NEW ACQUISITION
As part of an effort to enhance the diversity of holdings in its permanent collection, the Denver Art Museum has acquired a series of works by Wendy Red Star.
DENVER ART MUSEUM
The Denver Art Museum is expanding the depth and volume of its collection through a variety of new acquisitions which started in 2019 and remains an ongoing project. Among these is a pigment print on archival paper by Crow artist Wendy Red Star, contributing to the museum’s collection of Native American art.
When Red Star was an artist in residence at the Denver Art Museum in 2016 and 2017, the Native arts department provided her with scans of catalog cards documenting works in the Crow collection. On the backs of many of the cards are drawings and paintings done by artists during the Works Progress Administration era of 1935 to 1943. Red Star used these cards as reference during the Crow Nation’s annual Crow Fair in Montana, and subsequently took photographs of the people and horses wearing similar material during the parades. The artist’s Accession Series, born out of this project, was purchased with the Nancy Blomberg Acquisitions Fund for Native American Art, created in memory of the museum’s late chief curator, Nancy Blomberg.
“[The series] connects our historical collection of Apsáalooke (Crow) arts with the history of our Native arts department and with contemporary Apsáalooke culture,” says museum curator John Lukavic. “Her work titled Catalogue Number 1949.73 is particularly special as it brings together visually a painting of an iconic ‘wedding robe’ (bishbaalopúuchihkuu), found on the back of a catalog card in DAM’S records, with Wendy’s own family: a photograph of her father and daughter taken at a recent Crow Fair. This series as a whole helps us activate our historical collections by making them accessible and meaningful today.”