and the Infinity Award in Contemporary Photography and New Media (2024). In 2025 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Montana State University, Bozeman.

In 2019, her first career survey, Wendy Red Star: A Scratch on the Earth, opened at the Newark Museum and traveled to the San Antonio Museum of Art and the Columbus Museum of Art. Recent exhibitions include What It Becomes, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Art, Fashion, Technology, Autry Museum of the American West, Los Angeles; 19th Century Photography Now, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; The Land Carries Our Ancestors, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (traveling to the New Britain Museum of American Art); New Acquisitions: Paul Bril to Wendy Red Star, The British Museum, London; and This is Not America’s Flag, The Broad, Los Angeles.

Her work has been shown nationally and internationally at institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum; Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris; Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Bignan; Portland Art Museum, Portland; Hood Museum of Art, Hanover; Saint Louis Art Museum; Minneapolis Institute of Art; and the Frost Art Museum, Miami. In 2027, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., will present a major solo exhibition of her work.

Red Star’s work is held in more than eighty public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth; Denver Art Museum; Baltimore Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; and the British Museum, London, among many others.

 

CV

Wendy Red Star

1981 Born in Billings, MT

Lives and works in Portland, OR

Education

2006 MFA Sculpture, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA

2004 BFA Sculpture, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT