Artists Archive
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Aki Sasamoto is a New York-based artist who works in performance, sculpture, dance, and whatever medium it takes to communicate her ideas. In her installation and performance works, Sasamoto moves and talks inside the careful arrangements of sculpturally altered objects, activating the complex emotions at work in her daily life. Sasamoto’s works appear in theater spaces, gallery spaces, and landscapes. Sasamoto has shown in exhibitions at Mori Museum, Take Ninagawa, Yokohama Triennale 2008, Japan; Gwangju Biennial 2012, South Korea; Chocolate Factory Theater, the Kitchen, Soloway, Whitney Biennial 2010 at Whitney Museum, Greater New York 2010 at MOMA-PS1, New York; and numerous other international and domestic venues. Sasamoto has collaborated with visual artists, musicians, choreographers, mathematicians, and scholars.
Selected Press:
"String Theory," Jennifer Krasinski, Artforum, March 19, 2014.
"After Magritte," Martha Sherman, Dance View Times, March 11, 2014.
"Stilts Aren’t the Only Way to Rise Above It All," Brian Seibert, The New York Times, March 7, 2014
Learn moreAlexandria Rema Saleem is a first generation Palestinian American* artist and cultural worker. She works with individuals, communities, and the land to reclaim our right to sacred spaces through land tending, worldbuilding, dance, ritual, risk, and tenderness. Flowers are her deepest ally and main medium, working between the land as a regenerative flower farmer and her community as florist, event designer, and installation artist. She is currently co-stewarding the Black Oregon Land Trust and is the Director of Arts and Culture with the Center for Study and Preservation of Palestine.
*Saleem grapples with an appropriate way to name her locations amidst the ongoing legacies of harm to land and people by colonialist projects.
Learn moreA.L. Steiner is a collective member of Chicks on Speed, co-curator of the project Ridykeulous, founding member of Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) and collaborates with numerous visual and performing artists. Her works have been featured internationally at such venues as P.S.1/MoMA, Tate Modern, The New Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, Centre Pompidou, The Kitchen, REDCAT, and Zacheta National Gallery of Art, among others. Her work is included in such public collections as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art and the Marieluise Hessel Collection. Steiner is currently based in Los Angeles and is faculty at the University of Southern California.
Selected Press
The Lowdown: A.L. Steiner, Io Tillet Wright, New York Times T Magazine, May 11, 2011.
Eve Fowler & A.L. Steiner, North Drive Press #4, 2007.
Would it be okay if I kept my sweater on?, Naomi Fry, Paper Monument.
Learn moreAngelo Scott is an interdisciplinary artist from the South currently living in Portland, OR and completing their BFA in Intermedia at PNCA. Their sonic compositions build shifting layers of melodic sentiments from splintering phrases, emphasizing irregularities in live sampling, synthesis, and insisting upon fleeting swells of emotive expression as a passage through intricate patterns in overwhelming soundscapes. Scott received their Associate of the Arts from Linn-Benton Community College in 2019, where they worked as the photo editor for The Commuter. While living in Corvallis, Oregon, they began operating in DIY sonic arts communities, co-organizing and curating installation and video works for Corvallis Experiments In Noise's What is Noise? festivals. In 2016, they co-initiated and co-created Sponsored Trash, an ongoing performance arts collective. They currently perform solo sound compositions as Tyronza and participate in improvisational ensembles, create video projections, and make collaborative CRT installations for interactive music events.
Learn moreBarry Sanders holds a Ph.D. in Medieval Literature. He taught for over thirty years in the departments of Literature and the History of Ideas at Pitzer College of the Claremont Colleges, where he was the first to hold the Peter S. and Gloria Gold Chair. The author of fourteen books and over fifty essays and articles, he has twice been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and was twice a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. He serves as a contributing editor of North American Review, and writes frequently for Cabinet. His essay “Bang the Keys Swiftly: Type-Writers and Their Discontents” recently appeared in the New Museum catalog Ghosts in the Machine, published by Skira Rizzoli. He is Founding Co-chair of the MA in Critical Theory and Creative Research at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and the Ford Institute for Visual Education.
Learn moreThe Design Collaborative know as the Black Aesthetic Studio (BAS) is led by artist duo Cleo and Kayin Davis, in conjunction with Professor of Architecture Robert Alexander Clarke, and historian Kimberly Moreland. They will investigate policing through the lens of Oregonian historically anti-black urban politics and policies. And how these systems of policing affected Black Folks' ways of living, being, and seeing throughout time.
BAS aims to uncover how past, present, and future policing histories have imprinted African Americans' psychology and aesthetic throughout time. They will construct temporal gateways that will encapsulate specific periods which will draw the audience into black space, thus illuminating the user on how we see our histories and futures which has been policed by white authorship from the founding of our nation. These constructed visions will be critique on Oregon racist history and policies, allow one to understand how migration and oppression has transforms black identity and its expressions.
Cleo Davis started his education in architecture at the University of Oregon further changing to industrial design at San Jose State. He is an artist whose work takes a critical view of the social, political and cultural issues and through his work, he continues to reconstruct the cultural view modernizing while also highlighting traditions. Although he engages with multiple subjects and mediums his methodology remains consistent. He also has started the screw loose Studio the Mayo House project and most recently, the archives project in collaboration with Kayin.
