Museums & Collections

At the Portland Art Museum, Inkling Studio revealed the history of a local printmaking community. Among the works on view, two by women especially stayed with me: Eileen “ikie” Nolan Kressel’s playful self-portrait Someday My Prints Will Come and Sheryl Funkhouser’s atmospheric March Evening.

Betty Muffler’s Ngangkari Ngura (Healing Country) expands the idea of healing beyond the individual body, connecting care for people with care for Country, memory, and the lasting effects of displacement and nuclear testing on Aboriginal homelands.

A visit to Portland Art Museum’s The Stars We Do Not See revealed Australian Indigenous art through weaving, bark painting, sculpture, video, memory, Country, and the stars. Several works stood out for the ways they transformed both the gallery space and the act of looking.

A woman dressed in white sits beneath a canopy of trees facing a historic manor. What first appeared to be a peaceful landscape photograph gradually revealed itself as something else: an act of remembrance, witness, and reclamation.

Two Black women sit together. We don’t know their names. Yet months after leaving the gallery, I found myself still thinking about their presence in Emma Amos’s ‘To Sit (With Pochoir)’ and what it means to truly see another person.

Three hotel keys sit behind glass, all that remains of hotels that once welcomed thousands of travelers. The rooms are gone. The guests are gone. Yet these ordinary objects continue to point toward a Portland that no longer exists.

A century-old suffrage handbill asks a simple question: “Why Not in Oregon?” Preserved behind glass, it captures a moment when women’s voting rights were not yet guaranteed and the future was still being argued for.

A Red Cross bag, an aviator’s cap, a welder’s mask, and a flight suit tell a story larger than war itself. Together, these artifacts reveal how generations of women moved from service and support into new forms of work, opportunity, and independence.

A film reel, a TV guide, and a series of still images sit under glass—fragments of a 1980s public access program that brought Black Portlanders into view. Carefully arranged, the past remains visible, but never fully settled.

A ribbon is lifted toward a grave. The dead are absent; what remains is the act of return. Recovered from fragments, the vessel preserves not a life, but the gesture that continues.

Inside the Pavilion Gallery at the Portland Japanese Garden, Enduring Impressions presents mokuhanga as both tradition and contemporary practice, where process, repetition, and place shape the work as much as the final image.

The wreck of Titanic remains visible as structure rather than event. The bow retains its form; the stern does not. What is seen is not the moment of impact, but its continuation—pressure, depth, and time acting together as a sustained condition.

A disposable cup, altered by extreme pressure, becomes a precise record of the environment surrounding the Titanic wreck. Compressed without distortion, it reveals the force of depth through absence. What appears to be damage is instead transformation—an object reshaped not by time, but by the sustained weight of the ocean.

At the Titanic Artifact Exhibition, visitors are assigned the identity of a passenger through a boarding pass that structures the experience from entry to exit. Through reconstructed spaces, physical interaction, and recovered objects, the exhibition organizes the voyage into a sequence of identity, environment, and outcome.

At the End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center, a plankhouse exhibit offers another perspective on Oregon City—one rooted in Chinook communities, permanent homes, and cultural traditions that existed long before overland migrants arrived.