Art+Feminism is pleased to announce that Wendy Red Star and Tuesday Smillie have been selected for the 2019 Call to Action art commissions. Under this program, artists create a Creative Commons licensed work that is hosted on Wikimedia Commons. Established in 2017, Divya Mehra’s Dangerous Women (Blaze of Glory) was the inaugural commission.
Ashkaamne (matrilineal inheritance), 2019 by Wendy Red Star depicts in black and white the artist and her daughter, Beatrice Red Star Fletcher, reclining in matching striped shirts and blankets, with the words, “Apsáalooke feminist,” repeated in the background. Apsáalooke inheritance is based on matrilineal descent, tracing affiliation along with the mother-to-daughter line. The Apsáalooke Nation consists of ten matrilineal clans, which represent the belief that there are ten lunar months from conception to birth. The mother’s clan takes care of the physical and emotional needs of the child. Wendy and Beatrice are part of the Ashkaamne clan, also known as the Treacherous Lodge. This image represents a lineage, female empowerment, and the next generation. Click here to view the work on Wikimedia Commons.
Rage/Sorrow, 2018 by Tuesday Smillie is an animated gif. The text “RAGE” appears large, filling the square format from left to right. “RAGE” is quickly obscured by a cascade of rectangles and the text, “SORROW,” repeated in a smaller font. The work was initially inspired by the artist’s reflection on the public murder of queer Greek HIV activist, Zak Kostopoulos, by a mob of people. Rage/Sorrow, a born-digital work, suggests the role of technology and the internet in nurturing and exacerbating pre-existing social divisions. The endless loop of the gif mimics a cycle of anger and anguish produced by the constant stream of horrifying news. Click here to view the work on Wikimedia Commons.
About the Artists
Raised on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana, Wendy Red Star works across disciplines to explore the intersections of Native American ideologies and colonialist structures. An avid researcher of archives and historical narratives, Red Star seeks to incorporate and recast her research, offering new and unexpected perspectives, along with creating a forum for the expression of Native women’s voices in contemporary art. Red Star holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Montana State University, Bozeman and a Master of Fine Arts from University of California, Los Angeles. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, at venues including Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, Hanover; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris. Red Star is the recipient of a 2017 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and a 2018 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. She has lectured widely, at institutions including Banff Centre; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Yale University, New Haven; and California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. The Newark Museum will host Red Star’s first career survey exhibition later this year. She lives and works in Portland, Oregon.
At the core of Tuesday Smillie’s work is a question about the individual and the group: the binary of inclusion and exclusion and the porous membrane between the two. Smillie holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Oregon College of Art and Craft. Recently, she has shown at Artist Space, New York; New Museum, New York; Participant Inc, New York; the Rubin Museum of Art; and Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham. Smillie is the recipient of a 2014 Artist Grant from Art Matters, New York and the 2018–19 Ruth Ann and Nathan Perlmutter Artist-in-Residence Award by Rose Art Museum. In 2014, she was named the first Resident Artist by the Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art. Her work has been featured in Artforum; the Boston Globe; and New York Magazine, and she has lectured at Cornell University, Ithaca and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Smillie lives and works in New York.
About Art+Feminism
Founded in 2014, Art+Feminism is a do-it-yourself campaign to improve coverage of gender, feminism, and the arts on Wikipedia. The project is a response to the gendered gaps in participation and content on the world’s most popular online research tool. Art+Feminism creates accessible training materials and step-by-step organizer kits to encourage the organization of edit-a-thons, events where people of all gender identities and expressions collectively create and update articles on Wikipedia, add images to Wikimedia Commons, expand WikiData entries, and more. Since 2014, over 10,000 people at more than 800 events around the world have participated in Art+Feminism’s Edit-a-thons, resulting in the creation and improvement of more than 33,000 articles on Wikipedia.
Art+Feminism is led by Siân Evans, Jacqueline Mabey, McKensie Mack, Michael Mandiberg, and Melissa Tamani. Art+Feminism’s Regional Ambassadors are Mohammed Sadat Abdulai, Accra, Ghana; Stacey Allan, Los Angeles, California; Amber Berson, Montreal, Canada; Daniela Brugger, Basel, Switzerland; Marta Delatte, Barcelona, Spain; Dominique Eliane, Ivory Coast; Medhavi Gandhi, Chandigarh, India; Linden How, Portland, Portland, Oregon; Walaa Abdel Manaem, Cairo, Egypt; Amanda Meeks, Flagstaff, Arizona; Jessie Mi, Taiwan; Juliana Monteiro, São Paulo, Brazil; and Taryn Tomasello, Portland, Oregon. Art+Feminism is supported by Qubit New Music, Inc. and the Wikimedia Foundation.