Kayin Talton Davis started off in an artistic direction from a very young age, but later learned her love for math and science and pursued a Bachelor's in mechanical engineering at Portland State University. Her design projects were always influenced by a drive to be accessible to all. She started the soapbox theory in 2001, as a way to express herself creatively. And through these mediums, her interest is always in creating something that is positive, helpful and accessible to all but especially children from culturally underrepresented communities.
Robert Alexander Clarke is a designer, educator, and theorist practicing at the intersection of culture, identity, and architecture. His work aims to develop and canonize black aesthetics, thus authenticating it as a lens through which to practice architecture. His design office, BAS (Black Aesthetic Studio) was founded by Clarke, Cleo Davis and Kimberly Morland; their studio explores how to unearth new aesthetics that are immensely specific to African American culture, experience, and identity. Before joining as Activist in Residence at UCLA’s City Lab, Clarke held posts as a Wilson Smith III Design in Spatial Justice Fellow at the University of Oregon’s College of Design. As well as Research Fellow at Newlab under the supervision of architect and New York University Associate Professor of Practice Mitchell Joachim. Before opening his practice, Clarke worked for many years at architectural firms across the globe, including HOK, Terreform ONE, Gensler, and Archi-Union.
Kimberly Stowers Moreland, MBA, MURP, is wife of Michael L. Moreland and the mother of four amazing young adults: Katherine, Mike Jr., Kristen, and Karina. She owns Moreland Resource Consulting and has over 25+ years of experience in the public sector, urban and historic preservation, community development, and urban planning in Portland, Tacoma, and Salem.
Moreland serves as the President of the Oregon Black Pioneers, and their mission is to preserve the history of Black Oregonians. On behalf of the Oregon Black Pioneers, she authored Images of America: African Americans of Portland (Arcadia Publisher). She is the Vice-Chair of the Portland Historic Landmark Commission and a member of the Portland Landmark Commission.
As a community historian, Kimberly began documenting Portland's Black history for over 30+ years. As a city planner with the City of Portland, she worked with the community advisory committee and local historians to produce the History of Portland's African-American History (1805 to the Present). She was on the project team that produced Cornerstones of Community: The Buildings of Portland's African American History, published in 1995. She was subsequently involved in the Multiple Property Documentation (MPD) history project, which builds on the Cornerstones research to produce African American Resources in Portland, Oregon, from 1851 to 1973. This research brings attention to sites related to Portland's Black history so they can be listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
As owner of Moreland Resource Consulting, Moreland worked with the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) and Home Forward, former the Housing Authority of Portland (HAP), to better understand how their past policies unjustly impacted African Americans. Since, 2021, she has teamed with the City of Portland and Architectural Resource Group (ARG) on successfully approval of four National Historic Landmark Register nominations significant to Portland's Black history, including Dean's Beauty and Barbershop, Mt. Olivet Baptist Church, Golden West Hotel, and Dr. John D. Marshall Building. In 2023, with Constructing Hope, Moreland co-authored Building Legacy: BIPOC Construction Trailblazers in Oregon, which highlighted twenty-three construction trade pioneers.
In 2023, she partnered with Robert Clark and Cleo Davis to establish Black Aesthetics Studio LLC (BAS). The firm explored how to unearth new aesthetics specific to African-American culture, experience, and identity.
Learn moreDan Seward, also known as Bunnybrains, is a musician, curator and promoter in Hudson, New York, where he runs the celebrated (and somewhat nomadic) record store, John Doe Records. This exhibition focuses on Bunnybrains thirty plus years as a transgressive, mutable, collaborative, performative project and what it means to illustrate the life of a true muse. From live broadcasts of Bunnybrains radio show Battlefield Earth, participatory workshops, rotating guest exhibitions, spontaneous happenings and performances, the artist shares their space with you in an effort to vivify "Bunnybrains is all".
Bunnybrains’ career highlights include a vinyl only pressing with Matador, a national tour supporting Devendra Banhart, a four CD boxset that garnered raves from the indie press, and opening for a reunited Hawkwind—a set credited with giving the many hippies in attendance bad trips.
Learn moreDao Strom is an artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, and visual—to explore hybridity and contemplate the intersection of personal and collective histories. Using practices of polyvocality, fragmentation, and (re)assemblage, Strom writes arrangements of poetry, music, image, song, and sound, to be experienced as performance, installation, multimedia, recordings, and inside the spaces of a book. Although separate, these elements are unified by a shared (under)current that transposes itself through or despite its conduits, and endeavors toward “re-membering” and attempting to synchronize the divided ‘languages’ within the self and concerning the self as placed in the world.
Strom is the author/composer of several hybrid works, including the music/poetry project TENDER REVOLUTIONS/YELLOW SONGS (2025), and INSTRUMENT (2020), which won the 2022 Oregon Book Award for Poetry, and its musical companion of song-poems, TRAVELER’S ODE. She co-curated and co-edited the hybrid-literary anthology and exhibition, A Mouth Holds Many Things (2024), and released an album of ambient-folk songs, Redux (2022). She is also the author of a bilingual poetry-art collection, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else; a hybrid-form memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, with song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction. Her work has received support from the Creative Capital Foundation, Oregon Community Foundation, Ford Foundation, Precipice Fund, NEA, and others. She is the co-founder of She Who Has No Master(s), a collective of Vietnamese women writers and artists making polyvocal poetry-art works; and de-canon, a literary social art project centering BIPOC writers. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevadas of northern California and now lives in Portland, OR.
