Since the beginning of her career, the Native American artist Wendy Red Star has drawn from oral histories passed down through her family. Born in 1981 in Billings, Montana, she is Apsáalooke and Irish, and was raised on Crow Reservation, the largest of the state’s seven reservations. Red Star’s work places Indigenous culture alongside American history, and her latest exhibition investigates the cultural networks formed by trade beads, which were passed between colonizers and Indigenous communities. Monumental watercolor paintings showcase over 200 different types of beads and their uses, from currency to decoration. Red Star also shows how the small object allowed colonizers to assert dominance in a world grappling with a new balance of power. —Maggie Turner