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    Kevin Red Star
    Kevin Red Star
    Kevin Red Star
    Ebook291 pages1 hour

    Kevin Red Star

    By Daniel Gibson and Kitty Leaken

    ()

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    About this ebook

    The life, work, and inspiration of the acclaimed Native American artist are explored in this beautifully illustrated book.
     
    Born and raised on the Crow reservation in southern Montana, Kevin Red Star celebrates the history and culture of the Crow Nation with his artwork. As a visual historian of his people, he explores traditional roots with a contemporary outlook, producing a body of work that is revered by galleries, museums, and collectors.
     
    Author Daniel Gibson and photographer Kitty Leaken showcase the talents of Red Star in this collection of artwork while also exploring his life and artistic development. Red Star’s friends and family, his childhood on the reservation, and his time at the Institute of American Indian Arts and San Francisco Art Institute all feed into his iconoclastic and ever-evolving artwork.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateMay 27, 2014
    ISBN9781423636090
    Kevin Red Star
    Author

    Daniel Gibson

    Veteran author Daniel Gibson grew up skiing in New Mexico and has written a weekly winter column, Snow Trax, for twenty-four years. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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      Book preview

      Kevin Red Star - Daniel Gibson

      A Critical Appraisal

      Over the decades, Kevin Red Star’s work has come to the attention of many major art institutions and museums. They have watched his career and work unfold, the changes in his styles, themes, and materials. They are thinking about his place in American art and Native art. And, over the years, the artist has also drawn a loyal cadre of collectors to his work. They also have studied his evolution and have become astute observers of his winding path.

      Mindy Besaw, John S. Bugas Curator at the Whitney Western Art Museum (a division of the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming), notes:

      One of the strengths of his work is the combination of his personal experiences and his experience within his tribe, and how that blends with modern art styles and Native American art of the past, and becomes something else. Graphically the images are recognizably his, but also very modern. Then if you dig a little past the immediate surface recognition, subject, and beautiful design, it becomes something more, a search for meaning. It has a dual nature.

      James Nottage, Vice President and Chief Curatorial Officer of the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis, the major institution of its kind in the Midwest, grew up in Wyoming, and has been aware of Red Star since the early to mid-1970s. The museum has shown his work in at least five exhibitions from 1989 to 2011. Two paintings, Dressed for the Parade and Elk River Woman were included in the inaugural opening of the Hurt and Harvey galleries in 2005. In 2003 he served as the featured artist of their annual Indian Market and Festival. Nottage says:

      He is one of the wonderful mainstays in our world of art. I really enjoy his rich imagination, which I think is particularly true with his tipi series. Many are a little more abstract, with different angles and compositions and color schemes. There is a wonderful variety but you can also always spot a Red Star painting. There is a consistency in quality. I describe his use of color as vibrant, which runs such a close parallel to the Crow themselves. His work reveals them as a people of the past, yet also and more importantly perhaps, as people of the present—not frozen in time but alive and present.

      Emma Hansen (Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma), Senior Curator of the Plains Indian Museum (a division of the Buffalo Bill Center for the West in Cody, Wyoming), has known Red Star’s work since he and his mother collaborated on a tipi project displayed in Anadarko, Oklahoma, in 1973.

      One is struck immediately by his strong colors and compositions, but as an anthropologist, I am most taken by his faithful recording of his culture and people. I’ve come to know quite a few Crow people since coming here more than 20 years ago, and when I look at his portraits, I see them and the lands they inhabit.

      I have also been impressed with his availability and accessibility. He has attended numerous events here, including speaking at a seminar we had on contemporary plains Indian art.

      Suzanne Deats, an arts writer who worked as an artist alongside Red Star in Santa Fe, notes:

      Kevin has been the most successful of all the modern Indian artists in preserving his tribal traditions while being a completely modern artist. Some have gone away from the subject and stylized it more, but Kevin hasn’t. He just paints from a very, very modern aesthetic. I don’t think anyone else has gone to that high level beyond the purely decorative. Although his work is absolutely about his tribal traditions, he is not just mindlessly imitating it. He is making an artist’s statement in every painting he does.