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 moreMiller & Shellabarger create artist books and public performances that examine queer identity, politics, and displays of affection and intimacy. They are recipients of a 2008 Artadia Chicago Award and a 2007 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award. Together, Miller & Shellabarger have presented their projects at venues across the United States and at art fairs including Volta in Basel; Switzerland; NEXT in Chicago; NADA in Miami; and the Affair at the Jupiter in Portland, Oregon. The two artists also maintain separate artistic practices. Miller & Shellabarger are represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago, where they live and work.
Selected Press
Run, Don't Walk, Carlos Suarez de Jesus, Miami New Times, September 17, 2009.
Learn moreEvie Snax is a multimedia digital visual artist, curator, hustler, sex magik worker, and queer indie porn enthusiast casting spells of self-love and liberation. Her work reflects her experience as a queer mixed Chinese-American/white femme and looks and feels like it does because she is a fresh millennial slut with keyboard fingertips. Her gifs center QTBIPoC and sex workers in a vibrant contemporary fantasy free of binaries, shame, and oppression. Her work has been exhibited and screened internationally from Moore College of Art and Design to the Taiwan International Queer Film Festival. Currently she is co-producing Hot Bits, a touring sex-positive film and arts festival in its 4th year. She is also a recipient of the Leeway Transformation Award, is a CFEVA Visual Artist Fellow, and Elsewhere Exchange Fellow. Follow her on ig @snaxho_ and view her portfolio at snax.wtf/evie for more.
Learn moreJesse Sugarmann is an interdisciplinary artist working in video, performance, and sculpture. His work engages the automotive industry as a manufacturer of human identity, accessing automotive history as an index of both cultural identity and social development. Jesse has exhibited work in venues such as the Getty Institute, Los Angeles; el Museo Tamayo, Mexico; Southern Exposure, San Francisco; the Banff Center, Canada; Filmbase, Ireland; Human Resources, Los Angeles; Michael Strogoff, Marfa; el Museo de Arte Moderno de Santander, Spain; Drift Station, Omaha; Spirit Abuse, Albuquerque; the Knockdown Center, New York; Fugitive Projects, Nashville; the 21c Museum, Louisville; and High Desert Test Sites 2013. His work has been written about in publications including ArtForum, Art Papers, ART LTD, Art Cards, Art Fag City, Frieze Magazine, and The New York Times. Jesse lives and works in Bakersfield, California.
Selected Press:
"Sitting in the Back of a Car by Chip Lord," The Architect’s Newspaper, July 2014
"Doing Battle with the Remains of Industrial America by Christian Frock," Hyperallergic, May 2014
"Jesse Sugarmann," John Motley, Frieze Magazine, March 2014
"Critic’s Picks: Jesse Sugarmann," Stephanie Snyder, Artforum, October 2013
"High Desert Test Sites, a Diary by Mutual Art," Huffington Post, October, 2013
"Subverting Deadly Materials: The Work of Jesse Sugarmann," Mack McFarland, NY Arts Magazine, October, 2013
Learn moreJohn Smith was born in London in 1952 and studied film at the Royal College of Art. After graduating in 1977 he became involved in the activities of the London Filmmakers’ Co-op. John Smith has developed a body of work that deftly subverts the perceived boundaries between documentary and fiction, representation and abstraction.
Since 1972 John Smith has made over forty film, video and installation works and shown in cinemas, art galleries and on television throughout the world. His solo exhibitions include: Royal College of Art (London), Ikon Gallery (Birmingham, UK), Kunstmuseum Magdeburg (Germany), Open Eye Gallery (Liverpool), Pearl Gallery (London), and Tanya Leighton Gallery (Berlin). Smith’s work has been featured in retrospectives at the 2007 Venice Biennale and film festivals in Oberhausen, Cork, Tampere, Uppsala, Bristol, Regensburg, Glasgow, La Rochelle and, most recently, in the 2010 Berlin Bienniale. John Smith lives and works in London, where he teaches part-time at the University of East London as Professor of Fine Art. He is represented by Tanya Leighton Gallery (Berlin).
Selected Press
On the Street where You Live: The Films of John Smith, Adrian Dakes, senses of cinema, November, 2003.
Interview with John Smith, Brian Frye, Millennium Film Journal, Winter 2003.
John Smith, Michael O'Pray, LUXOnline, 2003. Learn moreJulio Salgado | Photo credit Wil Prada
Julio Salgado is the co-founder of DreamersAdrift and the Migrant Storytelling Manager for The Center for Cultural Power. His status as an undocumented, queer artivist has fueled the contents of his visual art, which depict key individuals and moments of the DREAM Act and the migrant rights movement. Undocumented students, organizers, and allies across the country have used Salgado’s artwork to call attention to the migrant rights movement. Salgado is the co-creator of The Disruptors Fellowship, an inaugural fellowship for emerging television writers of color who identify as trans/and or non-binary, disabled, undocumented, and/or formerly undocumented immigrants. His work has been displayed at the Oakland Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. You can find his work at juliosalgadoart.com.
