Wendy Red Star in Conversation with Will Matsuda at Powell’s Books

Join Aperture and Powell’s City of Books for an in-person conversation between Wendy Red Star and Will Matsuda, taking a look inside Red Star’s book Delegation (Aperture, 2022).

Red Star’s photography recasts historical narratives with wit, candor, and a feminist, Indigenous perspective, centering Native American life and material culture through imaginative self-portraiture, vivid collages, archival interventions, and site-specific installations. Whether referencing nineteenth-century Crow leaders or 1980s pulp fiction, museum collections or family pictures, Red Star’s practice questions the role of the photographer in shaping Indigenous representation.

Including a dynamic array of Red Star’s lens-based works from 2006 to the present and a range of essays, stories, and poems by award-winning historians and writers, Delegation—a copublication with Documentary Arts—is a spirited testament to an influential artist’s singular vision. It builds upon the success of Aperture magazine’s Fall 2020 issue, “Native America,” and the traveling exhibition Native America: In Translation, curated by Red Star.

Wendy Red Star (born in Billings, Montana, 1981) is an Apsáalooke artist based in Portland, Oregon. Her work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions and is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum; Saint Louis Art Museum; MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts; and the British Museum, London. Red Star was the guest editor of Aperture magazine’s Fall 2020 issue, “Native America,” and is the recipient of a 2022 Emerson Collective Fellowship.

Will Matsuda is a Japanese American writer and photographer based in Portland, Oregon, where he was born and raised.

 This event is presented in partnership with Powell’s City of Books.

Image: Wendy Red Star, Hawate (One), from the series A Float for the Future, 2021; from Wendy Red Star: Delegation (Aperture, 2022). © Wendy RedStar, Courtesy of Sargent’s Daughters and Nicholas Knight