Artists Archive
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Abigail DeVille received an MFA from Yale University and a BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology. She is the recipient of the 2014-15 fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the 2015 Creative Capital grant, the 2015 OBIE Award for Design, the 2017 Louis Tiffany Comfort Prize and the 2017-18 Chuck Close Henry W. and Marion T. Mitchell Rome Prize fellow.
DeVille’s work has been exhibited at venues including the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; Cooper Gallery at Hutchins Center, Harvard University, Cambridge; Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; and the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, New York. She has designed sets for theatrical productions at venues such as the Stratford Festival (2014), Harlem Stage (2016), La Mama (2015), JACK (2014-16), and Joe’s Pub (2014).
Learn moreAdam Sorensen’s work explores the landscape as subject and depicts the natural world with an intellectual remove. His dark otherworldly scenes suggest the lonely contemplation of overwhelming beauty. Sorensen’s work has been exhibited as part of the Portland Art Museum's 2011 APEX Project Space series, in Los Angeles as part of “High Five: Emerging Art in America,” in the Portland Art Museum’s 2003 Biennial as well as the “Core Sample” exhibition of that year. He was selected as one of ten artists for the annual young painters competition at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and was recently featured in New American Paintings. His work has been exhibited throughout the Northwest. Sorensen is currently represented by PDX Contemporary in Portland, Oregon, and James Harris Gallery in Seattle, Washington. An exhibition of new paintings is currently on view at PDX Contemporary Art.
Learn moreA.K. Burns is an artists and compulsive collaborator who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Using sculpture, video, collage and performed social actions, Burns exploits and perverts utilitarian forms, in an effort to upend the pathology of language and meaning. Burns is a founding member and co-organizer of W.A.G.E. and co-editor of RANDY, an annual trans-feminist arts magazine. Burns has shown and screened works internationally, including the Tate Modern (UK), The Brooklyn Museum (NY), Hessel Museum of Art (NY), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (CA); Sculpture Center (NY), TAG (Netherlands), and Callicoon Fine Arts (NY). Burns received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.
Learn moreAki Onda is an artist and composer. His musical and visual works are often catalyzed by and structured around memories—personal, collective, historical—such as his widely-known project "Cassette Memories", drawn from three decades of field recordings (or, as Onda refers to them, ‘sound diaries’). Crossing genres, he has been active internationally in the fields of art, film, music, and performance. His artistic collaborators include Michael Snow, Ken Jacobs, Raha Raissnia, Loren Connors, Alan Licht, David Toop, and Akio Suzuki. Onda has presented his works at documenta 14, the Louvre Museum, Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Argos, Bozar, International Film Festival Rotterdam, MoMA, The Kitchen, and Walker Art Center, Nam June Paik Art Center among other institutions. After residing in New York for many years, he currently lives and works in Mito, Japan.
Learn moreAKIO SUZUKI is known as a pioneer of sound art, but the breadth of his activities and the form of his works far exceeds the normal boundaries of sound art. It is perhaps more as a “quester after sound and space” that he has received the most attention from artists in many fields. Suzuki’s journey as an artist began in 1963 with a performance at Nagoya station, in which he threw a bucket full of junk down a staircase. The inspiration behind this performance is the idea that if one were to hurl an object down a well-balanced stairway, a pleasant rhythm might be the result— took the desire to “listen” as its subject. That desire to hear, to listen has remained the one constant in Suzuki’s stance as an artist. During the sixties, Suzuki’s sense of playfulness led him to undertake a series of Self-Study Events, where he explored the processes of “throwing” and “following”, taking the natural world as his collaborator. The experiences he gained in these events led him in the seventies to invent an echo instrument he named Analapos. The instrument’s structure resembles that of two mirrors facing each other, reflecting into infinity. As an extension of the principles underlying Analapos, Suzuki constructed the Hinatabokko no kukan (Space in the Sun) in 1988. This space consists of two huge parallel walls, in between which the artist can sit all day and purify his hearing by listening to the reflected sounds of nature. This space leads the artist to discover a new method of listening. Suzuki himself comments: “Sound, which had been conceptually imprisoned in various spaces, is freed to circle the world.”
His performances and installations have been presented at major venues internationally including: Yokohama City Art Gallery, Japan, 2010; The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan, 2010; The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan, 2007; Gelbe Musik, Berlin, Germany, 2007; The Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama, Japan, 2005; British Museum, UK, 2003 and DAAD Galerie, Berlin, Germany, 2000.