Learn moreKat Salas is a proud chicanx and member of the Apache Nation. Her practice seeks to explore the ways in which curating can be used to build platforms for intersectional conversations and take up space in academic or institutional settings. In her spare time, you can usually find her tattooing around Portland or collaborating on STROLL's latest project!
Learn moreKimberly Stowers Moreland, MBA, MURP, is wife of Michael L. Moreland and the mother of four amazing young adults: Katherine, Mike Jr., Kristen, and Karina. She owns Moreland Resource Consulting and has over 25+ years of experience in the public sector, urban and historic preservation, community development, and urban planning in Portland, Tacoma, and Salem.
Moreland serves as the President of the Oregon Black Pioneers, and their mission is to preserve the history of Black Oregonians. On behalf of the Oregon Black Pioneers, she authored Images of America: African Americans of Portland (Arcadia Publisher). She is the Vice-Chair of the Portland Historic Landmark Commission and a member of the Portland Landmark Commission.
As a community historian, Kimberly began documenting Portland's Black history for over 30+ years. As a city planner with the City of Portland, she worked with the community advisory committee and local historians to produce the History of Portland's African-American History (1805 to the Present). She was on the project team that produced Cornerstones of Community: The Buildings of Portland's African American History, published in 1995. She was subsequently involved in the Multiple Property Documentation (MPD) history project, which builds on the Cornerstones research to produce African American Resources in Portland, Oregon, from 1851 to 1973. This research brings attention to sites related to Portland's Black history so they can be listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
As owner of Moreland Resource Consulting, Moreland worked with the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) and Home Forward, former the Housing Authority of Portland (HAP), to better understand how their past policies unjustly impacted African Americans. Since, 2021, she has teamed with the City of Portland and Architectural Resource Group (ARG) on successfully approval of four National Historic Landmark Register nominations significant to Portland's Black history, including Dean's Beauty and Barbershop, Mt. Olivet Baptist Church, Golden West Hotel, and Dr. John D. Marshall Building. In 2023, with Constructing Hope, Moreland co-authored Building Legacy: BIPOC Construction Trailblazers in Oregon, which highlighted twenty-three construction trade pioneers.
In 2023, she partnered with Robert Clark and Cleo Davis to establish Black Aesthetics Studio LLC (BAS). The firm explored how to unearth new aesthetics specific to African-American culture, experience, and identity.
Learn moreMaster Artist Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr. is Black, Italian, Queer, Non-Binary, Neurodyvergent, and practices primarily in america. Their collaborative approach results in artwork by and for the people.
Stevenson’s practice has been dedicated to supporting young people ages 4 to 18 in developing the necessary skills to encourage advanced imaginative thinking and self-confident expression. In 2019 they developed the Afro Contemporary Art Class at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School which has had many forms since, including Afro Futurist February, and three years of Fred Hampton Summer Camp. Supporting community efforts as well, taking the shape of support for the effort to Save Dr. Martin Luther King School from being displaced by the expansion of Interstate 5 which has triggered the need to move Harriet Tubman Middle School. Stevenson is currently working in the Albina community to develop a Living Archive at Jefferson High School with students, community, and the architectural design team. Stevenson also has a robust portfolio of artist projects centering food and gathering around it, projects involving sculpture, drawing, and photography, and new work in collaboration with currently and formerly incarcerated folks. These include Tin Can Phone, a podcast all about life in and outside of prison, and Gallery Blue, a curation and exhibition project both of which are owned and operated by formerly incarcerated individuals. Stevenson pursues these professional and creative goals passionately because they believe that empowered and open-minded young people and communities are the best and most direct way toward ensuring a sustainable and prosperous future for all.
Learn morePortland, Oregon based artist Mona Superhero’s work is comprised entirely of duct tape and masking tape. Each piece of duct tape art is crafted from layers of duct tape and masking tape, hand-carved to reveal captivating, often provocative Pop Art inspired imagery with eye-catching color and attitude.
Superhero spends her days creating new art for gallery shows, client work and for her line of prints and post cards.
Learn morenůn studios is a burgeoning member-run risograph print shop in Northeast Portland, Oregon. Launched in 2020, the studio opened as a Black-stewarded space offering production, design, distribution support, education, and studio access to counter-hegemonic artists and organizers. Today, nůn operates with two MZ1090 duplicators, 30 ink colors, and a range of DIY binding and finishing tools. As a collective, mycelial in its reach, utility, poetic, and care, the studio offers free and highly subsidized printing services for organizers, writers, and artists who work in local to global solidarity movements, community wellness, and independent publishing, among other schemes and dreams.
nůn studios was born from A Black Art Ecology of Portland (BAEP)—a transdisciplinary convener and resource mobilizer cultivating networks of creative care for Black artists and communities. Through BAEP's continued support, proceeds from the 5 & 5 portfolio, as well as prints and publications from the studio’s first five years in operation, nůn hopes to launch a transdisciplinary artist-in-residence program that focuses on diasporic voice(s) and solidarity, and supports its communities in need.
