Description

The Public Art Fund (PAF) seeks funding to launch a multi-city project featuring the work of the Native American artist Wendy Red Star in her first foray into public art. Slated to run from August through November of 2022, the project centers on the installation of Red Star’s work on 300 bus shelters throughout New York City, Boston, and Chicago. Red Star, a Portland, Oregon-based artist who was raised on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana, engages in a research-based photography practice through which she seeks to identify, revive, and assert Native American histories in concert with community.
PAF began its work in bus shelter settings in 2019, after establishing an arrangement with the advertising entity JCDecaux. Each exhibition reimagines the traditional advertising platform as an outdoor gallery space, creating a decentralized, street-level exhibition. In June 2020, “Art on the Grid” featured work by 50 New-York-based artists in response to the global pandemic and BLM. The project grew the settings from 100 bus shelters to 500; and in 2021 PAF expanded the format to include sites in Boston and Chicago. A solo exhibition of new work by Martine Gutierrez, reinterpreting a diverse canon of radical historical and mythological figures, is currently on view.
Red Star will create ten to fifteen new works—based in photography, collage, painting, and writing– that will have specific relevance to the urban settings in which are installed. Her process will draw on local Native histories and non-Native institutions to interrogate historical events and monuments, and address photographs and objects relating to her tribe in nearby museums. (A compelling example of this localization noted in the proposal is Red Star’s address of a 1913 effort to document Native Americans, which yielded an effort to erect a monumental National American Indian Memorial on Staten Island; thousands of glass plates negatives related to the photo-expeditions are housed at AMNH.) In addition to her central artistic goal of amplifying Indigenous voices and histories, Red Star intends for this project to communicate with new and broader audiences in the consideration of how Crow objects came to be housed in vast urban institutions, and in the process reconnect those objects to the Crow community.
Each bus-shelter work will bear the exhibition’s title and a link to a webpage with a geo-tagged map of the exhibition locations, images of the works, curatorial texts, and a series of short films. PAF anticipates each work will receive 60,000 impressions each week, offering more than one million people the opportunity to engage with the artist, learn more about Crow culture, and join the dialogue around Indigenous objects in U.S. museums and the portrayal of Indigenous people in art. Curated by Katerina Stathopoulou, the exhibition will be complemented by a public program (live-streamed internationally from The Cooper Union) the webpage mentioned above, and short films featuring the artist. Red Star will begin her research this fall with outreach to museum archivists and curators, with object selection to take place early in 2022.
PAF’s Wendy Red Star exhibition is fully aligned with the AAP’s goals on both the macro and micro level. The project will place art at the center of public conversations related to representation, justice, and equity. More specifically, it will contribute to the increase of our work in the Native American field in a way that questions established cultural narratives and traditional museum practices. And finally, it allows us to continue our limited but steady work in the public art arena. This would be the AAP’s second grant to PAF.