He has also participated in major international events and Festivals including: Tuned City, Brussels, 2013; LISTE Art Fair Basel, Switzerland, 2013; MaerzMusik, Berlin, Germany, 2012; Nuit Blanche Festival, Paris, France, 2004; Adelaide Festival, Australia, 1999; Sonambiente Festival, Berlin, Germany, 1996; Documenta 8, Kassel, Germany, 1987; and Festival d’Automne, Paris, France, 1978.
Learn moreAki 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 moreAlex Cecchetti is an artist based in Paris, France, who works primarily in writing and performance. Cecchetti has published several books of his writing, and performed internationally at places including: La Vatrine, Paris, France (2010); Art Pavillion, Zagreb, Croatia (2010); Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, France (2009); and Artists Space, New York, NY (2009). Cecchetti was an artist in residence at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2006) and SMART Project Space, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2003).
Learn moreMacKenzie is an experimental film artist working primarily with relic analog film equipment and hand-processed imagery. He creates works of expanded cinema, light projection installation, and projector performance. His work has screened at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the EXiS Experimental Film Festival in Seoul, Lightcone in Paris, Kino Arsenal in Berlin, and others. MacKenzie was the founder and curator of the Edison Electric Gallery of Moving Images, the Blinding Light!! Cinema, and the Vancouver Underground Film Festival. He was an artist in residence at Atelier MTK in Grenobles, France, and Struts Gallery/ Faucet Media in New Brunswick. MacKenzie is currently Artist in Residence at Cineworks’ Analog Film Annex in Vancouver.
Learn moreDolan is an artist who lives and works in Portland, Oregon, where he is a co-curator of Appendix Space. Recent exhibitions include Infinite Cell at Autzen Gallery (Portland), Cherry Picking at Karma International (Zurich), ZERTZ Player with Koch Snowflake at West Lane South (London), and Deep Freeze at Generation Works (Tacoma). Dolan is a 2013 artist-in-residence with the Park Avenue Armory in conjunction with 89plus, an ongoing research project conducted by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Simon Castets, which examines the generation of artists born in or after 1989.
Selected Press
"22 Year Old Sculptor to Do Residency at Park Avenue Armory," Kyle Petreycik, Animal New York, April 23, 2013.
Learn moreAlfredo Jaar is an artist, architect, and filmmaker who lives and works in New York. His work has been shown extensively around the world. He has participated in the Biennales of Venice (1986, 2007, 2009, 2013), Sao Paulo (1987, 1989, 2010, 2021), as well as, Documenta in Kassel (1987, 2002).
Important individual exhibitions include The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1992); Whitechapel, London (1992); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1994); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1995); and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome (2005). Major recent surveys of his work have taken place at Musée des Beaux Arts, Lausanne (2007); Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2008); Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlinische Galerie and Neue Gesellschaft fur bildende Kunst e.V., Berlin (2012); Rencontres d’Arles (2013); KIASMA, Helsinki (2014); Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK (2017), Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa (2020) and SESC Pompeia, Sao Paulo (2021).
The artist has realized more than seventy public interventions around the world. Over sixty monographic publications have been published about his work. He became a Guggenheim Fellow in 1985 and a MacArthur Fellow in 2000. He received the Hiroshima Art Prize in 2018 and the Hasselblad Award in 2020.
His work can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum, New York; Art Institute of Chicago and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MOCA and LACMA, Los Angeles; MASP, Museu de Arte de São Paulo; TATE, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Centro Reina Sofia, Madrid; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; MAXXI and MACRO, Rome; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlaebeck; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art and Tokushima Modern Art Museum, Japan; M+, Hong Kong; and dozens of institutions and private collections worldwide. Learn moreAlima Lee is a transdisciplinary afrolatinx artist from New York City and is currently based in LA. Their work explores themes of identity and intersectionality. A recent Frieze LA x Ghetto Film School Fellow and Co-Host of a monthly radio show, "Rave Reparations" on NTS. Working in an uninhibited range of mediums from video installation and performance to printmaking and sculpture, Alima is on an ever-constant freefall from structure. Their video work is currently on view at HVW8 Gallery in Berlin and has been presented at the Tate Modern, MOCA, Smithsonian African American Museum, Gavin Brown's Enterprise, and ICA Boston among other global entities.
