Native America

About the Exhibition

Native America: In Translation, curated by artist Wendy Red Star, assembles the wide-ranging work of nine Indigenous artists who offer contemporary perspectives on identity, memory, and the history of photography. “I was thinking about young Native artists and what would be inspirational and important for them as a road map,” said Red Star. 

This road map spans intergenerational image makers representing various Native nations and affiliations, and working in photography, installation, multimedia assemblage, and video. Among them, the late Cree artist Kimowan Metchewais investigates landscape and language through his evocative Polaroids. And the stylish self-portraits of Martine Gutierrez pose as fashion ads and question conceptions of ideal beauty. 

Together, their work confronts the historic, and often fraught relationship between photography and the representation of Native Americans, while also reimagining what it means to be a citizen in North America today. 

Contemporary Indigenous artists featured:
Rebecca Belmore
Nalikutaar Jacqueline Cleveland
Martine Gutierrez
Koyoltzintli
Duane Linklater
Guadalupe Maravilla
Kimowan Metchewais
Alan Michelson
Marianne Nicolson

MEMBERS SEE IT FIRST. Member’s Preview Day on Saturday, 8/3

About the Curator

Wendy Red Star (born in Billings, Montana, 1981) is a Portland, Oregon-based artist raised on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation. Her work is informed both by her cultural heritage and her engagement with many forms of creative expression, including photography, sculpture, video, fiber arts, and performance. An avid researcher of archives and historical narratives, Red Star seeks to recast her research, offering new and unexpected perspectives in work that is at once inquisitive, witty, and unsettling. Red Star holds a BFA from Montana State University, Bozeman, and an MFA in sculpture from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her monograph, Wendy Red Star: Delegation, was published by Aperture in 2022. Native America: In Translation extends Red Star’s work as guest editor of the Fall 2020 issue of Aperture magazine.

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Image Gallery

Credit Line

Native America: In Translation is curated by Wendy Red Star. The exhibition is organized by Aperture, New York, and is made possible, in part, with generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts.

 Support for this exhibition at the Blanton is provided in part by the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation.

Additional support for this exhibition at the Blanton is provided by Suzanne Deal Booth. 

Feature Image Credit

Martine Gutierrez, Queer Rage, Imagine Life-Size, and I’m Tyra, p66–67 from the series Indigenous Woman, 2018, 42 x 28 in., framed digital C print, Courtesy of the artist and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York