Artists Archive
A.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 moreAlex S. Vitale is Professor of Sociology and Coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He has spent the last 30 years writing about policing and consults community based movements, human and civil rights organizations, and governments internationally. Prof. Vitale is the author of City of Disorder: How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics and The End of Policing. His academic writings on policing have appeared in Policing and Society, Police Practice and Research, Mobilization, and Contemporary Sociology. He is also a frequent essayist, whose writings have been published in The NY Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, Vice News, Fortune, and USA Today. He has also appeared on CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, NPR, PBS, Democracy Now, and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.
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 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 Boydston is a Portland born Abolitionist educator, with an Irish mother and an Ethiopian father who has been teaching and facilitating trainings around social justice and equity for 25 years since she was a young teen. Her organization Spirited Justice focuses on police abolition in addition to the abolition of all anti-Black and oppressive systems. She works with businesses interested in decolonizing the way they sustain their practice within communities, in addition to teaching inside and outside of the educational industrial complex, elementary through higher ed. Amber's work focuses largely on healing the epigenetic impacts of colonialization and combating ACE's (adverse childhood experiences) that People of the Global Majority experience through the sanctioned systems of fascism and genocide. She weaves in large amounts of breath and meditation practice with her education, supporting the journey of Liberation across the Global Majority diaspora. As a parent and lifelong learner, Amber is incredibly passionate about remaining curious, using her access to open doors, and keeping the pressure on creating the kinds of worlds in praxis that we hope to one day leave behind for the youth.
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 moreTBA Guest Scholar and Asst. Professor of Performance Art, Fairhaven College Western Washington University.
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 moreAriel Osterweis (TBA:16 Guest Scholar) recently joined the faculty of The Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), where she will teach dance history, aesthetics, and pedagogy. She has also taught at Skidmore College, Wayne State University, and UC Berkeley. Osterweis earned her PhD in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley and her BA in Anthropology at Columbia University. Her book manuscript, Body Impossible: Desmond Richardson and the Politics of Virtuosity (working title), is under contract with Oxford University Press and examines issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality in contemporary dance. Osterweis also researches Sub-Saharan African dance and mixed-race, feminist, and transgender performance that disavows dance-based virtuosity. Publications appear in Dance Research Journal, TDR/The Drama Review, Women and Performance, e-misférica, Theatre Survey, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen (Oxford University Press, 2014), and Choreographies of 21st Century Wars (Oxford University Press, 2016). Osterweis danced with Complexions Contemporary Ballet, Mia Michaels R.A.W., and Heidi Latsky, choreographs, and has served as dramaturg for John Jasperse and Narcissister. She is on the Board of Directors of the Society of Dance History Scholars and is Book Reviews Editor for Dance Research Journal.
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 morebart fitzgerald (b. 1991) is a pastor, scholar, and cultural critic.
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 moreJaJa PDX is a performance art space, wood shop, ceramic studio, healing space, and a collective of creatives.
We have formed a group of diverse, like-minded individuals who come together to share ideas, learn from each other, build community, and create a new reality for artists in the Pacific Northwest to cement the bases for the future of Sustainable Arts Collectives.
Our 20,000sf warehouse is housed in the Central East Side Industrial sector of Portland. We are comprised of makers and creators of all types.
We have formed a partnership with The Haven, an incredible artist collection, who joined us and moved their community inside the walls of JaJa PDX.
Through this partnership, we are striving to build unity within the creative community of Portland. We are encouraging people to live outside of their comfort zone. JaJa PDX is rapidly morphing into a factory of peoples' dreams.
Learn moreBoyzie Cekwana (Durban, South Africa) is a performing artist and choreographer. Along with some of his continental peers, he is part of an artistic noise for developing a voice for contemporary dance practice and scholarship in Southern Africa. Together with Desiré Davids, he founded The Floating Outfit Project in 1996, where he remains Artistic Director, Choreographer and performer. He works across disciplines and his work has been shown across various platforms around the world. He is part of the on-going African guerrilla thought-factory, developing and shaping ideas for artistic self-expression in the Southern African region.
Learn moreGerard & Kelly (Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly) have collaborated since 2003 to create project-based installations and performances interrogating the formation of the couple and the critical potential of intimacy. Driven by an inquiry of their own partnership, the duo uses choreography, video, and sculpture to address questions of sexuality, memory and the formation of queer consciousness. Their work has been exhibited internationally at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; New Museum, New York; and The Kitchen, New York, among other institutions. Their ongoing performance series Modern Living, in collaboration with L.A. Dance Project, was recently presented by The Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut, and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House in West Hollywood, in association with Art Production Fund. Gerard & Kelly have received numerous recognitions for their work, including the New England Foundation for the Arts (2015), Art Matters grant (2014), and the 2014 Juried Award from the New York Dance and Performance Awards, also known as the Bessies. Gerard & Kelly completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 2010, and received their MFAs in 2013 from the Interdisciplinary Studio in the UCLA Department of Art.
