Wendy Red Star & Kambui Olujimi at the Newark Museum

Wendy Red Star’s “A Scratch on the Earth” exhibition at the Newark Museum shows the heritage and culture of Crow Tribe through portraiture, hand sewn textiles, and a photographic timeline that spans around the main room of the exhibition, with over 100 years of recorded history from the Crow Tribe.

In Wendy Red Star’s Family Portraits, she incorporates her own family photos and places them on a colorful quilt inspired by Crow and Plains Indian communities. This goes to show how one’s identity doesn’t only consist of one’s family, but also their culture.

Wendy Red Star’s series of black and white portraits called “Diplomats of the Crow Nation” are portraits of Crow Tribe chiefs in the late 1800s with red annotations detailing each individual’s heritage, role within the Crow Tribe, and even the significance of what they’re wearing/ holding. For Example, her “Portrait of Chief Che-Ve-Te-Pu-Ma-Ta (Iron Bull) with His Wife” (1873) shows Mr. and Mrs. Iron Bull surrounded by Wendy Red Star’s annotations such as the significance of elk teeth showing Mrs. Iron Bull’s “wealth and her husbands hunting skills”. Mr. Iron Bull is shown wearing hairbows, which according to Wendy Red Star’s annotations represent “physically overcoming an enemy and cutting their throat”.

Within Wendy Red Star’s Exhibition One can see traces of cultural diffusion between the Crow Tribe and America’s mainstream culture. Examples of this can be shown through the Fancy Shawl Project: Basketball Hoops” (2009) with the shawl representing the Native American cultural tradition, and the basketball hoops represents one of the mainstream sports played all over America. 

In a way, Wendy Red Star’s exhibition relates to my identity project. In her “Four Seasons” Red Star uses herself as the subject with symbols that identify her such as her clothing and the landscape that surrounds her. These are the main principles that I will use to determine my identities across my self-portraits for my final project.   

On the other hand, Kambui Olujimi’s planetarium show “Skywriters” wasn’t as straight forward as Wendy Red Star’s exhibition was. What made Olujimi’s “Skywriters” challenging for me was the monotoned narration and the overall abstract visuals. However, once leaving the planetarium, we got to see an exhibition with further explanation on “Skywriters”. Kambui Olujimi creates his own constellations to tell a mythical story based on a certain month’s sky.