What It Becomes

This diptych is part of Wendy Red Star’s 1880 Crow Peace Delegation series, an intervention into Charles Milton Bell’s photographs of five Apsáalooke (Crow) leaders who traveled to Washington, DC, to defend their land against colonial expansion. After encountering the portraits in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Anthropological Archives, Red Star was compelled to return a sense of individuality to the unidentified sitters. The hand-drawn notations around Déaxitchish (Pretty Eagle), for example, reflect her research into his life and the cultural significance of his adornments. The drawing process also enabled Red Star to access her own Apsáalooke heritage; she remarked how the slow work of outlining the images helped her to focus on their details and study them with care: “It’s a way to get into the reality of that photo in the most intimate or tactile way that I can.”