Star Wallowing Bull

Star Wallowing Bull, son of Frank Big Bear, was born in Minneapolis in 1973. His work is held in public and private collections across the US. He has been the recipient of several awards and fellowships, including a Native American Fellowship from the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in 2001, and the Juror’s Award from the Plain Arts Museum in 2002. He also runs art and heritage workshops for children from the White Earth Reservation and the Madison Elementary School in Fargo, North Dakota.

At first glance, Star Wallowing Bull appears to be reciprocating decades of appropriation by Modernist artists of indigenous motifs with his utilization of American pop-culture. He seems to do this with Pop Art antics, but this suggests his work is made solely in retaliation of Modernism and “Coca-colonization.” Wallowing Bull's work doesn't lend itself to a simple didactic. These drawings are magically complicated both formally and conceptually, mixing humor and irony while citing disparate imagery. His adornment of entertainment icons, from the “All-American” Mickey Mouse to Yoda, in feather bonnets is amusingly sacrilegious to the stereotype. In a sense, Wallowing Bull is mixing up what many have tried to keep pure and romantic: the idea of a Pan-Indian identity existing in a separate world of its own, incognizant of and untouched by the world around.