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 pose challenging questions about identity and heritage, land rights, and histories of colonialism. “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. Posing as fashion ads, the stylish self-portraits of Martine Gutierrez question conceptions of ideal beauty. And Alan Michelson’s archival projections on presidential busts excavate colonial histories.

Also included are works by Rebecca Belmore, Nalikutaar Jacqueline Cleveland, Koyoltzintli, Duane Linklater, Guadalupe Maravilla, and Marianne Nicolson. 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. 

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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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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. 

Feature Image Credit

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