Wendy Red Star

Wounded Buffalo

Wounded Buffalo, 2024

Each buffalo is copied from George Caitlin’s (1796–1832) series of buffalo paintings – a lawyer and artist who became infamous for his documentation of the American West, through portraits of members of the Plains tribes (including the Crow), landscape painting, and the collection of objects amassed during his travels that he used to form his ‘Indian Gallery,’ now in the collection of the Smithsonian Museum. Red Star used Caitlin’s buffalo paintings as a departure point, contrasting them against contemporary Native depictions of the animals, noting the ways these representations diverged. Of the latter, she says, “All the buffalo, even though some of them are wounded, seem happy. They’re frolicking, and then you get to Caitlin’s, and his buffalo are in agony, pure agony.” The series exemplifies a significant strand of Red Star’s practice, based in the activation of images and objects found in museum archives, fleshing out their context and allowing them to speak across time…

As the decimation of the buffalo population can attest, the Pryor mountains still bear the ruptures of the American frontier: hunting, the early fur trade, and the westward railroad expansion. They are also inscribed with Red Star’s personal history and the communal histories and myths of the Apsáalooke people; throughout In the Shadow of Paper Mountains, we are reminded that landscape holds history and sustains it, translating it into the living present.

— Text from In the Shadow of Paper Mountains, Gathering, London, UK