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 moreAmber Gayle Thalmayer (Ph.D, psychology, University of Oregon 2013) has collaborated on scientific studies seeking to distinguish culturally specific personality concepts from more universal, directly translatable, attribute distinctions. She has also published on how to best measure personality, and on personality predictors of life outcomes and mental health treatment. As half of underground publishing duo Evil Twin Publications, Amber spent the ‘90s writing a zine called “My Evil Twin Sister”, and books of poetry and natural history. Evil Twin books and zines are included in the permanent collections of over a dozen institutions, including the Victoria Albert Museum of London, MOMA NY, and SF MOMA. Amber lives on a farm in Eugene with her family, and teaches at the University of Oregon.
Learn moreAMERICAN ARTIST makes thought experiments that mine the history of technology, race, and knowledge production, beginning with their legal name change in 2013. Their artwork primarily takes the form of sculpture, software, and video. Artist is a recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in Visual Art and a Creative Capital grantee. They are a former resident of Smack Mellon, Red Bull Arts Detroit, Abrons Art Center, Recess, EYEBEAM, Pioneer Works, and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. They have exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland, and Nam June Paik Art Center, Seoul. Their work has been featured in The New York Times, Cultured, Artforum, and Art in America. Artist is a co-director of the School for Poetic Computation and a core faculty at Yale.
ig: @ivorytower_headass
Learn moreAndrea Stolowitz is a playwright living in Portland, Oregon and a proud member of Playwrights West. Her plays have been produced nationally and internationally. The LA Times calls her work “heartbreaking” and the Orange County Register characterizes her approach as a “brave refusal to sugarcoat...issues and tough decisions.”
A recipient of Artists Repertory Theatre’s $25,000 Fowler/Levin Prize, Andrea premiered her newest work, Ithaka, at the theatre in June 2013.
Her previous play Antarktikos premiered at Pittsburgh Playhouse in March, 2013 and won the Oregon Book Awards’ Angus L. Bowmer Award for Drama in April 2013. Andrea’s screenwriting work includes Jonathan’s War, a feature-length action film; the treatment for Code Name: Pelicano, which was sold to independent producers; and the upcoming web series Crackerjacks, which is currently in development.
A Walter E. Dakin Fellow at The Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Andrea has also been awarded residencies at Ledig House, Soapstone, and Hedgebrook; and arts grants from North Carolina, Oregon, and private foundations. An MFA playwriting alumna of UC-San Diego, Andrea teaches at Willamette University and the University of Portland and has served on the theatre studies faculty at Duke University and UC-San Diego.
Learn moreAndrew Gilbert is a Los Angeles-based performer, musician, and teacher. In 2007 he co-founded Poor Dog Group, an experimental performance collective with whom he has developed six works as a sound designer and performer, performing in venues including REDCAT, the Experimental Media and Performance Art Center (EMPAC), The Getty Villa, Grotowski Institute in Poland, Bitef Theater in Serbia, and the Pula International Theater Festival in Croatia. House Music, an ongoing co-creation with choreographer Jennie Liu, is a performance for 16 guests rooted in an ongoing study of Japanese tea ceremony, and has been performed since 2014 at venues including Prelude Festival, Live Arts Exchange, HomeLA, The Mistake Room and the Printed Matter Art Book Fair. He most recently designed sound for choreographer Faye Driscoll's Thank You for Coming: Space. Andrew is one half of the band Royal Auditorium. @royalauditorium @andrewgilbertindependentartist
Learn moreFor the TBA Festival, Mr. Ritchey has specially composed a totally unique narrative-form biography of no more than 150 words. This personal biography provides context for the 16mm programs he has organized. At each of the screenings, Mr. Ritchey's exclusive, narrative-form biography will be distributed as an addendum to the program notes. This biography totaling at least less than 150 words will be an important and unrepeatable part of the unique experience of each individual program, as well as the exhibition as a whole. All attendees of the TBA Festival are encouraged to read the program notes for additional details. These program notes will be made available no later than the date of each individual program, at or prior to the start time of each event.
Learn moreAngélica Maria Millán Lozano is a Portland based artist from Bogotá, Colombia. She creates abstract and figurative compositions on distressed fabrics that question the social injustices that affect Latinas in the home. She received her MFA in Visual Studies at Pacific Northwest College of Art and is currently the Curatorial Fellow for Community Engagement at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA). Millán is also a co-founder at cvllejerx, a poc focused fashion, poetry, and performance collaboration. Millán has presented work at Disjecta, Williamson | Knight, Nationale in Portland, OR; Gallery Protocol in Gainesville, Florida; and Bridge Productions in Seattle, Washington.
