Artists Archive
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Gray and Paulsen are artists who live and work collaboratively. Their idea-based practice fuses history, fiction, autobiography, and artistic commentary into a wide variety of material works. Their work has been shown and published internationally. They live and work in Portland, where they are represented by PDX Contemporary Art.
Selected Press
Anna Gray & Ryan Wilson Paulsen, Nat Andreini, Shift.jp, June, 2011.
Review: Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen at PDX Gallery, DK Row, The Oregonian, July 15, 2010.
Learn moreDon’t Shoot Portland is an arts and education organization that promotes social justice and civic participation. Our year-round programming allows us to advocate for community members facing racism and discrimination by providing legal representation and direct advocacy. Since our inception in 2016, Don’t Shoot Portland has hosted its own dialogues, community forums and workshops focusing on history, archiving and social culture. The art proponent of our work acts as a communicative tool to facilitate discussions about race in America while providing educational assets to those most affected by discrimination in public policy.
As we uplift and amplify social movements around the world, your solidarity and commitment to change is the impact needed. We must continue to evolve alongside one another to extend this work. Our community action plan provides direct essential resources, legal advocacy and more to support communities that have been systemically marginalized. Our programming will remain free and low-barrier to keep our resources accessible to all.
Teressa Raiford is a community organizer, philanthropist and fourth generation Portlander. Her experiences with gun violence inspired her to demand accountability from leaders and lawmakers surrounding public safety. In 2016 Teressa established a human rights organization, Don’t Shoot Portland, focusing on civic education, art and nonviolent direct action while providing legal access to vulnerable communities.
Tai Carpenter (she/her) is a writer, gallerist and community archivist with a passion for social impact in the realms of art and civil rights. She is also the founder of Compose Yourself Magazine, an independent online publication spotlighting music, culture and social justice. She has curated political art installations, facilitated panel discussions and organized artmaking workshops centered on civic action with Portland Art Museum, University of Oregon’s Special Collections and University Archives, Society of American Archivists, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Shift Collective and Documenting the Now, among others.
Her work allows her to intersect two passions, art and civil rights, to create a more equitable and creative world by utilizing critical research to facilitate dialogues around art in relation to current social movements.
Tai is currently the Board President of Don’t Shoot Portland, a community-based advocacy nonprofit and Director of The Black Gallery. Most recently she was Gallery Coordinator for the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Portland State University, Gallery Manager at HOLDING Contemporary and an Archives & Records Management Coordinator at the City of Portland Archives.
Learn moreJess Perlitz’s work is informed by our formations of landscape and the body’s place within it, finding points of desire, incongruity, and disruption. Born in Toronto, CA, she is a graduate of Bard College and received an MFA from Tyler School of Art and clown training from the Manitoulin Center for Creation and Performance. Perlitz is currently based in Portland, OR, where she is Associate Professor and Head of Sculpture at Lewis & Clark College, and most recently, the co-leader of the year-long Portland’s Monuments & Memorials Project and the Experimental Arts Research Forest. Perlitz was named a 2019 Hallie Ford Fellow, won a Joan Shipley award, and received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has appeared in playgrounds, fields, galleries, and museums, including the Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA; Socrates Sculpture Park, Astoria, NY; Cambridge Art Galleries, Cambridge, CA; De Fabriek in The Netherlands; and aboard the Arctic Circle Residency. Her project, Chorus, is currently installed at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, PA, as part of the museum’s ongoing artist installation series.
Learn morePallace is a healing artist based in Seattle. She is director of Queer Astrology Club and teaches at Portland School of Astrology. QAC channel can be found on youtube for free lectures on ancient astrological techniques. She moonlights as a rope bondage specialist and hypnotist who crushes men psychologically and then cackles maniacally and writes poetry about it.
Learn morePamela Council is a New York based interdisciplinary artist creating fountains for Black joy. Guided by material, cultural, and metaphysical quests, Council’s practice embodies a darkly humorous and inventive Afro-Americana camp aesthetic, BLAXIDERMY. Through this lens, Council uses sculpture, architecture, writing, and performance to shed light on under-examined and under-valued narratives.