      Alex Betts owns and operates Windsor Betts Art Brokerage house in Santa Fe. She met the artist around 1977, and recalls her first impression of his work:

      I thought it was really honest art. Here is a guy chronicling his people when they were still warriors and hunters but doing it from his own vision and from stories told to him by elders. It was just so unique and I was enthralled by his ability to articulate these stories in paint. And, I was impressed with his humbleness about his talent, and what a gentle soul he has. He is absolutely courageous as well. He stayed true to his artistic calling and was able to survive with it, where so many of his classmates from IAIA didn’t. He stood firm in his vision and stayed on the job, even when times were tough.

      Foreword

      I attach great importance to that first wave of artists who graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a generation ago. Lloyd New, the institution’s first art director, had a very particular dream—namely, that Native art be a respected part not only of the life and culture of Native communities themselves, but also that a path be created to the larger international art movement and market for contemporary Native artists. Lloyd’s aspirations have typified Kevin Red Star’s career, as well as the professional journey of other artists of that era. They were the vanguard, and they accomplished it with great success.

      Lloyd was a bridge builder between Native and international arts. He wanted Native artists to engage other arts movements around them, including Euro-American modernism and contemporary art. My own father, born in 1912, had been involved in a similar initiative years earlier. He went to art school in the late 1930s and ‘40s, and grew up in an era when it was very difficult for Native artists to get off the walls of natural history museums and into art museums. He succeeded in that effort, but Lloyd wanted to make sure, through an institution like IAIA, that subsequent generations of Indian artists, in their entirety, would be able to do the same. Kevin is a superlative example of the legacy of my father and the efforts of Lloyd New.

      The past generation has been witness to such significant progress for contemporary Native artists on this journey. Their engagement with and participation in the larger international arts community is a splendid reflection of the ambitions and determination of those like my father and Lloyd.

      But I believe an aspect of the Native arts exists that all of us should continue to respect and to ponder in that engagement with the global arts community. Native people bring to the creation of fine arts and material culture a fundamental historical approach and ethic that is profoundly different in origin and endpoint than Western art history. In Europe prior to the Renaissance, art was created in integral—indeed, inseparable—association with everyday life, such as art created for use by the church as components of religious and ceremonial practice.

      The Renaissance signaled a sharp ninety-degree turn as Western art embarked down a very linear path of finer and higher art, individual expressions with universal meaning. It disengaged in important respects from daily life, moving, ultimately and metaphorically, from the church to the gallery wall. But Native art never did. Most Native art is still grounded in cultural communalism, and in a sense is an expression of collective viewpoint and will.

      Native arts, including what are referred to in Western art history as the fine arts, have never completely followed suit. Sometimes the aesthetic approaches of Western art have attempted to impose themselves on the Native arts—such as focusing solely on the aesthetics of objects as art, and imposing imported distinctions between low art and high art. But Native artists frequently—and correctly—are challenging those dividing lines, as they should!

      At the Autry National Center of the American West, we do not abide such separations, recognizing that art sits in diverse places, and includes paintings, sculptures, baskets, and ceramics—it is all art. Kevin stands courageously for this cultural and artistic ethic. He creates visual art that is beautiful by any aesthetic standard, and yet at the same time remains very culturally connected. I believe Kevin would be the first to say that the beauty of his individual expression on canvas has deep roots in the culture and history of Native life and community, and, indeed—in poetic respects—is done on that community’s behalf.

      Mr. Blackbird

      Mr. Blackbird, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 44 inches, as seen in Red Star’s Montana studio. 2013 Owensboro Museum of Fine Art exhibit.

      Preface

      I am proud to publish a book showcasing the work of Kevin Red Star.

      Many years ago, I accompanied my parents on a vacation to Montana and we visited the Crow Nation. My mother, an art lover, made inquiries about artists in that community and was told about a talented young artist named Kevin Red Star. I was intrigued by the name.

      Some years later, I was on a business trip to Santa Fe and had the opportunity to speak with Fritz Scholder about his work at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Scholder had been one of Kevin’s teachers at the school and mentioned his admiration for Red Star and his art.

      Hearing the Red Star name again inspired me to take a look at Kevin’s work and find out more about this gifted artist. Red Star’s Native American background combined with a spirited modernist attitude and a sense of humor creates very appealing artwork.

      I first met Kevin in Cody, Wyoming, at the

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