Learn moreAnissa Mack received her BA in Studio Art from Wesleyan University and an MFA from Tyler School of Art. She also attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and participated in the PS1 National Studio Program. Her work has been featured solo exhibitions in New York, Atlanta, and Portland, Oregon. She has also created commissioned public projects and performances for the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum (California), WaveHill Gardens (Bronx, New York), The Public Art Fund (New York), and the Queens Museum (New York). She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Mack is represented by Laurel Gitlen in New York.
Selected Press
Anissa Mack at Small A Projects, Micah J. Malone, Big, RED & Shiny, March 17, 2008.
Anissa Mack: The Last Full Weekend Each September, John Motley, Portland Mercury, March 27, 2008.
Pies for a Passerby (with audio), Melissa Block, NPR, June 14, 2002.
Learn moreGray 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 moreAnn Hamilton is an American artist who studied textile arts at the University of Kansas, where she completed her BFA in 1979. She went on to earn an MFA from Yale University in sculpture in 1985. Her varied background in the visual arts informs her artistic practice, which takes the form of installations, videos, objects, and performance. Hamilton’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including the Irish Museum of Modern Art (2002), Musèe d’Art Contemporain in Lyon, France (1997), and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1994). In 1999, Hamilton was selected to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. Her honors include the National Medal of Arts (2014), a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship (1993), The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1990), and a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1989).
Learn moreAnthony Hudson is a Grand Ronde/Siletz artist and writer also known as Carla Rossi, Portland's premier drag clown. Hudson’s performance work—from his award-winning solo show Looking for Tiger Lily to Queer Horror at the Hollywood Theatre—have earned him national fellowships, international engagements including the US Pavilion’s drag clown in residence at the 2024 Venice Biennale, features in Hyperallergic and Art in America, and sainthood from the Portland Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. A 2023 FSG Writer’s Fellowship finalist and 2024 Tin House resident, Hudson’s writing has appeared in American Theatre, BOMB Magazine, and Arts and International Affairs. Hudson is currently adapting Looking for Tiger Lily into a book.
Learn moreCatala's practice, aside from making video, includes performance-based works and curating as a medium. A New York-based French artist, Catala holds a BA in mathematics and was schooled in sonic and fine arts at Middlesex and London Guildhall Universities in London. His work has been exhibited internationally at le Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Galerie Christine Mayer (Munich); GAM (Mexico); The Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh); and numerous venues in Bordeaux, Berlin, London, Los Angeles, Mexico, New York, Munich, Paris, Toulouse, and Saint-Etienne.
Learn moreariella tai is a video artist, film scholar, and independent programmer from Queens, New York. They are interested in Black performance and cultural vernaculars in film, television and media studies. They are one half of “the first and the last,” a fellowship, workshop and screening series supporting and celebrating the work of Black women and femmes in film, video and new media art. They have shown work at Anthology Film Archives, the Portland Oregon Women’s Film Festival, Portland Institute For Contemporary Art, Northwest Film Center, Boathouse Microcinema, Wa Na Wari, the Black Femme Supremacy Film Festival, MOCA and Smack Mellon. Their most recent video work "safehouse" premiered at Trinity Square Video in Toronto as part of group show "Architectures after the Asylum" curated by Sajdeep Soomal.
Learn moreArnold J. Kemp is an American artist who has been critically and professionally engaged with making, exhibiting and publishing in cities such as San Francisco, New York, Portland, and Chicago. He has also worked internationally in Stockholm, Paris, Vienna, Berlin and Nassau, Bahamas. His works are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, The Tacoma Art Museum, The Schneider Museum of Art and the Fine Arts Collection at the University of California, Davis. He is a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow and has also received awards and fellowships from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Art Matters Inc., Printed Matter, Inc., and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. He holds an MFA from Stanford University. He is Dean of Graduate Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been exhibited in Chicago at Iceberg Projects.
