OTTAWA, Canada — Apsáalooke artist Wendy Red Star’s 2006 photograph “Winter” now anchors the National Gallery of Canada’s exhibition “Winter Count: Embracing the Cold,” which opened Nov. 21 and gathers more than 150 works that reimagine winter from the 19th century to today. By surrounding herself with plastic snow, cardboard wildlife and other bargain-bin props, the artist turns a seemingly cozy seasonal scene into a bold takedown of the stereotypes that have long frozen Indigenous people into myth, Dec. 10, 2025.
From a distance, “Winter” could pass for a fashion ad: a composed woman in brilliant red-and-blue Apsáalooke dress sits in a snowdrift, framed by trees and birds. Step closer and the illusions fall apart. The “snow” is plastic, the birds and skulls are props, and the forest behind Wendy Red Star is a wrinkled printed backdrop closer to a mall portrait studio than a pristine wilderness. The work asks viewers to notice how easily an artificial scene can masquerade as authentic Indigenous life.
The photograph hangs near the entrance of “Winter Count: Embracing the Cold,” a sprawling show that mixes historic Indigenous belongings, Inuit prints, Canadian landscape paintings and European Impressionist snow scenes. The exhibition, organized across Indigenous Ways and Decolonization and Canadian Art departments, tracks how winter imagery has helped construct national myths of purity, endurance and “empty” land. According to Roberts Projects, which represents the artist, the curators aim to show how winter has been experienced across cultures—a frame that makes Wendy Red Star’s icy stage set feel less like decoration and more like a warning flare.
How Wendy Red Star turns fake snow into a real critique
“Winter” is part of Four Seasons, a 2006 self-portrait series in which Wendy Red Star appears in ceremonial Crow elk-tooth dress amid astroturf, inflatable deer, cardboard trees and other conspicuously synthetic scenery. On her own website, she lists the project as four archival pigment prints—Indian Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring—each built from cheap materials that echo natural history dioramas. The visible fakery points to the way museums, postcards and ads have long packaged Indigenous cultures as timeless, pristine and safely distant from contemporary life.
That critique has been building for nearly two decades. A 2015 piece in Hyperallergic noted how Four Seasons confronts American Indian stereotypes by surrounding the artist with obviously cardboard wildlife and glossy, mass-produced landscape backdrops. In 2020, an interview in the environmental humanities journal Edge Effects described how Wendy Red Star uses humor and play to “subvert museum practices that freeze Indigenous cultures in the annals of history,” turning the tools of display back on the institutions that once objectified her community. And in 2022, The New Yorker highlighted her “Indigenous gaze” and sharp deployment of satire to flip bigoted tropes—from dime-store “squaw” imagery to western movie clichés—into biting punchlines.
Today, Wendy Red Star is widely recognized as one of the most influential Indigenous artists working in North America. The Apsáalooke (Crow) multimedia artist, raised on the Crow Reservation in Montana and now based in Portland, Oregon, builds her projects from archival research, family histories and hands-on making across photography, sculpture, textiles and performance to challenge how institutions have told Native histories. In 2024 she was awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant, a nod to the way her blend of humor, scholarship and visual punch is reshaping how museums and the public imagine Indigenous presence.
Placed at the threshold of “Winter Count,” Red Star’s photograph functions like a visual disclosure form. Before visitors step into rooms filled with Impressionist snowdrifts and iconic Canadian vistas, they pass Wendy Red Star’s plastic drifts and visibly wrinkled backdrop—a reminder that every winter image, especially those featuring Indigenous people, is constructed by someone. The fake snow might gleam under the gallery lights, but in “Winter” it’s there to melt away the myth.
