Blog

Featured Artist: Angel Starr

MIP Author
Nov 13, 2025
3 min read

Art of Native Everyday Wear

Angel Starr creates art meant to be worn, carried, danced in, and made part of everyday life. An Omaha and Odawa artist and enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes, also known as the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, Starr works across clothing, jewelry, beadwork, appliqué, and other forms of handwork through her family business, Fox Way Designs.

Her work includes ribbon dresses and skirts as well as jewelry made with materials such as beads, bone, porcupine quills, and birch bark. Together, these forms demonstrate the range of Starr’s artistic practice without separating Native art from the people and communities who continue to create, wear, and use it.

Family, Community, and Chicago

Starr was born and raised within the Chicagoland Native American community. Her maternal grandparents met in Chicago during the federal Indian relocation era and chose to remain there and build their family’s home.

During the mid-twentieth century, federal relocation programs encouraged Native people to leave reservations for cities where employment was presented as more readily available. Chicago became home to Native people from many Nations, and organizations such as the American Indian Center, founded in 1953, helped build and sustain an intertribal urban community.

Starr’s family history belongs to this larger history, but it is also distinctly personal. Sewing, dancing at ceremonies and participating in powwows have been part of her life since childhood. Her work reflects a creative practice developed through family, community participation, and years of making.

“Native Everyday Wear” — Angel Starr

Angel Starr Selected work
Angel Starr demonstrating beadwork
Angel Starr demonstrating beadwork
Angel Starr beaded necklace
Angel Starr beaded patches

Fox Way Designs by Angel Starr

In 2018, Starr and her family established Fox Way Designs, a Native owned family business specializing in what they describe as “Native everyday wear.” Its work includes ribbon clothing, appliqué, jewelry, moccasins, and other handmade pieces.

That description is important. “Everyday wear” places Native creativity in the present rather than treating it as something belonging exclusively to history, ceremony, or a museum display. The clothing can be worn, the jewelry can be carried into daily life, and each purchase supports a Native artist and family business directly.

Starr’s designs also demonstrate the labor hidden within a finished piece. Cutting, measuring, layering, stitching, beading, shaping, and attaching materials require patience and technical knowledge. An artist demonstration makes that process visible and allows people to understand the difference between a mass-produced object and something made by hand.

Art as a Living Relationship

Through its Guest Artist Series, the Museum of Indigenous People brings artists and audiences together through conversation, demonstrations, and direct engagement. These informal encounters allow visitors to ask how a piece is created, learn about the artist’s process, and purchase work directly from its maker.

Angel Starr’s work embodies the reason these relationships matter. Native art is not frozen in the past or limited to an exhibition case. It is continuously being made, worn, shared, adapted, and carried forward by Native artists, families, and communities.

Follow Fox Way Designs on Instagram or Facebook to see more of Angel Starr’s work.

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