Wendy/Kambui Experience

As soon as I entered the Wendy Red Star experience, I felt like I was in Native  American territory. Then, I was captured by the historic timeline that ran along the walls which featured so much character to a culture that isn't much acknowledged in good ways. It was personable and so real! The photos she uses to represent specific time periods not only offered a sense of who she was but how being apart of the “Crow culture” impacted her in ways where she is able to convey a unique perspective on American history through her knowledge of crow history and with research of the reservation where she was raised in. I was inspired by her persistent ways of forcing me to realize that Native American culture exists and matters. In fact, every culture should matter, and

Wendy helps us acknowledge that by showcasing a different form of art that she felt would promote a healthier perspective on her culture. In many of her pieces, she intersects between crow culture and the American  mainstream. In some photos she humanizes the crow culture with humorous captions that make it relatable and understandable. As she offers insight, she allows her culture to have real meaning. An example of this are photos of the Peace Delegation/ Diplomat members taken in 1880. Wendy makes it clear that she wants the viewer to know that these are real people, and not just made up figures that happened to be labeled on Honest Tea boxes. She states, that non-native American people took the portraits and explains that her annotations highlighted in red correctly symbolize the true essence of the men in the photos. These were men, who had to negotiate with the president over land and territory, serving an important position within a tribe, yet constantly complicated by arbitrary ruling by the U.S. Each portrait identifies with who they’re and what they’re wearing with a level of detail that invites the viewer to spend time looking at the things that she has enlivened through personalized captions that offer historical facts of the members.   

 

-Not the traditional American home but I enjoyed seeing this up close and personal. I don’t see this everyday, so I felt a need to go inside and examine the internal parts. 







-Home symbolizes the nostalgia of original place. A place to build memories, a place where we can truly be ourselves. A place that resembles a stable foundation. A part of her identity laid right in the middle of the exhibition, representing so much comfort and peace.

In the same day I visited the planetarium which featured Kambui Olujimi’s work, “Skywriters & Constellations.” Kambui offers his unique way of expressing identity, home, personal narrative, and mythology much like Wendy Red Star does. Kambui transforms his original novella, “Wayward North” into a variety of art projects offering a series of twelve 20 by 10 foot tapestries, each embroidered by Kambui himself with constellations of fine thread and rhinestones, composing a narrative of contemporary “star maps.” The  constellations reference a series of personal stories that play on the relationship between fact and fiction, reality and belief. The embroidered figural representations of persons, animals, and objects chart constellations, which transform pre-existing celestial bodies into new mythological characters. He expresses, “this project can be a medium that can be used to talk over distance, It’s a way of communicating over  distance, storytelling throughout time throughout geography and something that people can share through cross cultures.” 

I found his exhibition to be refreshing. It was a fantastic way to observe art, a new way to identify meaning, and most importantly a new way to express. Seeing things from a visual standpoint made the experience lively, leaving my reality and perception responsible for shaping a story being told within his constellations.

After visiting both, Wendy Red Star and Kambui Olujimi’s exhibitions, I realized how much of their work impacted me. From Wendy Red Stars exhibition I realized how insensitive I am towards other cultures and in her case, a culture that we are taught to perceive as people that have been conquered. Instead, Wendy invites us in and informs us with personal and historic facts to give viewers a chance to know more than just what textbooks tell us, which is something we have trouble with in modern society. At the same time, Kambui makes it ok to express art on another platform, as he touches on his own cultural experiences that he fuses with a variety of mythologies to disseminate a narrative that elaborates existence of past and present. 

Every culture has its own myths that identify with certain groups of people. It gives a culture meaning, whether it be real or fake. It’s distinctly what makes us all different. And when we have greater understanding or more awareness of another persons culture it is easier to accept one another and co-exist. In relation to this, my self- portrait will include a piece of writing that is based on a dream I’ve had about my ideal world, taken place in a parallel universe where social circumstances aren’t judged so heavily by where one comes from. This will give me an opportunity to explain why some dreams can be the vehicle that provide people with new perspective.