Council has created commissions, exhibitions, performances or presentations for: New Museum for Contemporary Art, United States Library of Congress, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Studio Museum in Harlem, and MoCADA. Council has been Artist-in-Residence at MacDowell, Red Bull Arts, Bemis, Rush Arts, MANA, Signal Culture, Mass MoCA, and Wassaic Project. A recipient of the 2017 Joan Mitchell Grant, Council holds a BA from Williams College and an MFA from Columbia University and is currently artist in residence at ISCP.
Social Media handles
twitter / pamelacouncil
instagram / pamelacouncil
Patreon / BLAXIDERMY
venmo / pamelacouncil
cash app / $pammypammy
Learn morePato Hebert is an artist, teacher, and organizer. His work probes the challenges and possibilities of interconnectedness. His creative projects have appeared at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Quito; Beton7, Athens; the Ballarat International Foto Biennale; and the Songzhuang International Photo Biennale. Hebert is a COVID-19 long hauler, living with the ongoing impacts of the coronavirus since March of 2020, and publicly addressing the pandemic through creativity and community building. His solo exhibition about long COVID, Lingering, debuted at Pitzer College in 2022, curated by Ruti Talmor. His writing about COVID has appeared in Lastgaspism: Art and Survival in the Age of Pandemic (eds. Romero, A.,Tucker, D.,Wang, D.), and The Long COVID Survival Guide: How to Take Care of Yourself and What Comes Next (ed: Fiona Lowenstein). Hebert serves as Chair and teaches in the Department of Art & Public Policy at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.
Learn moreIn her practice, Patricia Vázquez Gómez (she/her) investigates the social functions of art, the intersections between aesthetics, ethics, and politics, and the expansion of community-based art practices. She uses a variety of media to carry out her research: painting, printmaking, video, exhibitions, music, and socially-engaged art projects. The purpose and methodologies of her work are deeply informed by her experiences working in immigrant rights and other social justice movements. Her work has been shown at the Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; Reece Museum, Johnson City, TN; Cascade Paragon Arts Gallery, Portland, OR; Art League Houston, Houston, TX; and Linfield Art Gallery, McMinnville, OR, and also in apartment buildings, neighborhoods, community-based organizations, and schools. She has received support from the Ford Foundation, Regional Arts and Culture Council (RACC), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), Oregon Community Foundation, Oregon Metro, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Patricia teaches at the undergraduate and graduate levels at Portland State University. Her work can be explored at patriciavazquez.art.
Patricia is a 2022/3 Golden Spot Residency awardee.
Learn morePatrick Rock is a conceptual artist who has shown internationally, most recently with the collective AMERICAN MEAT LLC., and with the post-punk trio PISS in the Sequences Live Art Festival in Reykjavik. He is the director of ROCKSBOXCONTEMPORARYFINEART, a short-term artist residency and exhibition space in Portland, as well as the director of the Portland State University Art Department galleries, where he also teaches as an adjunct instructor of its Art Department.
Learn morePepper Pepper is a Portland, OR-based multidisciplinary artist. His work transforms vulnerability into spectacle - using artifice, technology, and camp to metabolize trauma into luminous, often magical performance worlds. Pepper has presented performances on stages and at festivals including Risk/Reward, the Time-Based Art Festival (TBA), Performance Works Northwest, NCECA, and internationally at OFF! Biennale Budapest. Their visual and installation work has been exhibited at Oregon Contemporary, Linfield University, Seattle Central College, and The Budapest Art Fair.
Pepper has incubated new experimental works at residencies like MacDowell, Monson Arts, Playa, Caldera, Signal Fire, and PonderosaTanz (Germany), Pepper’s practice bridges experimental performance and nightlife legacy. With over 20 years in cabaret and drag production, Pepper has appeared at and been featured at The Austin International Drag Festival, OUTstages (Victoria, BC), and is co-host of The Portland Drag Theatre Festival alongside frequent collaborator Anthony Hudson.
