Montana State University alumna Wendy Red Star was named a 2024 MacArthur Fellow. She’s from Billings and is an enrolled member of the Apsáalooke (Crow) Tribe. (John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.)
Wendy Red Star, a Montana State University alum from 2004, has been named a 2024 MacArthur Fellow for her visual art “engaging with archival materials in works that challenge colonial historical narratives.”
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced the awards, or “genius grants,” this week, and Montana State University announced Red Star was among the recipients.
The fellowship recognizes “exceptional originality and dedication” to creative pursuits, and it comes with an $800,000 stipend over five years, according to MSU.
Red Star, 43, is from Billings and lives and works in Portland, Oregon, according to her biography on her website. She is an enrolled member of the Apsáalooke (Crow) Tribe.
“Red Star works across disciplines to explore the intersections of Native American ideologies and colonialist structures, both historically and in contemporary society,” her biography said.
“Drawing on pop culture, conceptual art strategies, and the Crow traditions within which she was raised, Red Star pushes the conversation surrounding Native American perspectives in new directions.”
Red Star earned a bachelor’s of fine arts degree from MSU’s College of Arts and Architecture and received a master’s of fine arts from the University of California, Los Angeles, according to her biography.
MSU College of Arts and Architecture’s Dean Adams said MSU is always excited about the success of its students and is “immensely proud” of Red Star, according to a news release from MSU.
“I am so happy for Wendy Red Star,” Adams said in a statement. “She earned this very prestigious MacArthur Fellowship through dedication to her vision and her studio practice.”
Red Star’s bio said she received the Apsáalooke name Baahinnaachísh or Baaeétitchish, or One Who Is Talented, while visiting home: “It is the original name of her grand-uncle, Clive Francis Dust, Sr., known in the family for his creativity as a cultural keeper.”
The MacArthur Foundation said her art sometimes features self-portraits, and it offers a different perspective on misconceptions and oversimplified portrayals of Native Americans. For example, a 2006 piece called “The Last Thanks” features Red Star at the center of a Thanksgiving meal.
The meal includes bologna, Wonder Bread and Natural American Spirit cigarettes, and Red Star is surrounded by plastic skeletons wearing feathered headdresses, which “mark them as stereotypically Native American,” her website said.
“The title and composition of the image immediately recall Leonardo Da Vince’s ‘Last Supper,’ transforming the American holiday of Thanksgiving into a Native American last meal,” the website said. “In this way, the large-scale photographic print employs comic pastiche in service of an urgent commentary about the dispossession and genocide of Native peoples in the United States.”
The MacArthur Foundation also describes a more recent work, a 2021 site-specific installation in Omaha, Nebraska, at the Joslyn Art Museum. The piece is called “Indian Congress,” which her website said was an “unprecedented convening of over thirty Native American tribes during Nebraska’s Trans-Mississippi Exposition” in 1898.
The event was supposed to showcase the daily lives of Native Americans and westward expansion, according to the MacArthur Foundation.
“Red Star’s installation puts present-day viewers in the position of visitors to the Exposition, who viewed attendees to the Congress as objects on display, while at the same time she reasserts the dignity of the Native participants,” said the MacArthur Foundation.
“Through her witty and subversive use of photography and installation, Red Star exposes audiences to materials typically only available to researchers and recovers details of histories that archives either cannot or purposefully do not convey.”
MSU President Waded Cruzado congratulated Red Star and praised her artwork, according to the news release from the university.
“I am so very happy to see one of our former Bobcats receive this recognition,” Cruzado said in a statement. “Ms. Red Star’s art highlights the resilience and strength of her Native American heritage, and MSU is honored to count her among our university’s distinguished alumni.”
Red Star has shown her work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris, France, among many others, according to her bio. Her work is in more than 60 public collections.