How are your running your application? Are you talking about in debug / testing mode using runserver, or are you talking about in a production mode?
The two answers are different.
In a test/debug mode, there are settings file settings that need to be set -
see the static-files how-to page.
In a production environment, you may want the static files served by your webserver (Nginx / Apache). If your settings are correct, you would use the “collectstatic” management command to copy those files to the directory from which they can be served.