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First Indigenous Arts Award honoree to visit campus Nov. 5-7

by MaryAlice Bitts-Jackson

Campus will soon be visited by an acclaimed artist—one whose work and life resonate powerfully at Dickinson and in its hometown of Carlisle. Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke [Crow], b. 1981) is the first Indigenous artist to receive the Ģ����Ƶ Arts Award.

The Nov. 7 award ceremony and concurrent exhibition arrive during an important moment in the college’s ongoing work to reckon with its hometown's connections to Indigenous Peoples and histories.

About the artist

Red Star is the recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2018) and an Anonymous Was a Woman Grant (2022), and she was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2024. Her artwork is held in more than 60 public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art and Guggenheim Museum, as well as the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (Fort Worth, Tex.), Denver Art Museum and British Museum.

The artist explores her Indigenous identity and heritage through bold photographs and colorful prints informed by her deep research into Native American photographs, artifacts and crafts held in non-Native archives. Her work reconsiders and recontextualizes these archival items, drawing them together with her own photographs. This creates new and personalized narratives and a new perspective on the role of archives and museum collections—and on the personal and cultural memories they represent.

“Her deep love for her people is palpable throughout all of the works, specifically her desire to create an archive of Crow history and culture that can be passed down to future generations, including her own daughter,” says Lisa Mazzotti, a study-abroad student from Italy who’s been learning about and captivated by Red Star’s work. “There's a care and affection for all the people that came before her and those who will come after, a wish to connect them and immortalize them in her art.”

Red Star’s work perhaps holds special resonance in Carlisle, home to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (CIIS) from 1879 to 1918. The CIIS was a federal boarding school for Native American children that aimed to force cultural assimilation, and photographs of its students were central to its nationwide propaganda campaign. Members of Wendy Red Star’s Apsáalooke community were CIIS students.

For students who've been studying the history of the CIIS through the , like Kira Bergeron '27, a history major with an art history minor, these connections, combined with Red Star's depictions of non-Native archives, are particularly affecting. "The archival reconstruction in Red Star’s work regarding unnamed or unexplained Native American histories was very impactful," Bergeron says. "I also love the wide range of ideas that she covered, even in the small number of works that are in the Trout Gallery, while keeping a cohesive theme."

About the public events

Red Star was the Department of Art & Art History’s unanimous top choice for the 2025 Arts Award, recognizing individuals or groups making an outstanding contribution to the creative or performing arts. Previous recipients include Robert Frost, John Cage, David Mamet and Toshiko Takaezu.

The artist will accept the 2025 Arts Award on Nov. 7 at 7 p.m. in Rubendall Recital Hall. The free public presentation will include an interview between the artist and Assistant Professor of American Studies Darren Lone Fight (proud member of three affiliated tribes, Citizen Mvskoke Nation). The award will be bestowed by President John E. Jones III ’77, P’11.

Nov. 7 also marks the start of a exhibition of Red Star’s recent work. The opening reception for Wendy Red Star: Her Dreams Are True will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. in the Weiss Center for the Arts lobby, immediately before the Arts Award presentation.

Notably, these events will be held just one day before an important milestone in the college’s history: a ground-blessing ceremony to kick off construction of Dickinson’s Jim Thorpe Center for the Futures of Native Peoples.

Close connections

While in Carlisle, Red Star will share meals with students, faculty and staff; tour the former Carlisle Indian School grounds; and visit an exhibit of CIIS photography at the Cumberland County Historical Society. She’ll also deliver critiques to senior studio art majors and visit Professor of Art History Elizabeth Lee’s Contemporary Art class.

Nina Grafton ’26 (women’s, gender & sexuality studies, German) is enrolled in that class. She’s also an education intern at the Trout Gallery, and she’s been teaching middle-school students about Red Star and her artworks through the Trout’s Culture Studio after-school program.

“I'm so excited to get to hear more about Red Star's work from the artist herself,” Grafton says. “When you research and engage with an artist's body of work so deeply, you naturally form a connection with certain works or series. But you don’t usually get to interact with the artist in real life!”

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Published October 29, 2025