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 moreCurrently based in Brooklyn, New York, Stiler received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from Yale University. Her work has been shown internationally at galleries including Nicelle Beauchene (New York), Sandroni Rey (Los Angeles), and Annarumma 404 (Naples, Italy). Recent and upcoming exhibitions include solo projects at Callicoon Fine Arts (New York), The Suburban (Chicago) as well as the Emerging Artist Fellowship Exhibition at Socrates Sculpture Park (New York). Stiler has been featured in BOMBlog, Artforum.com, and Flash Art Italia and is represented by Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in New York.
Selected Press
Ruby Sky Stiler, Christopher Howard, Artforum, May 2009.
Ruby Sky Stiler, Rebekah Drysdale, Daily Serving, May 16, 2009.
In Words: Ruby Sky Stiler, Kelly Devine Thomas, BOMBlog May 25, 2009.
That's What He Said, Ian Cooper, The Highlights, October 2009.
Learn moreSable Elyse Smith’s work has been exhibited in numerous institutions, with solo shows at the Queens Museum in New York and the Haggerty Museum in Milwaukee. In the forthcoming year Smith’s work will be featured in exhibitions at the New Museum, NY, the Wexner Center of the Arts in Columbus, OH, MoMA PS1, NY and she will be an artist-in-residence at the Rauschenberg Residency. Most recently, her work was on view at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, MA as part of Colored People Time, which traveled from the ICA Philadelphia. Her work was included in Great Force at the ICA at Virginia Commonwealth University, and solo shows include Carlos Ishikawa in London (2019) and JTT in New York (2018). Smith was a 2018/2019 artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem which culminated in an exhibition at MoMA PS1, NY. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including Matthew Brown Los Angeles, the Highline in New York, for which she also curated an event at The Kitchen, the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, SITE Santa Fe, Brooklyn Academy of Music, the New Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Socrates Sculpture Park, El Museo Del Barrio, and Andrea Rosen Gallery.
Learn moreSaint Abdullah is the moniker of Mohammad and Mehdi, New York based Iranian-Canadian brothers working across sound, and music. Inspired by Iran’s religious, political and cultural history, the project was formed out of a deep frustration with the way the West perceives – and treats – Muslims and the Islamic faith. We aim to challenge stereotypes and act as a conduit between unnecessary enemies.
Learn moreSandy Rodriguez (b. 1975, National City, CA) is a Los Angeles-based Chicana artist and researcher. Her ongoing series Codex Rodriguez-Mondragón is a collection of maps and paintings about the intersections of history, social memory, contemporary politics, and cultural production. Her works are in the permanent collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, AR; Amon Carter Museum, TX; The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Garden, CA; Denver Art Museum, CO. She was awarded the 2023 Jacob Lawrence Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2023 Hermitage Greenfield Prize, Caltech-Huntington Art + Research Residency, Creative Capital Award, and Migrations Initiative from Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative and Global Cornell. Rodriguez and her work have been featured in BBC News: In The Studio, Hyperallergic, LA Weekly, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Spectrum News 1, and others.
Check out a behind-the-scenes video of Sandy Rodriguez's work in Policing Justice.
Learn moreSarah Farahat is a transdisciplinary Egyptian American* artist, cultural worker, teacher, and abolitionist dreaming of a more collective future for all beings. She holds a BA in Psychology from Occidental College, a BFA in Intermedia Studies from PNCA, and an MFA from California College of the Arts. She has trained in auricular acupuncture at the historic Lincoln Recovery Center in The Bronx, and participated in Beirut's Homeworkspace program on the coattails of the Arab "Spring." She teaches art at local colleges and for kids in her community, and is a member of the Justseeds Artists' Cooperative. For the past 16 years, Farahat has monitored the body within the sociopolitical landscape in the US and abroad, intervening with works that explore grief, connection, assimilation, storytelling, and engagement. Grassroots movement building informs her work. She finds joy in reading speculative fiction, talking with plants, cooking, and DJing. Her work lives in protests, archives, public and digital spaces, and is in the permanent collections of JustSeeds Collective, Pittsburgh; Arab American National Museum, Dearborn; Charles Voorhies Fine Art Library, Portland; Palestine Poster Project, Silver Spring; and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, Culver City. She has been featured in publications including Artforum, The Oregonian, L'Orient-Le Jour, and The Daily Star. As a nomadic child of diaspora, Farahat plants portals through taste, smell, and sound while continually attempting to live in reciprocity with the land wherever she creates home. She is a co-founder of the SWANA Rose Culture and Community Center in Portland.
* Farahat grapples with an appropriate way to name her location amidst the ongoing legacies of harm to land and people by colonialist projects.
Learn moreSarah Gilbert (she/they) is an artist and educator based in what is currently called Los Angeles, CA (Gabrileño/Tongva/Kizh Lands), where she is an Associate Professor of Sculpture and Affiliate Faculty in Gender and Feminist Studies at Pitzer College. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, a BA from Brown University, and her MFA in Sculpture from the University of Idaho.
Gilbert’s work explores craft and collectivity—how the sticky relationality of material transformation can open spaces for thinking and feeling together in more-than-human worlds. Joining a wide range of materials and processes, her promiscuously interdisciplinary practice moves between art and science, synthesizing traditional craft techniques with emerging technologies. Often unsettling clear boundaries between past and present, her work draws on material memory and tensions between figuration and abstraction as springboards for contemplating our experience of time. Moving us away from narratives of material mastery or maker-movement individualism, Gilbert's practice highlights the ethical particularities of encounters with difference, and the radical potential of embodied attunement to reorient us towards collective care.
