VISUAL GENEALOGIES

THE MAKING OF A PRINT
AT CROW’S SHADOW
INSTITUTE OF ARTS, UMATILLA

In October 2020, Wendy Red Star went to Crow’s Shadow Institute of Arts, located on the Umatilla Indian Reservation, to create a series of three lithographs, still to be titled, which explore her family genealogy.

This was Red Star’s third time working with a master printmaker at Crow’s Shadow. In this collaboration, she guides the printmaking conceptually, while fabrication is undertaken by the printmaker and their team.

Below, Red Star shares more about the inspirations for, and the production of, this lithograph series.

“At Crow’s Shadow, I wanted to do something based on genealogy, and the star quilt popped into my head.

The idea was to take this nostalgic image and let it serve as a powerful background to my genealogy work, especially around the ownership and use of historical photos of my great-great-grandparents.

I became very excited about it, and at the same time, I also understood how technically difficult it would be to execute.”

The first quilt that Red Star made featured her great-great-grandmother, Dreams the Truth.

“I think the star quilt featured in the work is the most traditionally Native out of the series. Native star quilts tend to use solid color fabrics for their stars, rather than things that have patterns on them.

The pattern and color choices worked out to be quite powerful, optically, in the finished print, because there is an outer ring of blue that sort of vibrates.”

“I used a floral background in relation to the beautiful paisley pattern of my great-great-grandmother’s dress, which was most likely an everyday dress. The pattern I ended up choosing for the background reminded me of the floral design in a Crow floral beaded jacket.”

crow+floral+jacket.jpg

In both works featuring images of her great-great-grandparents, Red Star embeds their names within the design of the print’s background.

“In the work featuring Her Dreams Are True, I wanted to have her name repeated throughout, so that whoever has the print knows her name; so that there is no chance that she will become another nameless Indian person.”

“Some people equate making editions of 20 lithographs to the process of reproducing photographs, but that’s a mistake. You simply can't copy these.

It’s a lot of work to make each of these lithographs, especially because the photos on each print are themselves cut out and pasted onto the paper each time.”

The second print that Red Star made at Crow’s Shadow featured her great-great-grandfather, Dust.

“The story of my great-great-grandfather, Dust, and my great-great-grandmother, Her Dreams are True, is a funny one, because I don’t think they ever got married. They had one child named William Dust, who is my great grandfather. It wasn’t until I did genealogical research, and I learned about their other marriages, that I better understood the strains of people with this name who I am and am not related to.

I took this image from a Fred E. Miller photograph. In terms of paper color choice, and all the photos in this series, I based them around the color choices of the star quilt itself. In Dust, I got obsessed with two colors: a peach and a really interesting green, full of yellow. From here, I picked a yellower photo paper, and when we ran prints of it, it happened to work really well with this image. Dust’s figure almost juts out three-dimensionally when you’re with the print in person.”

“When I used to see a lithograph, I didn't realize how labor intensive they are to produce. Oh, my gosh! These are really exquisite, handmade works. They're layered, and it takes multiple days to lay down different colors. At the most, you can run two or three colors a day.”

“For the print of my great-great-grandfather, I happened upon the design for the background as I was reading a book about Crow astronomy and cosmology.

It explains that the Crow are a people of stars. There’s a saying that the star people are going to return to earth and come get us. I developed the idea to use constellations, incorporating Dust’s name within the pattern itself.”

The final print that Red Star produced at Crow’s Shadow consisted of photographs of the artist, her father, her paternal grandmother, and her daughter.

“This piece — all these pieces, really — are an alternative record for my daughter. It’s a genealogy for her and for her future kids. When I die, she can point to this and say, ‘here is the link of four generations.’

Part of what’s motivating my interest in genealogy has to do with the regulations around blood quantum that affect all federally recognized tribes. In order to be designated a member of a tribe, you need to prove that you have a certain Native blood percentage. It’s a system that was put in place by the government that is not working anymore — we’re approaching the point, for example, where no one can be 100 percent Crow.”

“Making prints at Umatilla is a great exercise in communication and collaboration. There was an apprentice that helped the master printer, and because of the pandemic, we were all social distancing throughout: working eight to twelve hours a day, all while wearing masks.”

Learn more about the important work of Crow’s Shadow Institute of Arts, including the educational, social, and economic opportunities its provides for Indigenous artists, here.

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