Crow’s Shadow was very lucky to host Portland-based artist Wendy Red Star for a two-week printmaking residency June 8-19, which culminated on the final Saturday with a half-day public workshop on fancy shawls.
Red Star, who earned an MFA degree in sculpture from UCLA, said she was initially unsure about the prospect of working within a two-dimensional form such as printmaking.
“As it got closer and to the date I got more and more nervous,” Red Star said. “But right away the first day I came up with two ideas, and I was really impressed.”
Working with several slides and photographs from Montana’s Crow Indian Reservation, where she lived until she was 18, Red Star completed approvals for four lithographic editions.
One edition, titled “The (HUD),” incorporates pictures of the reservation’s government housing. Another edition, a six-color lithograph titled “enit,” uses a slide image taken from the reservation during the early 1970s. It was one of several slides previously in her father’s possession that Red Star said she had long wished to incorporate into a new project.
“(It’s a) car float that’s on this really funky 1970s station wagon with these two women that are looking away from the observer,” Red Star said. “And the background for it is a Mexican blanket or serape.”
Red Star’s other two lithographs, “Rez Car 1” and “Rez Car 2,” each feature a manipulated photographic image of a broken-down car that she humorously described as a kind of statue at the entrance to her hometown.
“This is like my dream audience, to be showing on a reservation,” Red Star said. “I guess the reason I’m excited to show here is because there’s that quality that all of the Native Americans here were put on the reservations, and the government has put in place some of the same laws that we’ve had to go through. And so we end up having these HUD houses and we end up being really, really poor, and not able to fix our cars when they’re broken down.
“But we’re also a very proud, proud people, and we do everything to kind of keep our culture there. So we’ll dress a 70’s station wagon in our regalia and things like that. So there’s always these really major culture clashes that I find really beautiful on any reservation, where you can see the native people trying to overcome colonization and conformity of non-Indians and dominant society.”
Red Star said she appreciated the comfortable atmosphere of Crow’s Shadow, partly for its location on the Umatilla reservation, and hopes work in the studio again.
“It’s jump started me again to be interested in making more work,” Red Star said. “I feel honored and I’d love to come back.”
Prints from each of Red Star’s editions will be available for sale as soon as they are printed. We also will upload digital images from each edition to the “prints” section of our Web site as soon as possible.
In the mean time, check out more photos of Red Star’s visit on our facebook.com page.
Red Star’s was the third of eight printmaking residencies being funded through a grant from the Administration for Native Americans.