His ongoing project Pink Moment explores PINK as queer energy, ritual, and resistance while hybridizing performance, photography, and installation into an evolving archive of embodied glamour.
@thepepperpepper
www.thepepperpepper.com Learn morePeter Coffin was born in Berkeley, California in 1972. He has had solo exhibitions at Herald St, London; Andrew Kreps Gallery (NY); The Wrong Gallery (NY); the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Michael Benevento, Los Angeles (CA); Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Miami (FL); The Horticultural Society of New York (NY); and le Confort Moderne, Poitier, France; as well as recent group exhibitions at the Tate Modern, London, and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in NY. He is represented by Andrew Kreps Gallery.
Learn moreBorn and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, Peter Falanga decided to attend school in New Orleans, Louisiana to study music at Loyola University New Orleans. Upon volunteering at the 2009 New Orleans Film Festival, he switched his major from music to film and digital media, and added a minor in philosophy. Immediately upon earning his BA, he decided to pursue a master’s degree that would align with his interests in philosophy, film theory, community outreach, and video making.
Peter moved to Portland, Oregon last August to become a member of the MA Critical Theory and Creative Research program’s inaugural cohort at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Currently, he is working on his master’s thesis, which is an extensive study of sincerity and its expression in the works of David Foster Wallace, the films of the New Sincerity, and in the 1977 Woody Allen film Annie Hall.
Learn morePeter Simensky’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Museum 52, New York; The Swiss Institute, New York; and Project Row Houses, Houston. Selected group exhibitions at Sculpture Center, NY; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Mass Moca, North Adams; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery New York; Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York; and Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York among others. Simensky’s Gold Dust was recently featured in Cabinet’s, Money Issue. He has received awards and grants from LMCC, NYFA, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He lives and works in Portland, OR and Brooklyn, NY.
Learn morePhilip Edward King lives in Portland, Oregon, USA. Their interdisciplinary work deals with questions surrounding the loosely defined term "human nature" juxtaposed with themes of crisis unique to the 20th and 21st centuries.
Learn moreRaised by wolves in parts unknown. Classicly trained in Europe, art has been a part of her life and provided a therapeutic output for years of untrained trauma. Black lives matter. Believe victims. Find beauty in our collective ugliness.
Learn moreRabbits Road Press is a community Risograph print studio and publishing press founded and run by OOMK. The project was commissioned by Create London and is based at Old Manor Park former Carnegie Library. The small-scale publishing press provides printing and book binding services for artists and community groups in Newham in East London and beyond. A responsive programme of workshops and events explore a contemporary model for community publishing, bringing together artists, designers, writers and neighbours.
Learn moreSTROLL is the amoeba baby of a loose and shifting collaboration of sex workers committed to organising for justice and equity. Founded in 2015 as a street outreach project with a side publication, over the years STROLL has provided hot meals, clothing, legal referrals, workshops, references and resume help, home HIV test kits, and a bad date list to sex workers and houseless workers in the PNW.
Learn more at strollpdx.org
Learn moreSynth Library Portland is a collectively run arts organization that supports a diverse community of artists, centering access for marginalized folks to experiment, learn, and participate. We are an audiovisual art laboratory that provides Portlanders with access to a myriad of production tools and equipment, as well as practical workshops hosted by local and visiting artists. After having to close our physical space and suspend in-person programming due to Covid-19, we adapted to host remote workshops, launched our take-home gear lending program in 2021 and resumed in-person workshops a year later. We are committed to generating equity, opportunity, and freedom to explore and create in our artistic communities.
http://synthlibraryportland.com
Aaron Guice - artist in residence of Synth Library Portland (2023)
Yaw Evans - artist in residence of Synth Library Portland (2023)
Learn moreOver the past year, The Stripper Project crew has travelled around the country listening, filming, recording and capturing people who work the sex industry. Even though we believe our journey isn’t done, we have collected a wide variety of voices.
Our intention for this project is: 1. People outside of the industry be able to see and experience content that is genuine and true to us And; 2. Have people in the industry begin to grasp how different this job can be depending on race, social status, education and, mental health status. We hope to create greater support to our community from the inside out.
Learn more