Wendy Red Star: Her Dreams Are True

This project, Her Dreams Are True, provides a new perspective on the role of archives, museum collections and personal memory in Wendy Red Star's work. Apsáalooke (Crow) artist Wendy Red Star works across mediums to reconsider and liberate archival photographs and materials from a fixed historical moment. Starting with the Peace Crow Delegation series (2014), This publication articulates the connections between Red Star's annotated 19th-century portraits and her more recent works that recontextualize hand-painted illustrations of artifacts in the Denver Art Museum's Indigenous collection. Red Star juxtaposes these with her own photographs of the Crow Nation's annual fair in Montana. Returning to her handwritten notes in the Bíiluuke series (2023), Red Star also provides a nuanced intervention with Apsáalooke heritage items from several public collections. More than a meditation on the past, Red Star's archival work looks to the future and offers a new perspective on rematriation.