Gilbert has exhibited widely throughout the US and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include BREAKING AND BENDING, curated by Stephanie Snyder at the Edith Feldenheimer Gallery at Reed College, Portland; GOOSEBUMPS, an interactive sound installation as part of the 7th Tallinn Applied Arts Triennial, Estonia; and TURNINGS at the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk. She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including WOMEN ON THE FENCE in Desert Hot Springs; GENERIS01: COMMUNITY ASSOCIATION at Bushwick Expo, Brooklyn; BORN/MADE at Tartu Art House, Estonia; GLASSAC 17 in Lisbon; WHITHER THE AMERICAN DREAM at Punch Gallery, Seattle; and IMAGINED COMMUNITIES at Gallery Project, Ann Arbor.
In 2014, Gilbert was awarded the inaugural 4Front: Innovation From All Angles Residency at the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk. She has been a Fellow at the Creative Glass Center of America, Millville; and a Resident Artist at Faro Tláhuac, Mexico City; Olustvere Mõis, Estonia; Glazenhuis, Lommel; and the LC36-Kunstverein, Cologne.
Her published writing includes:
“A Widening Chromaticism: Learning Perception in the Collective Craftwork of the Encounter” in Material Perceptions, Documents of Contemporary Craft no. 5, edited by Knut Astrup Bull and André Gali, Arnoldsche Art Publications, Stuttgart, Germany, 2018.
“Understories: A Common Ground for Art and Science,” co-authored w/ Scott F. Gilbert in the Museum Catalog for Alma Heikkilä’s Exhibition: ‘ , ‘ /mediums,.’_ ” bodies,.’_ ” ° ∞ logs,∞ ‘ , ‘ /~` ‘ holes, .’ `-. ` .’ — °habitats / /`‘ * ‘-‘ . ‘ , ‘ /~`want to feel (,) you inside | * . . * * | ..* . . *./..-. ~ .’ ‘ , ‘ /~` ❅ ☼ ~, curated by Satu Oksanen, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland, 2019.
“Process Epistemologies for the Careful Interplay of Art and Biology: An Afterward,” co-authored w/ Scott F. Gilbert in Drawing Processes of Life: Cells, Molecules, Organisms, edited by Gemma Anderson and John Dupre, Intellect Press, Bristol, United Kingdom (forthcoming, 2023).
Learn moreSasha Wortzel is a visual artist and filmmaker working between South Florida (Miccosukee and Seminole lands) and New York City (Lenape lands). Blending the archival and the imaginary, Wortzel uses film, video, installation, sculpture, sound, and performance to explore how the past haunts and inextricably shapes contemporary American life. Projects examine queer place-making, geographies of resistance, and the systems that marginalize, extract, and erase communities, peoples, and histories.
Wortzel’s films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art’s DocFortnight, True/False Film Festival, DOC NYC, BAMcinemaFest, Blackstar, New Orleans Film Festival, Wexner Center for the Arts, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Berlinale, among others. Their work has been exhibited at the New Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and The Kitchen, New York; and SALTS, Birsfelden. Wortzel has been supported by the Sundance Institute, Ford Foundation, Field of Vision, Doc Society, Art Matters, and a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship. Wortzel has participated in residencies including Smack Mellon’s Artist Studio Program, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Program, Abrons Arts Center, Watermill Center, New York; AIRIE (Artists in Residence in the Everglades) and Oolite Arts, Miami Beach. Wortzel’s film This is an Address (2020) is distributed by Field of Vision. Happy Birthday Marsha! (2018; co-director Tourmaline) won special mention at Outfest and is distributed by Frameline. Their work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Studio Museum of Harlem, Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, and Miami Dade County Art in Public Places. She has been featured in publications including the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, and New York Magazine. Wortzel received an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College.
Learn moreSathya is a Bay Area-based artist with a particular focus on the somatic ripple effects of trauma & social alienation. He is an Indian gay trans man with a history of FSSW.
@transfxgsneverdie
Learn moreSatpreet Kahlon (b. 1989) is a Panjabi-born artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She received a full fellowship to pursue her MFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 2019. In addition to her studio practice, which has been featured in Hyperallergic and Artforum, she co-founded and -ran an Indigenous arts organization that supported 400 artists with over $2 million of opportunities and rematriated 1.5 acres of greenspace that was slated for development during her tenure from 2017-2023. For this work, she was named one of the Most Influential People in Seattle by Seattle Magazine in 2019, and was a 2022 Roddenberry Fellow for “new and innovative strategies to safeguard human rights and ensure an equal and just society for all.”
Kahlon's practice has been supported by Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA; National Endowment for the Arts; Robert Rauschenberg Foundation; Foundation for Contemporary Arts; Critical Minded; Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), Portland, OR; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; 4Culture, Seattle, WA; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA; Magnum Foundation, New York, NY; Brown University, Providence, RI; and Bellevue Art Museum, Bellevue, WA, among others. She is the 2024 recipient of the Foundwork Artist Prize, an annual international juried award “to support outstanding artistic practices,” and is currently preparing for a solo exhibition in PICA's 10,000-square-foot warehouse space.
