Museums & Collections

A reconstructed wooden crate at the End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center reframes westward migration through confinement rather than movement, revealing the conditions endured by Rose Jackson during her journey west in 1849.

Returning to Portland State University as an alumnus, I encountered Wendy Red Star’s Apsáalooke Feminist #2—a work that reframes Indigenous womanhood through authorship, domestic space, and an unflinching gaze. Installed within civic space, it asserts presence not as spectacle, but as structure.

At the Portland Art Museum, Alison Saar’s Grow’d (2019) reconsiders Topsy from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, shifting a figure once defined by others into one of presence and self-possession. Bronze and cotton situate the work within history while quietly revising it.

Standing before Felipe Diriksen’s 1630 portrait of Infanta María Ana de Austria at the Portland Art Museum, the image shifts from imperial display to something quieter—an encounter with presence, endurance, and the structures that shaped both.

At the World Forestry Center, Sasquatch: Ancestral Guardians reframes a familiar figure through Indigenous perspectives that emphasize relationship, presence, and place. Moving beyond pop culture imagery, the exhibition shifts attention from proof to how stories shape connection to land and community.

A stage costume worn by Sarah Bernhardt around 1890 survived long after the performance for which it was created. More than a century later, it remains one of the few physical connections to a theatrical moment that otherwise disappeared when the curtain fell.

A rediscovered visit to the Portland Art Museum traces how kabuki actor prints transformed performance into image, preserving gesture, identity, and memory. Through Toyohara Kunichika’s work, the exhibition reveals how theater endures—not on stage, but in paper, ink, and time.

On Main Street, the Haunted Mansion is presented outside of itself. Elements are placed in open view—lit, labeled, and separated from the environment that contains them. The system is made visible, yet nothing collapses. What is removed and displayed remains intact.

Pompeii is often understood through what the eruption preserved. Less attention is given to what remained absent. Among the artifacts, a marble theater mask representing a woman reflects a structure in which women appeared in performance, but were not permitted to speak for themselves.