Wendy Red Star was born in Billings, Montana just outside of the Crow Indian reservation where she was raised. She grew up in a multi-cultural family. Her mother is of Irish descent, her father a full blood Crow Indian and her older sister is Korean. Wendy left the Crow Indian reservation when she was 18 to attend Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana, where she studied sculpture. She then went on to earn her MFA in sculpture at UCLA. Wendy currently lives in Portland, Oregon, where she is an adjunct professor of art at Portland State University.
Wendy Red Star’s work explores the intersection between life on the Crow reservation and the world outside of that environment. She thinks of herself as a Crow Indian cultural archivist speaking sincerely about the experience of being a Crow Indian in contemporary society. (SOURCE: Crow's Shadow Press, http://crowsshadow.org/artist/wendy-red-star/, accessed 11/8/16)
Over the course of her practice, Red Star has worked within and between the mediums of photography, sculpture, installation, performance and design. Red Star's work layers influences drawn from her Crow tribal background, daily surroundings, aesthetic experiences, collected ephemera and conjured histories that are both real and imagined. Through her photographs and sculpture new universes are built, simultaneously urban-rural and high-low with their own language of symbols created from such seemingly disparate sites as HUD houses, rez cars, three legged dogs, powwow culture, proliferative indigenous commoditization, and Red Star's personal collection of memories growing up as what she calls "a half-breed" on the Crow Indian reservation. The work represents an insider/outsider view that is wrought with complexity and contradiction, its most salient attributes. Red Star's unruly approach examines a cross section of American cultures and their very consumption while also being a meditation on her own identity. (SOURCE: Wendy Red Star Biography provided by Crow's Shadow Press, see object file)