Learn moreAutumn Knight is a New York-based, Texas-born interdisciplinary artist working with performance, installation, video, sound, and text. Drawing from her training in theater, group dynamics, and psychology, Knight makes performances that reshape power structures and upend audience expectations of live experiences. Her performance work has been on view at various institutions, including Human Resources, Los Angeles; Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Shedhalle, Zurich; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, OR; The Kitchen, New York; Museum Of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; Museum Ostwall, Dortmund; Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY; Performance Space New York, NY; and REDCAT, Los Angeles. Her performance work, WALL, is the first live performance work acquired to the permanent collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Knight is the recipient of various awards, grants, honors, and fellowships, including an Art Matters Grant, the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, the Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize in Visual Art, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Learn moreBig Art Group is a New York-based experimental performance ensemble founded by Caden Manson and Jemma Nelson in 1999. The company pushes the formal boundaries of theater, film, and visual art through the use of technology and experimental methods of communication. In its history, the company has grown from an underground performance group to an internationally recognized ensemble with invitations from leading festivals and presenters including Hebbel am Ufer Berlin, Festival d’automne à Paris, La Vie de Festival Rome, REDCAT in Los Angeles, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and The Kitchen in New York.
Selected Press
10 years of Big Art Group, Justin Bond, The Brooklyn Rail, April 2010
Big Art Group: 'The People' Shaped by Local Views, Nirmala Nataraj, San Francisco Chronicle, September 15, 2011.
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 moreBrad Adkins was born in Kalispell, Montana. Adkins' individual, collaborative, and curatorial work has been presented at The Art Gym, Consolidated Works, Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Gallery, The Portland Art Museum, and PICA; and has been noted and featured in ArtNews, Artweek, Modern Painters, Punk Planet, and The Independent. His work is represented by PDX Contemporary Art (OR). BIG RED, an audio cd that documents an afternoon conversation between Adkins and Curtis Knapp on the subjects of performance, imitation, and close-up magic, was produced by Marriage Records in 2004.
Learn moreAtlas has created work for film, theatre, television, and museums including the Whitney (New York) and the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville (Paris). A pioneer of integrating live video with stage performance, Atlas is best known for his acclaimed collaborations with choreographers, dancers, and performers such as Leigh Bowery, Diamanda Galas, Merce Cunningham, and with Antony and the Johnsons on the audiovisual performance, Turning. Atlas is the recipient of three Bessie Awards and was recently presented with the prestigious John Cage award, by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2006).
Atlas has been active as an interdisciplinary filmmaker and video artist since the 1970s. Over the years he has made pioneering media/dance works, multi-channel video installations, feature-length documentaries, video art works for television, and live electronic performances. In November 2006, London's Tate Modern presented a retrospective of his work, titled Hail the New Puritan.
Learn moreDB Amorin (b. Honolulu, Hawai'i) is an interdisciplinary media artist who explores audio-visual non-linearity as a container for intersectional experience. He frequently emphasizes the generative role of error as an opportunity for creation, resulting in media-centered projects driven by DIY methodologies, lo-fi translations, and persistent, inquisitive experimentation with available materials.
His work has garnered awards from esteemed organizations including the Jersey City Arts Council, Oregon Arts Commission, the Ford Family Foundation, Regional Arts & Culture Council, the Precipice Fund grant funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Calligram Foundation and administered by Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA). His visual art, performances, curatorial & collaborative programming have been presented internationally at A4 Arts Foundation; the ImagineNative Film + Media Arts Festival; Onassis Foundation; ICA at MECA&D; Luggage Store Gallery; Soundwave ((7)) Biennial; PICA; Portland Art Museum; the Honolulu Museum of Art; Honolulu Biennial 2019.
Learn moreEmily Jones and Hannah Krafcik make performances and facilitate movement practices together. They are white settlers residing on the unceded lands of the Cowlitz, Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, Clackamas, and many other Tribes, also known today as Portland, OR. Hannah (they/them) is a neurodivergent dancer and writer. Emily (she/they) is a dancer, movement educator, and bodyworker. The artists’ long-standing collaboration is driven by considering how power dynamics impact their body/minds and behaviors.
Learn moreForensic Architecture (FA) is a research agency, based at Goldsmiths, University of London, investigating human rights violations including violence committed by states, police forces, militaries, and corporations. FA works in partnership with institutions across civil society, from grassroots activists, to legal teams, to international NGOs and media organisations, to carry out investigations with and on behalf of communities and individuals affected by conflict, police brutality, border regimes and environmental violence.