Learn moreSatya Byock is a psychotherapist in Portland. Her clinical and academic work is rooted in the scholarship of Carl Jung, which emphasizes the reality of the unconscious and its impact on human experience, identity, and relationships. Through studying the language of dreams, mythology, and history, Satya seeks to better understand what propels us towards acts of creation and destruction. Prior to working as a clinician, Satya studied and worked in a variety of settings internationally including with prisoners in Colombia, with students and Buddhist monks in central Sri Lanka, and with farmers in post-tsunami South Asia. She has also worked with tech start-ups, non-profits, and foundations in Portland and California. She holds a B.A. in History from Lewis & Clark College and a Masters in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. She has a private practice in downtown Portland.
Learn moresean chamberlain is a queer artist currently living in Portland, OR.
Their practice largely focuses on identity production, the ethics of the second self, and the construction of our IRL/URL worlds. This work predominantly manifests through video, installation, publication, and performance, as well as being engaged through curatorial work, event production, and writing. chamberlain has exhibited at b10, Composition, GAK Space, First Brick, One Grand Gallery, and has performed in various nightclubs, both above and below ground.
@seanchamberlain
Learn moreSeba Calfuqueo are from Mapuche origin. Their work appeals to their inheritance to propose a critical reflection on the social, cultural, and political status of the Mapuche subject in contemporary Chilean society and in Latin America. It includes installations, ceramics, performances, and video art that explore cultural similarities and differences as well as the stereotypes produced from the cross between Indigenous and Western ways of thinking. Their research also has the purpose of making visible feminist and sexual dissidence issues. Seba Calfuqueo is part of the Mapuche collective Rangiñtulewfü, which edits YeneRevista, an online magazine of art, thought, and writing in Wallmapu and AbyaYala language.
Learn moreAs an artist, Sharita Towne’s interests lie in unpacking the inherited struggles of past burdens and in affording collective catharsis. Through collaboration, stereo-photography, printmaking, video, and community art projects, she’s worked at memorials in Germany; in the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria; Brazil; in gentrifying cities like Portland and New Orleans; in schools, museums, and neighborhoods, and within her own family. She received a BFA from UC Berkeley and an MFA from Portland State University. She currently teaches at Pacific Northwest College of Art, works in the DIY printmaking and audiovisual collective URe:AD Press (United Re:Public of the African Diaspora), the post-colonial conceptual karaoke band Weird Allan Kaprow, and is a 2016 Art Matters grant recipient.
Learn moreSHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY is a new media artist and poet. Known for using sound, video, and performance, HOLLOWAY shapes the rhetorics of technology and sexuality into tools for exposing structures of power. She has spoken and exhibited work internationally in spaces like The New Museum (NYC), The Kitchen (NYC), Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. SHAWNÉ was a 20-21 Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art Queer Theatre & Performance Resident and is currently teaching across the New Arts Journalism and the Film Video New Media and Animation departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Learn moreSholeh Asgary is an Iranian-born interdisciplinary sound artist whose immersive works, performances, and audience participatory scores implicate the viewer-participant into future mythological excavations, bridging large swathes of time and history through water, water clocks, crude oil, movement, light, imaging, voice, and sound. Asgary’s practice is a conglomeration of visual, sound, and collective processes, all of which she is deeply dedicated to.
Featured in Art in America’s 2022 “New Talent Issue,” Asgary has been supported by numerous residencies, most recently including Headlands Center for the Arts, MASS MoCA, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, UCLA Art Sci, ARoS Kunstmuseum, and Berkeley Art Center. Her work has been presented through performances, exhibitions and screenings by such institutions as Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Minnesota Street Project, Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, 500 Capp St., and Ann Arbor Film Festival. Asgary holds an MFA from Mills College and BA from San Francisco State University. Learn moresidony o’neal is an artist and writer working from interdisciplinary research and pre- to post- machine computing. o’neal’s practice treats conceptual art and mathematics as related forms of industrial culture that have shaped human relationships to objects, labor, and technology over time.
Recent solo exhibitions include Et al. (SOFTMAX HARD HASP), San Francisco, CA; Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, (The Pudding Butcher), Princeton, NJ; Dracula’s Revenge (NOT TALKING UNTIL BAD COMPANY JOINS), New York, NY; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (Enchiridion: Aisle, Spline, Resort), Portland, OR; and Veronica (AuguRing), Seattle, WA. Duo and group exhibitions include Third Born (Continuous Dimensional Thorax), Mexico City, Mexico; ICA at Maine College of Art and Design (ENTER:), Portland, ME; and SculptureCenter (In Practice: Total Disbelief), Long Island City, NY. o’neal has participated in residencies at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; and Banff Centre, Banff, AB, among others. o’neal is the co-founder of INFANT design firm. Performances as a part of DT have been presented with Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Volksbühne Berlin, and Performance Space New York. o'neal is the recipient of awards and fellowships including the Oregon Arts Commission's Joan Shipley Award and a Hodder Fellowship from the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. In 2023, o’neal was awarded a Hallie Ford Fellowship. Learn moreSimon Liu (b. 1987, Hong Kong) is an artist filmmaker working between alternate documentary forms, abstract diary films, 16mm projection performance, and video installation. He has exhibited at film festivals and institutions globally including the New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam: Tiger Short Competition, Toronto International Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, British Film Institute, The Shed, M+ Museum, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Cinéma du Réel, Sheffield Doc/Fest, “Dreamlands: Expanded,” and a solo-presentation at the Museum of Modern Art as part of their Modern Mondays series. The M+ Museum and MoMA recently acquired Liu’s quadruple 16mm projection “Highview” with other recent works for their Permanent Collections. Liu is a 2019 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, a teacher at the Cooper Union School of Art, and a member of Negativeland, an artist-run film lab in Brooklyn. Liu is currently editing his first feature film, Staffordshire Hoard.
