Wendy Red Star Gets Her Bag
Most everything has a price—eggs, gas, art, empire—but how arbitrary is it, and who pays? The other day, at Sargent’s Daughters gallery, in Tribeca, the forty-four-year-old Apsáalooke multimedia artist Wendy Red Star held out one of her large-scale (melon-size) blown-glass replicas of trade beads—the regular-sized versions of which traversed the globe for centuries, used for bartering in Africa and the Americas. “Feel that, it’s so awesome,” she said, caressing the “Manhattan Bead” (white, with red and blue stripes, $5,000).
Red Star, who grew up on the Crow Indian Reservation in southern Montana and is now based in Oregon, worked with gaffers to create the glasswork for her show, titled “One Blue Bead,” which also features grids of watercolors of, yes, beads. The gallery, on Broadway, is situated along a historic Native trade thoroughfare, near where the Dutch “purchased” Manhattan from Lenape Indians for an apocryphal “handful of beads,” in 1626.
“I started off with the Dutch Moon Bead,” Red Star said. “I looked into it and the Dutch didn’t make these, they only became synonymous with the Dutch because the Dutch would take them to Africa.” She noted that her art usually involves “some kind of nerd research project” into archives and census records. In the diaries of Lewis and Clark, she’d read that the duo stocked up on a type of faceted red trade bead, “because they thought it would just fly off the shelves, but it wasn’t popular at all.” Bright-blue beads, in fact, were the hot commodity; their shade is now referred to as Bodmer blue, after the illustrator Karl Bodmer’s nineteenth-century portraits of Native people.
Red Star’s big beads lay on the floor of the gallery, on top of vintage Hudson’s Bay point blankets, so named because they feature a number of “points,” or short black lines, along one side. “When they were displayed for sale, that would tell you how many beaver pelts you’d need to buy the blanket,” she explained. “What you see in photos of different Native delegations is that people will have point blankets wrapped around them with the points facing out, like a baseball cap with the sticker still on it.”
Plotting the installation, she’d thought about the knockoff designer handbags sold on Canal Street, around the corner, “and how we, as humans, want to be a part of that—O.K., so we can’t get the actual one, we get the fake one, and walk around hoping that it will appear as if it’s real,” she said.
“Do they do, like, Venmo?” Red Star asked her gallerist Allegra LaViola, on the way out, in a faux-fur coat, to shop for a bag for her luxury-loving sister.
LaViola laughed: “I think they do cold, hard cash.”
On Canal, Red Star encountered throngs of jostling venders standing over bags arranged on the sidewalk. She homed in on a Takashi Murakami Louis Vuitton number (the real thing goes for more than two thousand dollars). Asking price: $130; final bid: $100.
Police sirens blared, and the venders scooped up their wares and disappeared. Earlier this year, after ICE raided Canal Street, some Tribeca gallerists came under fire for holding a meeting about how to disperse venders outside their spaces; last week, a bill backed by Mayor Mamdani went into effect which basically decriminalized vending without a license.
Walking back, Red Star discussed the cost of actual antique trade beads. “A string can sometimes be five hundred or a thousand, but you can find individual ones for maybe eight dollars,” she said. “I go to Etsy and eBay, or, if I’m near a reservation, a lot of times pawnshops will have them.”
LaViola greeted her at the door. “Did you get a bag?”
“Yes! It was very exciting,” Red Star said. “And then to see them all pack up—it was really impressive. That’s why the bags are on sheets, but they also had little wagons.”
“How much?” LaViola asked.
“Well, they wanted one-thirty,” Red Star said, presenting the bag.
LaViola scoffed. “I would’ve gotten them down to, like, twenty-five bucks. Well, maybe sixty. This is terrible. Look at this workmanship! Also, it’s upside down.” Indeed, the rainbow “LV” logos were printed the wrong way up.
“Your problem is, you had the artist go out and negotiate,” Red Star said.
“Your sister will burn this on a pyre,” LaViola replied. She reminisced about being in L.A. with Red Star, at a Murakami show at the Broad. “Wendy’s sister was there and she wanted Murakami to sign a bag she’d brought with her, and he was, like, ‘I’m not giving autographs.’ ”
They tracked him down outside later and he signed the purse. “He actually drew some cherries on it,” Red Star recalled. Might that make the bag too valuable to use as a bag?
“It’s a collector’s item now,” LaViola said. ♦