As we continue to celebrate Native American Heritage Month, let’s celebrate the contributions of these three contemporary women artists living in the U.S! Be sure to check out examples of their work online.
Wendy Red Star is an Apsáalooke (Crow) artist based in Portland, OR. She works in a variety of media including photography, collage, textiles, installation, and her well-known ironic dioramas. Her works confront ongoing misrepresentation, romanticization, and flattening of Native American history and identity. She often critiques how Native objects and bodies are displayed in museums. As seen on the cover slide, Red Star sometimes collaborates with her daughter Beatrice, making cultural continuity visible and giving agency to the next generation of Indigenous voices.
WE LOVE: her institutional critiques, humor in the face of fetishization, and #ApsáalookeFeminist mom pride.
2. Erica Lord:
Erica Lord’s work explores complicated conceptions of home and layered experiences of displacement within the Native diaspora as an artist with a mixed cultural identity stemming from what she calls a “cultural limbo” of Athabascan, Iñupiaq, Finnish, Swedish, English, and Japanese roots. She emphasizes the multiplicity of her perspectives as an intermingled whole through working in a variety of disciplines including photography, performance, video, sculpture, installation, and mixed-media. She is currently based in Santa Fe, NM.
WE LOVE: her defiance of rigidity and insistence on fluidity, the ways she reframes and expands upon art historical and culturally significant images.
Teri Greeves continues the Kiowa tradition of beadwork passed down to her from the women in her family in her work, which blends imagery and stories from her own everyday life in Santa Fe, NM, Kiowa oral histories, and contemporary pop culture. Using materials ranging from deer hide to Chuck Taylors, Teri Greeves’ work is a testament to her lived experiences as a Kiowa woman in her time, just as the women who came before her have done through their beadwork for generations.
WE LOVE: her irresistibly bright, lush materiality and the vivid, tender
anecdotes she provides for many works.
Sources:
https://ericalord.com/home.html
https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-erica-lord-21981
https://archive.org/details/Erica_Lord_interview
https://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/emisferica-11-1-decolonial-gesture/11-1-essays/the-pose-as-interventionist-gesture-erica-lord-and-decolonizing-the-proper-subject-of-memory.html
https://www.terigreevesbeadwork.com/
http://www.sarweb.org/iarc/dobkin/greevesII03.htm
https://www.craftcouncil.org/magazine/article/teri-greeves
https://www.arts.gov/stories/magazine/2018/1/women-arts-galvanizing-encouraging-inspiring/wendy-red-star
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/wendy-red-stars-indigenous-gaze
https://www.pdxmonthly.com/news-and-city-life/2015/04/local-artist-wendy-red-star-totally-conquers-the-wild-frontier-march-2015
https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/interviews/story-trader-an-interview-with-wendy-red-star-56478/
https://aperture.org/editorial/wendy-red-star/
https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-wendy-red-star-21965
https://glasstire.com/2022/04/03/the-ground-on-which-we-stand-wendy-red-stars-a-scratch-on-the-earth/
https://www.wendyredstar.com/about-1
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