Starr relocated to Los Angeles, where she worked behind the scenes at entertainment companies like Viacom Productions and Showtime Networks. During those years, she honed her songwriting and performance skills at coffeehouses in Los Angeles and Hollywood. In 1996, she left her corporate job behind and became a full-time musician and artist.
Starr’s first CD, Meet the Diva, was named Best Independent Recording at the Second Annual Native American Music Awards. Her second release, Wind-Up, contained the hit Junior Frybread, which was named Song/Single of the Year at the Fourth Annual Native American Music Awards. In 2002, Wacky Productions released her third CD, Backflip, which featured Grammy-nominated country act BR549. Starr’s fourth CD, The Red Road – Original Cast Recording was named the Best Contemporary CD at the 15thAnnual First Americans in the Arts Awards and features a Who’s Who of musical guest stars from Los Angeles and Nashville. Additionally, Arigon was named “Songwriter of the Year” by the Native American Music Awards and received a nomination for “Best Country CD” from Canada’s Aboriginal Peoples Choice Awards.
Starr’s music has taken her around the world including stops in London and the famous West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, in addition to appearances at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and at venues like Sky City and Isleta Casinos in New Mexico, the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa and the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC and New York City.
Starr has also gained fame for her acting and has been awarded two First Americans in the Arts Awards, the Maverick Award from the Los Angeles Women’s Theater Project, and a Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers Award. Arigon is the playwright, composer and performer in The Red Road, a wild, wacky musical. The play garnered rave reviews from the Los Angeles Times and Daily Variety and has toured across the U.S. and Australia. Arigon also wrote and performed two original plays in Red Ink, a compilation of contemporary Native stories produced by the Mixed Blood Theater in Minneapolis. Additionally, Starr has appeared on television in Showtime’s comedy, Barbershop: The Series and ABC’s General Hospital.
Native Voices at the Autry and the Native Radio Theater project teamed with Starr for Super Indian, a radio comedy series she created which was taped before a live audience and broadcast in 2007. In July 2009, Starr taped a live radio version of her one-woman show The Red Road, directed by award-winning director/producer Dirk Maggs (Audible’s The Sandman and The X-Files, plus the audio adaption of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy.)
In April 2011, Starr published Super Indian online as a webcomic. The comic boasted a new panel every Monday continuously for almost five years. The weekly webcomics were compiled and published as Super Indian Volume One in 2012 to immediate acclaim. Her work has been highlighted in the publications First American Art and Native Peoples, featured on the national news program PBS News Hour and on the arts blog of the National Endowment for the Arts. Super Indian Volume Two was published in 2015 and Super Indian Volume Three was published in 2024.
All volumes of Super Indian have made their way into libraries, collections, and curricula of multiple colleges and universities across the United States and Canada.
Super Indian was part of a special exhibition at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona in 2015 that featured Native American superheroes. Super Indian was also included in DOI Goes Pop, an exhibit at the Department of the Interior Museum in Washington, DC, plus exhibits at the Museum of the American Indian and the Form + Concept Gallery, both in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Arigon’s comic art has also been included in exhibitions in Oklahoma, including the Gilcrease Museum, First American Museum, Oklahoma Contemporary and Philbrook Museum. Her work is also featured in the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City. Super Indian was also a part of a special science fiction exhibit at the Kunsthistorische Museumsverband, part of the Weltmuseum in Vienna, Austria.
Arigon created and edited Tales of the Mighty Code Talkers, a comic anthology featuring stories from different tribes that were part of the US military’s use of tribal languages as unbreakable codes. In addition to guiding the efforts of noted artists Roy Boney (Cherokee), Johnnie Diacon (Muscogee), Jonathan Nelson (Diné) and Michael Sheyahshe (Caddo), she also contributed her skills as a writer, artist, colorist and letterer. The anthology was named the Best Middle School Book by the American Indian Library Association in 2018.
In 2017, Arigon was selected as a writer/artist of the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, sponsored by the George Kaiser Family Foundation. During her Fellowship, she wrote a romantic comedy about a Native family who relocates to 1950s Los Angeles titled Round Dance. The play was part of a staged reading and eventually fully produced by the Oklahoma Indian Theater Company in 2018.
Arigon’s comic artwork gained notice and attention from editors at The Nib, a collection of topical comics and Vox Media’s Polygon website. Her work with writer S.I. Rosenbaum (How to Have A Powwow in a Pandemic) was reprinted in The COVID Chronicles published by Graphic Mundi Press.
Baseball has been a constant in Arigon’s life. Arigon’s mother Ruth attended many baseball games in Tulsa, Oklahoma in her youth with her mother Flora Snow and Aunt Cassie Musgrove. Arigon’s father Ken played baseball near his home in Shawnee, Oklahoma. Ruth and Arigon’s sister Gay were lifelong fans of the San Diego Padres. When Arigon relocated to Los Angeles, she became a Dodgers fan. Every October, an online challenge was issued to artists to create a piece of inked art for each day. Rather than use the seasonal Halloween prompts, Arigon switched her focus to playoff/World Series baseball and began creating digital inked drawings of her favorite Dodger players. Those drawings caught the attention of Cherokee writer Traci Sorell. Traci was also a Tulsa Artist Fellow at the time and a successful, published children’s book author. She asked Arigon to be the illustrator for her book, Contenders: Two Native Americans, One World Series, which told the true story of Charles Bender (Ojibwe) and John Tortes Meyers (Cahuilla), Major League Baseball players who faced each other in the 1911 World Series. The book was published in 2023 by Kokila Books, an imprint of Penguin/Random House. Contenders also received a Picture Book Honor from the American Indian Library Association in 2024.
In late December 2022, Arigon was approached by the producers of the PBS television series Native America to be part of their upcoming second season. Arigon worked with the producers to set-up a live concert at Tulsa’s famous Church Studios. The film crew worked with Arigon in Oklahoma as she celebrated her mother Ruth Wahpecome’s life at Belvin Baptist Church in Okmulgee, then back to Tulsa for the live concert. Arigon’s scenes were part of the fourth episode (Women Rule) of the series broadcast in April 2023.
As soon as the work on Contenders was sent off to the publisher, Arigon resumed her long-delayed project, Super Indian Volume Three. She finished the work on the three comic stories in the volume, plus two Real Super Indian features and got them to her printer pronto. Volume Three was officially released by Wacky/Rezium Studios on April 11, 2024.
As these projects were unfolding, Arigon also updated her lettering and layout work on both volumes of Super Indian. “One of the great things about self-publishing is being able to update and improve your work,” said Arigon. “As I learn new skills, it’s fantastic to be able to put them into action.”
Some of Arigon’s upcoming comic book projects are Super Indian Volume Four, and an anthology with stories from Indian Country highlighting the US Government Relocation Program. “Many of my family members were part of the program,” said Arigon. “Some stayed in urban areas and some returned to Oklahoma. I think it’s a fascinating way to tell the stories of Urban Indians and the effects of living and growing up in a mainstream environment on our way of life.”
Arigon will continue her work in live theater this fall. She is part of the cast of Antikoni, a Native retelling of the Greek classic. Produced by Native Voices at the Autry, the play will debut at the Southwest campus of the Autry Museum of the West in November 2024. Arigon is also researching and writing the plays to complete her ‘century cycle’ of plays. “August Wilson, the legendary African American playwright, famously wrote a century cycle highlighting stories from his community. I want to follow suit and tell stories from each decade of the 20th Century,” enthused Arigon.
Arigon Starr is based in Los Angeles and is a member of SAG-AFTRA and Actors Equity.
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