Brings Good Horses
Wendy Red Star at Sargent’s Daughters
In this age of virtual exhibitions and buzzword art reviews, galleries increasingly rely on the marketing potential of the works they choose to show. For many, to be a contemporary artist is to develop products for sale—Eckhaus Latta broke the fourth wall in 2018 by installing a functional clothing store in the Whitney, for example. In the New York art world, those who intentionally agitate the easy consumption of art help to pick away at the unseen forces of colonialism and economic exploitation. Brings Good Horses, a solo show by multimedia artist Wendy Red Star at Sargent’s Daughters, seems more like a museum show or a presentation of a personal collection than a commercial gallery exhibition. The result is a demonstration of historical power and subversive artmaking that stands against the pandering art market.
Brings Good Horses consists of ninety drawings, each mounted casually on marbled paper. The drawings depict various horses drawn from ledger artworks: a historical and culturally significant medium for Plains Indian Tribal Nations drawn on the blank pages of settler ledger books. In the late 19th century, pages of Plains Indian ledger books were stolen and unbound to be sold in white art markets. Red Star, an Apsáalooke (Crow) woman, lifts her horse drawings from contemporary museum collections and represents them in her own multicolored style, labeled with their original names and sources. The show fosters a feeling of community: Red Star has patched these multifaceted characters together to form a living quilt borrowed from an ancestral home. As the gallery checklist points out, each arrangement—or “corral”—of drawings is considered an individual artwork. Removing one would disrupt this community, which presents some problems to potential art buyers: is it possible to choose a favorite? Would it ruin the collection to take just one?
“Bi” nneete (No Water),” 2021, acrylic, graphite, kitakata paper, marble paper, 112 x 182 3/4 inches
Additionally, Red Star’s show uses an aspect of artmaking that is often overlooked: humor. In the past, Red Star presented and wrote about mobilizing depictions of Plains Indian people to fit her own projects. In a 2019 interview, she said: “To have [humor] in my work is quite Native, or Crow, and I’m glad that it comes through. It’s universal. People can connect with the work that way. Then they can be open to talking about race.” Notable to the audience of Brings Good Horses are the subjects themselves—the horses. Each is unique; some awkwardly stout and lime green, others tall and lanky with bubblegum pink manes. In the corner of each drawing is the horse’s given name. Here Red Star doesn’t hesitate to lean into the strange-sounding Anglicized titles: “Medicine Dress,” “Gets Down Among Them,” “Pounded Meat.” These uncomfortable labels humanize Red Star’s work to the larger audience of non-Crow people. She highlights the humor in her ancestral culture, something too often lost among stereotypes of joyless Native people.
Brings Good Horses is highly self-aware and ultimately clever in its seamless weaving of cultural history and aesthetic presentation. The show is a gathering of horses from throughout history, each possessing unique qualities, brought together for the first time here in New York. Red Star knows that strangers will enter the space and prescribe their own ideas of Native identity onto her work. What they do not expect is to find her there, with a corral of ninety mystical horses floating on water-marbled paper behind her.
Brings Good Horses is currently on view at Sargent’s Daughters on the Lower East Side. The show closes on May 15th.