Our investigations employ cutting-edge techniques in spatial and architectural analysis, open source investigation, digital modelling, and immersive technologies, as well as documentary research, situated interviews, and academic collaboration. Findings from our investigations have been presented in national and international courtrooms, parliamentary inquiries, and exhibitions at some of the world’s leading cultural institutions and in international media, as well as in citizen’s tribunals and community assemblies.
Learn moreDr. Gregory D. S. Anderson is founder and Director of Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. Dr. Anderson has degrees in Linguistics from Harvard (AB) and University of Chicago (PhD). He is an expert in endangered languages and the structure and history of languages from across the globe. He has worked with speakers of endangered minority languages in their communities from every continent. He is the author of eleven books and more than eighty academic articles. Dr. Anderson is a National Geographic Society Fellow and was the subject of the critically acclaimed film The Linguists.
Learn moreIna Diane Archer is a Media Conservation and Digitization Assistant at The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture. She is a filmmaker and visual artist whose multimedia works and films have been shown nationally. Ina was a Studio Artist in the Whitney Independent Study program, a NYFA multidisciplinary Fellow, a 2005 Creative Capital grantee in film and video, and she has been awarded numerous residencies. Prior to joining NMAAHC, Ina was adjunct faculty at Parsons The New School for Design. She is the former co-chair of New York Women in Film and Television’s Women’s Film Preservation Fund. Ina earned a BFA in Film/Video from RISD and a Master’s in Cinema Studies at NYU focusing on race, preservation, early sound cinema and technology and she studied Moving Image Archiving and Preservation at UCLA (MIAS) and NYU (MIAP). Finally, Ina is a regular contributor to Film Comment Magazine, and she participates on their podcasts and she is juggling at least three blogs!
Learn moreFounded by Luisa Pardo and Gabino Rodríguez in 2003, Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol is a young Mexican theater company reflecting the new dynamics of contemporary Mexican culture. They develop their multimedia stage productions as mechanisms to link work and life and give voice to overlooked moments in social and political historical. Lagartijas has toured widely throughout Mexico and Europe and has received awards from the Impatience Festival and the Zürcher Theater Spektakel.
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Learn moreFounded in 2012 by Libby Werbel, Portland Museum of Modern Art (PMOMA) is an investigative project focused on the lack of major contemporary and modern art institutions within a growing metropolis. PMOMA has produced more than 50 exhibitions and events within the context of a self-actualized and community-grown modern art museum.
Learn moreMarina Abramović was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1946. A pioneer of performance as a visual art form, Abramović has used her body as both subject and medium of her performances to test her physical, mental, and emotional limits—often pushing beyond them and even risking her life—in a quest for heightened consciousness, transcendence, and self-transformation. Characterized by endurance and pain—and by repetitive behavior, actions of long duration, and intense public interactions and energy dialogues—her work has engaged, fascinated, and sometimes repelled live audiences. The universal themes of life and death are recurring motifs, often enhanced by the use of symbolic visual elements or props such as crystals, bones, knives, tables, and pentagrams. While the sources of some works lie in her personal history (the circumstances of her childhood and family life under Communist rule in the former Yugoslavia), others lie in more recent and contemporary events, such as the wars in her homeland and other parts of the world. Marina Abramović attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade (1965–70) and the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Yugoslavia (1970–72). She received an honorary doctorate from the Art Institute of Chicago (2004). She has also received many other honors, including a Golden Lion at the 47th Venice Biennale (1997); a Bessie (2003); and awards from the International Association of Art Critics (2003, 2007). Abramović has had major exhibitions and performances at the Garage Art Center, Moscow (2011); Manchester International Festival (2011); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2005); Whitney Biennial (2004); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (2001); Irish Museum of Modern Art (2001); Documenta (1977, 1982, 1992); and the Venice Biennale (1976, 1997, 2009). Marina Abramović lives and works in New York City. -From Art21.
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 moreGutierrez is a New York-based dance and music artist who makes solo and group pieces with a variety of artists under the moniker Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People. His work has toured internationally to festivals and venues including American Realness Festival in New York; Festival d’automne à Paris; Antipodes Festival in Brest, France; Out There Festival at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; UNAM in Mexico City; and ImPulsTanz in Vienna. He is the winner of three New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” awards.
