Between Roots and Stars

The Stars We Do Not See: Australian Indigenous Art
Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon
September 6, 2026 | 10am

I had only a general idea of what I would find when I walked into The Stars We Do Not See: Australian Indigenous Art at the Portland Art Museum. The exhibition had opened the previous day, and outside the museum a large banner announced its arrival while a black-and-white pattern stretched across the tall windows nearby.

Inside, a deep blue entrance wall introduced the idea of Country. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, the exhibition explained, Country encompasses more than physical land. It includes sky, water, living beings, Ancestral knowledge and spirituality.

Nearby, the AIATSIS Map of Indigenous Australia covered the continent with the names of Indigenous communities, while carefully noting that its colored areas represented general locations rather than fixed boundaries.

Even the artwork labels came with an introduction, explaining the use of language groups, Indigenous place names and materials. Another notice advised Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander visitors that the galleries included images, voices and names of people who had died.

Before I had spent much time with the art itself, I was already being asked to look beyond the idea of a single Indigenous Australian culture.

Looking Up

One of the works that fascinated me most was impossible to experience from only one position.

Mun-Dirra (Maningrida Fish Fence), created collaboratively by thirteen women from Maningrida, hung high above the gallery in long woven sections made from materials including pandanus, bush cane and natural fibers. “Mun-dirra” refers to a traditional fish fence used to corral fish in the water, but inside the museum the work became something almost architectural.

From below, I found myself looking upward through layers of open weave. Light passed through the fibers while one section overlapped another.

From the upper level, the arrangement changed again, revealing how the pieces occupied different heights, depths and angles.

Most museum works ask you to stand in front of them. Mun-Dirra made me look up, around and through it.

That physical experience stayed with me. The installation did not simply illustrate an object associated with Country and community knowledge; it occupied the museum’s airspace and altered the gallery around it.

Roots Across the Museum

Elsewhere on the ground floor, Emily Kam Kngwarray’s enormous Anwerlarr Anganenty (Big Yam Dreaming) spread across the wall as a dense network of white lines on black.

At first, the lines could be mistaken for pure abstraction. They represent the twisting underground roots of the anwerlarr, or pencil yam, a plant closely connected to Kngwarray’s Country and identity. The accompanying text described the work as simultaneously Dreaming, landscape and a kind of self-portrait.

What made the painting especially memorable was encountering it again after leaving the ground-floor gallery.

As I climbed the stairs toward the exhibition’s second level, details from Big Yam Dreaming had been enlarged across the stairwell windows. The same white root lines that filled the painting now stretched across the museum’s architecture.

Seen from outside at the former museum entrance, they had initially looked like striking graphic decoration. After seeing the painting, they became recognizable as something more specific: roots, Country and identity following me upstairs.

History Behind a Fence

On the second level, Sandra Hill’s Beyond the Pale stopped me for very different reasons.

The work incorporated weathered wooden fencing, with painted scenes of Aboriginal figures partially visible behind the slats. I had to look through a barrier to see them.

Then I read Hill’s story.

She had been forcibly removed from her family under Australian assimilation policies and did not reunite with her mother for twenty-five years. Her mother had worked as a domestic servant.

The fence no longer felt like a framing device. It carried ideas of restriction, imposed boundaries and separation, while the history behind the work was also Hill’s own family history.

Installed beside it was Judy Watson’s black ground. Watson’s painting was far quieter visually: a large dark field crossed by a pale form connected to burial and Waanyi Country. The accompanying text described histories of colonial violence, including a massacre survived by Watson’s great-great-grandmother Rosie.

The two works approached memory in almost opposite ways.

Hill placed history behind a physical barrier.

Watson seemed to locate it within the land itself.

Standing in that corner, the pairing made colonial history feel less like something safely contained in the past and more like something carried through families and places.

An Invitation to Touch

Barrupu Yunupingu’s Gurtha (Ancestral Fire) provided one of the more unexpected moments of my visit.

The original work, painted with earth pigments on eucalyptus bark, remained safely untouchable. In front of it, however, the museum had installed a raised tactile panel based on the painting’s irregular diamond patterns.

Visitors were invited to place their hands on it.

So I did.

I traced the raised forms with my fingers while the accompanying text encouraged visitors to think about flame, smoke, ash and charcoal. It was a simple interaction, but memorable precisely because it reversed one of the most familiar rules of visiting an art museum.

Usually, touching means you are doing something wrong.

Here, touching was part of learning how to encounter the work.

The Star Lady

Near the beginning of the galleries, a group of eucalyptus-bark paintings by Gulumbu Yunupingu appeared beside an interpretive panel titled “Star Lady.”

Her works Garak (The Universe) and Gan’yu (Stars) covered irregular bark surfaces with fields of pale crosses and dots. Drawing upon stories of the southern sky learned from her father, Yunupingu developed imagery in which crosses could represent visible stars while the dots between them suggested what remained unknown.

The exhibition’s title, The Stars We Do Not See, was named in her honor.

After moving through the galleries, that idea felt increasingly appropriate. Again and again, appearances had only been the beginning of what a work contained. Lines became roots. Patterns became water sources, journeys or ceremonial knowledge. Landscapes carried family histories.

Naminapu Maymuru-White’s Milniyawuy (River of Stars) joined sky and water in another way. Its winding dark forms, filled with pale marks, suggested both celestial and riverine paths. The Milky Way became a river of stars connected to ancestors and the journey of spirits.

The night sky was not separate from Country.

It was part of it.

Old Stories, New Languages

The galleries also made it difficult to think of Indigenous Australian art as something confined to traditional materials or historical forms.

Women artists appeared throughout the exhibition working in bark, weaving, sculpture, photography, video, acrylic paint, industrial wire and unexpected contemporary materials.

Kaylene Whiskey’s Seven Sisters Song may have been the most playful example.

The Ancestral Seven Sisters story appeared alongside contemporary figures Whiskey associated with strong women, including Tina Turner, Wonder Woman, Whoopi Goldberg, Eartha Kitt and Dolly Parton.

Yet the humor did not make the work frivolous. Whiskey was bringing an Ancestral story into her own visual and cultural world, allowing ancient story and contemporary popular culture to occupy the same space.

Elsewhere, I encountered women using printer toner, commercial acrylic, skateboards, photography and video alongside earth pigments, bark and plant fibers. Cultural continuity, the exhibition repeatedly suggested, did not require artistic stillness.

Between Roots & Stars

By the time I left The Stars We Do Not See, I had seen far more than I could reasonably fit into a single Cultural Note.

There were enormous paintings mapping Country from above, woven baskets and figures, bark paintings carrying ecological and Ancestral knowledge, works confronting forced removal and colonial violence, contemporary photography and video, and installations that changed the way I physically moved through the museum.

But certain moments remained particularly clear.

I remember standing beneath Mun-Dirra and looking upward into its woven layers.

I remember seeing Big Yam Dreaming on the ground floor and then encountering its roots again across the stairwell windows.

I remember trying to look through the fence of Beyond the Pale.

I remember placing my hand on the tactile panel beside Gurtha.

And I remember Gulumbu Yunupingu’s fields of stars, where what could be seen existed beside what remained unknown.

The exhibition began by asking me to understand Country as something larger than landscape. By the end, that idea seemed to stretch in every direction—from roots beneath the earth to rivers, bodies, memories and stars overhead.

There was always something beyond the first thing I could see.