A Gaze That Does Not Blink

Wendy Red Star’s Apsáalooke Feminist #2 at Portland State University

There is something quietly powerful about returning to your alma mater not as a student, but as a witness.

On October 11, 2025, I stepped into the lower level of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Portland State University — free admission, open doors, a familiar campus now reframed by time. I spent years walking these blocks as a design student. This time, I entered simply as a citizen of Portland.

And on the wall:

Wendy Red Star’s Apsáalooke Feminist #2 (2016).

A white couch.
A mother and daughter in Crow regalia.
Bold, vibrating geometric textiles behind them.
A direct, unflinching gaze.

The work is meticulously staged. It feels studio-controlled, almost hyper-aware of its own framing. This is not ethnography. Not nostalgia. Not documentary anthropology.

It is authorship — controlled, deliberate, and sovereign.

Red Star, an Apsáalooke artist — Apsáalooke being the Crow word for “Crow,” as she explains in her Portland Art Museum talk — places Indigenous womanhood within a contemporary domestic setting without softening its authority. The couch reads suburban. Familiar. Almost sitcom-adjacent. And yet the beadwork, regalia, and patterned textiles insist: tradition is not costume. It is continuity.

The word “Feminist” in the title does not feel ornamental. It feels structural.

There is humor here — but it is precise humor.
A quiet refusal of the colonial gaze.

You wanted authenticity?
Here it is — in my living room, on my terms.

The textile backdrop ripples like visual interference. Your eye cannot settle comfortably. The image resists flattening. It looks back.

Standing there — in a public university museum in a city I have lived in for over three decades — the piece felt particularly grounded. It wasn’t part of a blockbuster exhibit. It wasn’t framed as spectacle. It was installed as infrastructure.

Acquired through Oregon’s Percent for Art in Public Places program — embedded into the architecture of civic life.

That matters.

Indigenous feminist authorship embedded into civic space — not as an event, but as presence.

Returning to PSU as an alumnus adds another layer. Universities are places where narratives are shaped and contested. As a graphic design graduate, I was trained to think about composition, hierarchy, framing, and visual control.

This work is all of that — sharpened.

It centers Indigenous women without spectacle.
It decouples tradition from artifact status.
It reframes domestic space as sovereignty.

Later, I found a recorded talk from the Portland Art Museum — Wendy Red Star: Apsáalooke Feminist — posted nearly a decade ago. At the 57:46 mark, Red Star describes the series as “a modern portrait update of these turn-of-the-century photographs with me and Beatrice on our IKEA couch.” Beatrice is her daughter. The specificity matters. The couch is contemporary, global, ordinary.

The lineage is not symbolic. It is literal.

Indigenous continuity staged within present-day domestic life. Tradition is not displaced. It is lived.

And in a quieter, more personal way, it aligns with something I continue to reflect on: the importance of decentering inherited power structures and re-centering women’s authorship without apology.

Not as rhetoric.
As composition.

For someone who has built a life around Portland’s cultural ecosystem — theatre matinees in Lake Oswego, ballet at Keller Auditorium, community stages in Tualatin, high school productions, small museum encounters — works like this are foundational.

They are reminders that culture does not require scale to matter.

Sometimes it requires a couch.
And a gaze that does not blink.

---

Artwork Details

Artist: Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke / Crow)
Title: Apsáalooke Feminist #2
Year: 2016
Medium: Digital print on archival silver rag
Location Viewed: Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Portland State University, Portland, Oregon
City: Portland, Oregon
Visit Date: October 11, 2025
Acquisition: Oregon’s Percent for Art in Public Places Program

Further Context

Video: Wendy Red Star: Apsáalooke Feminist
Portland Art Museum (YouTube), approx. 57:46 discussion of Apsáalooke Feminist series.