Learn moreFresh out of the backwoods of sunny Tampa, Florida, S. Loper was educated in "The Greatest City in America," Baltimore, Maryland at the Maryland Institute College of Art. In 2010, degree in hand, Sloper stepped into the professional arena, pioneering as a toy expert and acting as a videographer, and sole animator for one of Tampa's finest cinematic enterprises. In result of a high-stakes bet, Sloper made the move to Portland, Oregon where all sorts of charm and adventure seem to follow in tow.
Learn moreStephanie Snyder is the Anne and John Hauberg Director and Curator of the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, a position she has held since 2003. Snyder graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Reed College and completed her graduate studies in Art History and Art Education at Columbia University. In 2008, Snyder received a Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Getty Foundation, and in 2014 she was a Fellow in the Getty’s Museum Leadership Institute. In 2013 she received an award for her critical writing from the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) and the CUE Foundation, New York. The author of numerous catalog essays and other writing projects, she is a regular contributor to Artforum.com.
Learn moreStephen Slappe is an artist and curator whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the South Carolina State Museum; The Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow; The Sarai Media Lab in Delhi; Artists’ Television Access in San Francisco; and The Art Gym at Marylhurst University in Portland, OR. Slappe was the recipient of a Couture award from the New American Art Union in Portland for his 2009 exhibition entitled Shelter in Place.
Learn moreStephen Thompson, originally from Calgary, Alberta is an inter-disciplinary artist working between Canada, USA and Europe. Stephen’s introduction to movement and performing was through competitive figure skating. He received a Bachelor of Kinesiology (art and science of movement) and Dance from the University of Calgary. In 2015 at the World “Figure” Championships in Lake Placid, Stephen received the bronze medal. In 2016 he received a Victor Martin-Lynch award from the Canada Council for the Arts. Past choreographic work and collaborations: 2012 Bessie award winning Antigone Sr. (Large), The Ghost of Montpellier and the Samurai (2014) with Trajal Harell, Culture Administration & Trembling (2014), Les Etudes (2017), Chaud (2020); Jennifer Lacey, Antonija Livingstone, Dominique Pétrin, whatwearesaying (2014); Public Recordings (2 Dora Mavor awards Toronto), numerous projects with Benoit Lachambre, Relative Collider (2015); Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard, Service #5: Try to keep kids off naturalism and Kein Paradiso with Adam Linder recipient of the Mohn Prize at the L.A. Bienniale, Stitchomythia with Nadia Lauro and Zeena Parkins, Dramaturge for Such Sweet Thunder (2019) recipient of 8tensions Impulstanz, Compulsory Figures (2019) co-signed with French visual artist Xavier Veilhan.
Learn moreTharp was raised in Ontario, Oregon, and presently resides in Portland. He received his BFA from Cornell University. His work was featured in the 2010 Whitney Biennial and has been acquired by The Whitney Museum of American Art, Albright Knox Gallery, Saatchi Gallery, Portland Art Museum, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and Reed College. He is represented by PDX Contemporary Art (Portland), Nicole Klagsbrun (New York) and Galerie Bertrand & Gruner (Geneva). Selected Press Critic's Pick: Storm Tharp, Stephanie Snyder, Artforum.com, August 3, 2010. Perfect in the Middle, Matt Stangel, Portland Mercury, June 24, 2010. Storm Tharp's eighth show at PDX Contemporary Art features latest work, 'Hercules', John Motley, The Oregonian, July 30, 2010. Storm Tharp, Richard Speer, art ltd., May 2010. Interview with Storm Tharp, Bean Gilsdorf, Daily Serving, January 4, 2010. Virtuoso Vindicated: Storm Tharp at PDX Contemporary, Jeff Jahn, PORT, January 10, 2007. Storm Tharp: Arrangement in Flesh Color and Black, Stephanie Snyder, PLAZM, September, 2008. Selected Video Storm Tharp Artist Talk at the Portland Art Museum. Storm Tharp on OPB Art Beat
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 moreTravis Stewart is a contemporary Northwest artist of Chinook, Rogue River, and Kalapuya descent. He lives in Grand Ronde, Oregon, and works in a variety of mediums to depict stories defined by the cultural landscape and design of the Willamette Valley and Columbia River people. He also works as a curator at Chachalu Museum and Cultural Center (Grand Ronde, OR) and has devoted his life to the preservation of the art and culture of the tribes of Western Oregon. Travis is a founding member of the Shawash Ili?i Kanim Tilixam, which is a nonprofit cultural preservation group and canoe family that works to impart traditional teachings to at-risk tribal youth through song, dance, language, and art.
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