Jeffrey Gibson, They Come From Fire, 2022, site-specific installation, Portland Art Museum. Detail: Anthony Hudson / Carla Rossi. Photo by Brian Barlow.

When Portland’s premier drag clown Carla Rossi is unleashed on the Portland Art Museum, her human avatar, Anthony, struggles with the crushing pressure of expectation as he traces his place in a lineage of Native artists and ancestors—and with Oregon’s settler history, which brutally intersects with Anthony’s own in an unexpected revelation. Alternating between drag numbers and earnest storytelling, The Weight of the World is an all-new work from Anthony Hudson celebrating Two-Spirit identity, the work of Oscar Howe and Jeffrey Gibson, and the perseverance of Oregon’s Tribes in the face of Oregon itself.