During a five-month residency at the Denver Art Museum, Red Star, a Crow (Apsáalooke) artist, encountered cataloging cards of Native objects in the museum’s collection. Each contained written information on one side and a delicate watercolor on the other. At the annual Crow Fair, a gathering that since 1904 has passed on traditions and built intergenerational unity, she photographed similar materials being used and worn by contemporary Apsáalooke people. Each work in the resulting series, Accession, juxtaposes these two depictions and is titled by a common convention used by museums, including the Carter, that identifies each object with a number that includes the year it joined the museum collection. The contemporary images add important context to the historic objects, emphasizing both the resiliency of Crow culture in the face of oppression and the evolution and vitality of Indigenous people, who often are falsely presented as “vanished.”

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)