Learning, Unlearning, Relearning: Meditating on America’s Past and Present

Student Select: Art Acquisition Trip & Fund

Wendy Red Star grew up on the Crow Reservation in Billings where her paternal grandmother had a profound influence on her. She would often walk into her grandmother’s craft room and watch her sew traditional Crow outfits. This practice of craft and fiber art would later become a fundamental aspect of Red Star’s works. Dressing in outfits and developing set pieces that she creates herself, Red Star takes photographs that celebrate Indigenous Crow culture and challenge pervasive stereotypes of Native Americans. Wendy Red Star’s 2006 work, The Last Thanks is featured satirizes America’s glamorized vision of Native Americans. Red Star sets up a table spread with processed foods that people on the Crow Reservation often eat. Conflating Thanksgiving with the last supper, Red Star references how colonists ultimately betrayed the trust of Indigenous People.

Dr. Ann Fox’s “Disability in Literature & Art” class wrote and recorded image descriptions of some of the works in the Van Every/Smith collection. Here three students give a description of the work through their perspectives: Daniel Yetsick ’24 , Eliott Kim ’25, and Miriam Martinez ’24.

Van Every/Smith Galleries: PROFS TALK ART, Dr. Rose Stremlau

Thanksgiving: A Time for Rest and Reflection, by Caleb Machorro ’28