Wendy Red Star

Roberts Projects is pleased to present Bíikkua (The Hide Scraper), an exhibition of Wendy Red Star’s ongoing series exploring the social and material history of bishkisché. This Apsáalooke term is used to describe heirloom rawhide cases fabricated and decorated by the women of indigenous tribes throughout North America, translating to “backpack for dogs to carry meat or grain.” Historically referred to as parfleche—a French phrase introduced during the colonial fur trade—in Western European scholarship, Red Star intends to use this series to restore the creative lineage and language of her Apsáalooke ancestry.

A functional object used for transporting goods and possessions on horse across the Great Plains, each bishkisché features two painted panels with a mirrored pattern—a unique visual symbology invented by their maker. Growing up on the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana, Red Star recalls her grandmother with a creative project always in hand—perpetually sewing, beading, and drawing. While her matrilineal ancestors may not have described themselves as artists, they had robust artistic practices and established the aesthetic vocabulary of their tribal community—envisioning vibrant, geometric designs comprised of intersecting triangles, zig-zagging lines and lean sequenced rectangles rendered in rich primary-toned pigments.

Of the nearly one thousand images of rawhide bishkisché that Red Star has uncovered since embarking on this series, she has made studies of 226 bishkisché, 184 of which are on display in this presentation—accompanied by twelve historic bishkisché from the artist’s personal collection. Installed in a dense grid, these works form an extensive archive, piecing together common threads and visual motifs from a historical record that has been suppressed in the hands of white settlers. Of the many ruptures obscuring a complete understanding of her tribe’s history, one significant fissure is the lost birth names of Apsáalooke women. Since 1885, the American government has conducted a census of all federally affiliated tribes and—disregarding Apsáalooke’s matrilineal traditions and naming rituals—each woman was reassigned with a Christian name and a patrilineal last name. These forgotten birth names contain a bold, mystical poetry—such as her great great grandmother’s given name, Her Dreams Are True—a means of bestowing honor and good wishes for their people in the coming generation. As no bishkisché are inscribed with the name of their maker, Red Star recognized an opportunity to use these objects to heal the influences of patriarchy and colonization on her heritage. From the same census, she collected over one thousand female names recorded from her tribe, which she has used to title her painted studies—thus creating a permanent remembrance of two women’s lives and legacies with each artwork.

Wendy Red Star (b. 1981, Billings, Montana; lives and works in Portland, OR) holds a BFA from Montana State University, Bozeman, MT and an MFA in Sculpture from University of California, Los Angeles, CA. She has exhibited in the United States and internationally at venues including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris, France; Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Bignan, France; Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; Hood Art Museum, Hanover, NH; St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN and Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, Miami, FL, among others. In 2019, Red Star had her first career survey exhibition, Wendy Red Star: A Scratch on the Earth at the Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey. Red Star’s work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, Clinton, NY; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC and the British Museum, London, UK, among others. In 2017, she was awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, and received a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in 2018. She is the winner of the 2024 Bonnie Bronson Fellowship and the 2024 Infinity Award in Contemporary Photography and New Media.