The Exquisite Catalog of a Crow Fair

Over a five-month period spanning 2016 and 2017, I worked as the Native Artist-in-Residence at the Denver Art Museum. During my time there I focused my research on objects from my own tribe, the Crow Nation, including such items as clothing, moccasins, leggings, belts, and elk tooth dresses. I asked the researchers in the Native Art department to print out images of items in the Native American Collections database. They told me that anything that wasn’t digitized could be found in the Native Art department’s old card catalog system.

What I saw there stunned me. On one side of each 5x8-inch ochre yellow card was a beautiful watercolor illustration of the object; on the other, a description of the object, the date it was added to the collection, how much it cost, and other details. I soon learned that these remarkable but unsigned drawings, carefully crafted with detail and intimacy, had been commissioned by Denver Art Museum in the 1930s and 40s and executed by artists working for the Works Progress Administration.

I felt I had to use the cards in my work for this project in order to add context to the objects they depict and to honor them as works of art in their own right. I felt a connection with the artists who created the work, and I was jealous of the time they got to spend with my ancestors’ materials.

Last summer, I decided to take digital copies of forty of these cards to my reservation in Montana during the Crow Nation’s annual Crow Fair, held every third week in August since 1904 along the Little Bighorn River. Nearly 50,000 people attend the fair, including around 11,000 enrolled tribal members, almost 80 percent of the Crow tribe. Every family constructs a camp, and members of the Apsáalooke—the name of the tribe in our own language—gather every morning during the weeklong celebration for a parade symbolizing the moving of camp, an action that expresses the deep-rooted cultural tradition of movement in Apsáalooke society. Families put on traditional dress and display their horses during rituals that recall the nineteenth-century migrations from summer to winter camps. These parades pass on traditions from horse culture to car culture, from buffalo days to reservation life—weaving each generation into the fabric of a living, resilient tribal Nation.

Using the objects depicted on the catalog cards as points of reference, I took snapshots of similar Crow material worn during the parades. Waiting at the gathering place for the parade to begin, I identified individual parade goers and paired them with the most appropriate item cataloged on the cards, isolating intimate moments in the photographs and removing the backgrounds. In doing so, the subjects, the detail of their outfits, their facial expressions, and their finely-adorned horses came into sharper focus, highlighting the richness of Crow culture and giving context to the catalog cards themselves.

Items once draped on horses, cars, or the arms and bodies of Apsáalooke women, men, boys, and girls are linked to each of the illustrations on the catalog cards. I am amazed by the similarities in the coupling of a photograph of a martingale on my daughter's parade horse with a WPA artist’s brilliantly-crafted drawing of a beaded geometric martingale from the 1930s. Sweat stains from the horses and grass stains from playful children offer insights into the utilitarian beauty of objects meant to be in motion. This is a work in progress that will eventually be turned into a print series. It demonstrates the strong cultural connection that the Crow community maintains through the generations.

Wendy Red Star was raised on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana.

Her work is informed both by her cultural heritage and her engagement with many forms of creative expression, including photography, sculpture, video, fiber arts, and performance. Red Star has exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fondation Cartier pour l’ Art Contemporain, Portland Art Museum, Hood Art Museum, St. Louis Art Museum, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, among others. She lives in Portland, Oregon.