Learn moreNana Adusei-Poku, PhD, is Assistant Professor in African Diasporic Art History in the Department of History of Art at UC Berkeley, California. She was previously Associate Professor and Luma Foundation Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York. Her book Taking Stakes in the Unknown: Tracing Post-Black Art was published in 2021 with Transcript Verlag and her articles have been published in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, e-flux, Kunstforum International, Flash Art, L’Internationale and darkmatter. She curated the event “Performances of Nothingness” (Academy of Arts, Berlin, 2018) and Black Melancholia (Hessel Museum Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 2022).
Learn moreForever cascading forward in a positive direction, gleefully instinctive, No Age erupt out of your speakers, blasting away the clouds above the smoggy cityscape to reveal a solar flaring sun. With an ecstatic force bubbling around and beyond their music, they release contagious energy like they’re main-lining a field full of whirring wind turbines, while tuned into an ancient celestial power source.
No Age is the duo of Dean Spunt and Randy Randall, they are on a constant journey to explore the furthest reaches of sound. They set out with one particular rule in mind: To write songs that we would be psyched to listen to. On a first listen, discovering each new dose of their alchemy is exhilarating—they produce perfectly crafted songs, underpinned by infectious melodies and ear-piercing cacophony. This swirling mix of unstoppable momentum is catapulted into the stratosphere by sweeping bursts of symphonic growls. Their power is enunciated through their ability to take their core of catchy song-writing and expand its emotional influence through tone, structure and noise. Everything in Between, their third album and follow-up to 2008’s Nouns has now arrived.
Learn moreRay Anthony Barrett's interdisciplinary practice is situated at the intersection of art and gastronomy. Since 2018, his pop-up, CINQVÉ, has been devoted to tracing the evolution of Soul Food from California to its West African origins. GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, a project commissioned by Active Cultures, traces a seven month journey across the varied landscapes of the Western states. This multifaceted endeavor—spanning writing, research, film, and cooking—unfolded over the course of two years, interrogating the evolution of agricultural and land practices and the impact of dispossession and colonialism on foodways, tracing its roots from settler colonialism to present day modes of capitalism, and overconsumption. Barrett's drawings, photography, and installations elaborate on these themes. His projects have been featured at Gagosian, Beverly Hills, CA; Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Underground Museum, Los Angeles, CA; and Dak’Art: African Contemporary Art Biennale, Dakar, Senegal, among others. His work has been profiled in Hyperallergic, Compound Butter, and Los Angeles Times.
Learn moreSarah AbuAbdallah lives and works in Qatif, Saudi Arabia and studied art in both Rhode Island School of Design for a Masters in Digital Media, and in the College of Art and Design in University of Sharjah. She is currently an artist and puzzlemaker. Working with video, installation, poetry and images. Shown work in Sharjah Biennial 11, Serpentine Galleries Marathons, Fluidity in Kunstverein in Hamburg, Co-Workers in Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Do it Arabic, Prospectif Cinéma/Filter Bubble in Centre Pompidou and Luma Foundation, Private Settings in Warsaw Museum of Modern Art; Arab Contemporary in Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Rhizoma in the 55th Venice Biennale, amongst others
She is the recipient of Sharjah Art Foundation’s production programme grant (2016) in collaboration with Josh Bitelli for their project To Gaze at Ten Suns Shining and is a shortlisted artist for Abraaj Group Art Prize 2017.
Learn moreJacob Ciocci is an artist; a current Eyebeam Fellow; one third of the American art collective Paper Rad; and a prolific producer of music, installations, websites, and animations. David Wightman is completing a PhD in Music Composition at UC San Diego where he is a Lecturer of Pop Music Studies. Some of his many musical projects include Fortress of Amplitude, Powdered Wigs, and Chariots of Fire. Together, Jacob and David connect like Voltron in the high-NRG electronic music band Extreme Animals. They have toured the country every summer for the past 8 years presenting their music, videos, and art.
Selected Press
Eleven Evocations (For Paper Rad), Ed Halter, Rhizome, September 2, 2009.
Learn moreAngell was born in Portland, Oregon and lives and works in New York where he has produced and studied video, film and music. His work has been exhibited in Portland, New York, London, Europe and Australia and recently at the Istanbul Biennial. Angell gained notoriety in New York City by projecting his first nature video Jackie-O Forestry Center on the Guggenheim Museum and at Ground Zero. This year at the Caldera residency he inaugurated the first of his “myth building” public art projections on the snow-covered mountains and trees of central Oregon for the edification of unsuspecting drivers.
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