- Okay.
- A day in the park with Wendy Red Star
and her daughter, Beatrice, often includes
creative play with a camera.
- Why did that work?
Oh, that's pretty cool.
It's perfect for storytelling
and that's why I like to take photographs.
Keep going and make like little faces.
All right.
You wanna see it?
- Wendy Red Star creates work designed
to start a conversation.
Her diverse pieces are rooted in broad concepts
and lots of research.
At Montana State University Bozeman as an undergraduate,
she erected teepees on campus to mark Crow territory.
At UCLA for her graduate project called
The Four Seasons, she assembled fake foliage
and animal figures, made a dress, and coordinated
the framing to look like traditional dioramas.
- I really think of my work as being kind of open-ended.
And you wanna leave it so that the audience
can insert themselves and kind of finish it for you.
I was approached to do this fashion show,
I'm not a fashion person; I'm an artist.
My concept was, I was gonna work with traditional
men's hot dance outfit.
It's a Crow-style dance and the men
have these sort of capes,
and they have these feather bustles.
They have these bells that go down their leg
and around their ankle.
That's my inspiration.
And I sent them a photo of a hot dancer.
They're gonna look at it and what I'm gonna come
back to them with is not gonna look
anything like that. (laughs)
Let's try this on for fit, B.
- Okay.
- So all of that's sort of working in my head
while I'm making it and it's not literal at all.
It really kinda transforms into a point that sometimes
I don't even know what it's gonna look like
and tell it's finished.
Or things kind of changed.
So I can say this is, this is his photo of a hot dancer.
Can you turn?
But you're gonna end up with a blue and gold fringy dress
at the end, but it's totally about this hot dancer.
So those are the things that I think are all part
of my creative process.
- Beatrice wants to be the model,
which includes walking in the fashion show in a few months.
- It's really collaborative.
It's not me specifically telling Beatrice,
well, you're gonna wear these outfits
and you're gonna stand and do this.
No, she'll, she'll come and she'll tell me that,
"This is what I wanna do."
Growing up on the Crow Reservation, being Crow,
things tend to be separated.
Like, oh, that's a Native person's history.
And I know about it but I don't really
relate to it or it's happening to them.
And for me, I kinda like to break that down.
And we're all experiencing this history together.
And that's very much your history too,
not just my history.
- A couple of years ago, she started a project
inspired by this historical photograph
of Chief Medicine Crow.
- It's because I have been seeing Medicine Crow's image
all around, since growing up on the reservation.
And then when I left and took
Native American studies classes,
his image kept showing up.
And then finally I got a chance to really say,
wait a minute, instead of just enjoying the beauty
of this image, let's figure out what was happening.
- Everything she didn't know
about the picture intrigued her.
So she started researching.
Layers of information about the powerful Chief were evident
in the image, if a viewer knew what to look for.
Wendy wanted to make it visible.
- The ermine on his shirt represents
that he led a war party, a successful war party.
And then, you can kinda see on the back of his head,
it's hair extensions, which Crow men used to wear
from people in mourning.
Not only is he a very striking person
and did a lot for the Crow Nation,
but all of that is packed into that photo
and needs to be known.
So that, that's why it was important for me.
And then I wanna be Medicine Crow. (laughs)
So that's kinda my self-portrait of Medicine Crow
by placing my face on his,
but amongst all these other artists who have made portrait.
- I saw Wendy doing hers, it looked fun.
I thought of it like a coloring sheet.
- Beatrice, then seven, added colored designs
to another set of pictures.
They became part of an exhibition of Wendy's work
at Portland Art Museum.
- I would describe it
purple, yellow, green
and orange and blue
and I would describe it as a work of art.
- I really try to open it up so that they
can say, "Well, that person's like a human.
"It's not just like a figure of a past.
"It's a real human and here's how it connects to us today."
- And then we definitely do that one,
- Yeah, you could do, which?
- It was easy peasy.
- What are you gonna wear?
- The blanket! (laughs)
- Wendy is preparing to lead a tour
of the Halb family collection at the Tacoma Art Museum
as part of the museum's Native Arts Festival.
- Okay, and then he's also got an ax.
So you wanna grab the ax? - Okay.
I think this ax looks more like the one he has.
- Okay. - On the museum tour,
Beatrice will dress up in fake Indian artifacts
and recreate selected paintings.
Wendy will provide deadpan commentary.
- Sort of like him.
See, don't you think they sorta look alike?
- Yeah.
- Except I'm, like, way colorfuler
than he is. - Yep.
So this one? - Oh, my favorite.
- How is this one your favorite?
- That guy looks pretty funny.
And I get to use my favorite prop.
- Okay, so B, do you remember when we're in the museum,
you're not gonna say a peep, right?
- Peep.
- You'll be a silent muse.
- Muse?
What's a muse?
(chanting)
- A few weeks later, in Tacoma,
the crowd is larger than Wendy had expected.
It's showtime.
- One of the rules that the Halb family wanted
when they wanted to purchase artwork
is that none of the images in this exhibition
would show any violence.
So to make sure that we really shield ourselves
from violence today, we are gonna wear
our rose-colored glasses.
So, Beatrice, should we put ours on?
This is one our favorite pieces in the collection,
by artist E. Burbank.
He actually painted over 1,200 Indian portraits
and contacted 125 different tribes.
This is our most prized possession that we have here.
It had been sitting in a factory in China.
It's rare because it has these multi-colored eagle feathers.
Just take a moment here,
'cause this is really a beautiful piece.
A lot of these topics have to do with racism,
we have stereotypes,
things that people don't wanna recognize, like sexism.
The way people collect Native American artifacts,
and all of those kind of things,
which are all really heavy topics.
But if I can add a little kind of humor to it first,
people are much more apt to wanna dialogue with me about it.
So this piece is by Frederic Remington.
He felt that Native culture was doomed,
just like the buffalo.
We hope by reproducing this piece
that we might bring back more buffalo.
If anything, I want people to kinda walk away
with more questions than have anything answered.
- Mr. Sideburns.
- So if people are slightly confused, that's fine.