Defying dispossession: Wendy Red Star and objects of the Apsáalooke past, present, and future
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2025-05-03
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This thesis explores how Apsáalooke artist Wendy Red Star confronts the legacy of Native dispossession through three series created between 2019 and 2024: Our Side, Accession, and Bíikkua (The Hide Scraper). Red Star engages with Apsáalooke objects that now exist within public and private collections, using artistic interventions to reanimate and recontextualize them in the present. In Our Side, she disrupts the authority of the settler ethnographic gaze by adopting and subverting the visual language of field notes. Accession stages a symbolic return of Apsáalooke objects from the Denver Art Museum to their community, implicating them in the living traditions of Crow Fair. In Bíikkua, Red Star revives ancestral parfleche designs, painting a new visual archive that honors the original makers and preserves her nation’s artistic lineage.
Across these series, Red Star visually defies dispossession to reassert the dynamic relationship between her nation and its displaced cultural heritage.
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Art