Windsor Betts

Since embarking on his professional artistic journey, the acknowledged master artist is considered a visual historian and ambassador for his Native Crow culture. In 1997, Kevin Red Star received an Honorary Doctorate Degree in Fine Art from the Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana and in 2010, an Honorary Doctorate Degree from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Kevin Red Star's works are the focal point of several important museum collections, including...

• The Smithsonian Institution - National Museum of the American Indian
• CM Russell Museum
• Heard Museum
• Denver Art Museum
• Eiteljorg Museum
• Southwest Museum
• Whitney Museum of Western Art
• Institute of American Indian Arts Museum
• United States Department of State

Kevin Red Star was born in 1943 on the Crow Reservation in Lodgegrass Montana. The third oldest in a family of nine children Kevin grew up in a family that values music art and culture. His mother, Amy Bright Wings, practiced traditional Crow embroidery and beadwork. His Father, Wallace Red Star, was a musician, horseman and a collector of Remington and Russell prints.

He studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with James McGrath, where he was allowed to explore his history and culture and experimented with the "New Indian Art." Then he attended the San Francisco Art Institute on a scholarship, which "further exposed him to the avant-garde and the political and social concerns of post-modern art."

In 1966, he returned to Montana, living at Red Lodge near Billings. Since his return to Montana, Red Star's work has increasingly expressed his self-affirmed role as historian, recorder, and ambassador for his native Crow culture. Surrounded by his extended family, his horses and his ancestral homeland, Kevin Red Star has established a unique balance between his world and his art.