Kevin Red Star

Kevin Red Star (born 1943) is a Crow artist from Lodge Grass, Montana, whose vivid paintings and prints celebrate the life, ceremony, and visual magnificence of the Crow people with a boldness and graphic intensity that have made him one of the most widely recognized Indigenous artists in America. His work carries the deep cultural knowledge of an insider combined with the formal ambition of a trained contemporary painter, and the combination produces images of extraordinary power. Red Star attended the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe as one of its first students - the school opened in 1962, and Red Star was part of the remarkable inaugural generation that also included T.C. Cannon and others who would shape the Native American art renaissance. He went on to earn a fine arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute, where he was exposed to the Bay Area's vibrant experimental culture, and his work reflects both of these formative experiences: the cultural rootedness of his IAIA training and the formal ambition of his San Francisco years. His paintings draw on historical photographs of nineteenth-century Crow life - particularly the remarkable photographic archives documenting Crow dress, regalia, and ceremony - and reanimate them in contemporary compositions of striking visual intensity. The colors are bold and declarative; the figures carry their regalia with pride and authority; the compositions have a graphic energy that recalls both Plains pictorial traditions and the poster art of the twentieth century. The work is celebratory without being sentimental, historically grounded without being backward-looking. Red Star's work is collected internationally and exhibited regularly in Scottsdale and Santa Fe galleries. He has received honorary doctorates and lifetime achievement recognition from arts organizations throughout the Mountain West and is considered one of the essential voices in the history of contemporary Indigenous art.