Artist Talk with Wendy Red Star

Headshot of Wendy Red Star wearing a striped button-down shirt, a beaded necklace, silver earrings

Image Credit: Beatrice Red Star Fletcher

Self portrait of the artist in front of an artificial-looking natural background, in Native garb

Wendy Red Star, Four Seasons Series (Spring), 2006, archival pigment print, 35.5 x 37 in

April 1, 2022

Artist Talk with Wendy Red Star

in conversation with Beth Piatote

Friday, April 1st 2022

4:00 – 5:30pm PST

Watch the recording here!

This lecture is presented by the Arts Research Center with co-sponsorship from the Departments of Art Practice and Ethnic Studies, and the Program in Critical Theory

Raised on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana, Wendy 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 recast her research, offering new and unexpected perspectives in work that is at once inquisitive, witty and unsettling. In this lecture, Red Star will highlight five bodies of work, including older pieces as well as recent and upcoming projects. Following her lecture, Red Star will be in conversation with Beth Piatote, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Native American Studies.

Wendy Red Star (b.1981, Billings, MT) lives and works in Portland, OR. Red Star has exhibited in the United States and abroad at venues including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Frost Art Museum, among others. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and numerous others. She served as a visiting lecturer at institutions including Yale University, the Figge Art Museum, the Banff Centre, Dartmouth College, and CalArts. In 2017, Red Star was awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and in 2018 she received a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. Her first career survey exhibition “Wendy Red Star: A Scratch on the Earth” was on view at the Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey through May 2019, concurrently with her first New York solo gallery exhibition at Sargent’s Daughters. Red Star holds a BFA from Montana State University, Bozeman, and an MFA in sculpture from University of California, Los Angeles. She is represented by Sargent’s Daughters.

Beth Piatote is a scholar of Native American/Indigenous literature and law; a creative writer of fiction, poetry, plays, and essays; and an Indigenous language revitalization activist/healer, specializing in Nez Perce language and literature. She is the author of two books: Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature (Yale 2013), which won an MLA award; and The Beadworkers: Stories (Counterpoint 2019), which was longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, the PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and shortlisted for the California Independent Booksellers Association “Golden Poppy” Award. In 2021, she will serve as a judge for the PEN America/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize. Beth is part of the core faculty group that created the Designated Emphasis in Indigenous Language Revitalization (established in 2018) and currently serves as Chair of the DE. She earned her PhD in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University and joined the Berkeley faculty in 2007. In 2020, she joined the Comparative Literature department; she holds a dual appointment in Comparative Literature and Native American Studies. She currently serves on the international Council of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.

Artist Talk with Wendy Red Star

Topics

Past Events topic page, Visual Arts topic page, Visiting Artist/Writer/Curator/Lecturer topic page