Learn moreCandace Avalos is a first-generation American “Blacktina”, daughter of Black Americans from the south and Guatemalan immigrants. Mi nombre en español es Candis Ávalos. Originally from Virginia, she received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Modern Foreign Languages, with a focus on Spanish and Italian, and Master of Education degree in College Student Personnel Administration from James Madison University. Prior to her current career as a nonprofit executive leader, she started her career as an educator and worked at Portland State University for 8 years providing civic engagement education and advising support for student leaders. She lives in East Portland and is an active member of her community, previously serving as chair of the Citizen Review Committee and Charter Review Commission for the City of Portland, as well as currently on the boards of the Coalition of Communities of Color and Street Roots. Her hobbies include perfecting her Guatemalan recipes, reading social justice literature, playing kickball in her fast pitch league, and exploring Portland's parks.
Learn moreCarissa Dez: Dedicated advocate for social justice and policing reform. With a background in investigative journalism and involvement in community organizing, Carissa would like to promote accountability, equity, and transparency in law enforcement practices. As a panelist, Carissa brings a wealth of experience and insights to the discussion, aiming to drive positive change and foster safer, more equitable communities for all.
Website: https://carissadez.com/
Learn moreCarlos Motta | Photo by Cory Rice
Carlos Motta’s (b. 1978, Colombia) multi-disciplinary art practice documents the social conditions and political struggles of sexual, gender, and ethnic minority communities in order to challenge dominant and normative discourses through visibility and self-representation. His work manifests in a variety of mediums including video, installation, sculpture, drawing, web-based projects, performance, and symposia.
Motta's work was the subject of the survey exhibitions Carlos Motta: Formas de libertad at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín (MAMM), Colombia (2017) that traveled to Matucana 100, Santiago, Chile (2018); and Carlos Motta: For Democracy There Must Be Love, Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg, Sweden (2015). His solo exhibitions at international museums include, The Crossing (2017), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Histories for the Future (2016), Pérez Art Museum (PAMM), Miami; Réquiem (2016), Museo de Arte Latinoamericano the Buenos Aires (MALBA) (2016); Patriots, Citizens, Lovers (2015), PinchukArtCentre, Kiev; Gender Talents (2013), Tate Modern, London; La forma de la libertad (2013), Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico; We Who Feel Differently (2012), New Museum, New York; Brief History (2009), MoMA/PS1, New York; and The Good Life (2008), Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Philadelphia; among others.
In 2020, Motta will participate in the 11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art and the Yerevan Biennial, and he will have solo exhibitions at Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery—University of California Santa Cruz, and at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA).
Carlos Motta’s first 20-year career monograph, Carlos Motta: History’s Back Rooms was published by SKIRA in June 2020. He won the Vilcek Foundation’s Prize for Creative Promise (2017); the PinchukArtCentre’s Future Generation Art Prize (2014); and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2008).
Motta received grants from Art Matters (2008), NYSCA (2010), Creative Capital, and the Kindle Project (2012).He was appointed tenure-track Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Practice at Pratt Institute’s Fine Arts Department in 2019.
Learn moreConsidered one of the most influential contemporary American artists, Carrie Mae Weems has investigated family relationships, cultural identity, sexism, class, political systems, and the consequences of power. Determined as ever to enter the picture—both literally and metaphorically—Weems has sustained an on-going dialogue within contemporary discourse for over thirty years. During this time, Carrie Mae Weems has developed a complex body of art employing photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and video.
In a New York Times review of her retrospective, Holland Cotter wrote, “Ms. Weems is what she has always been, a superb image maker and a moral force, focused and irrepressible."
Weems has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at major national and international museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Frist Center for Visual Art, Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, Spain.
Weems has received numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including the prestigious Prix de Roma, The National Endowment of the Arts, The Alpert, The Anonymous was a Woman, and The Tiffany Awards. In 2012, Weems was presented with one of the first US Department of State’s Medals of Arts in recognition for her commitment to the State Department’s Art in Embassies program.
In 2013 Weems received the MacArthur “Genius” grant as well as the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. She has also received the BET Honors Visual Artist award, the Lucie Award for Fine Art photography, was one of four artists honored at the Guggenheim’s 2014 International Gala, a recipient of the ICP Spotlights Award from the International Center of Photography, The WEB Dubois Award from Harvard University, as well as Honorary Degrees from: California College of the Arts, Colgate University, Bowdoin College, the School of Visual Arts and Syracuse University.
She is represented in public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and The Tate Modern, London.
Weems has been represented by Jack Shainman Gallery since 2008, and is currently Artist in Residence at the Park Avenue Armory. She lives in Syracuse, New York, with her husband Jeffrey Hoone who is Executive Director of Light Work.
Learn moreC Davida Ingram is an award-winning artist who is passionate about beauty and social justice. Her primary subjects are race, gender, and social relationships. Ingram’s impulse is to imagine tactics to get free—not further prescribing Otherness. With this in mind, she uses unorthodox mediums—Craigslist ads, hypnosis, drones, cell phone videos among other things to reshape what is possible in her own identification with being a black queer woman. Her art has been shown at the Frye Art Museum, Northwest African American Museum, Evergreen College, Bridge Productions, Intiman Theater, Town Hall and more. Her writings have been included in Monday, Arcade, Ms blog, James Franco Review and The Stranger. Ingram received the 2014 Stranger Genius Award in Visual Arts. She is a 2016 Neddy art award finalist. She is a former 2016 Kennedy Center Citizen Artist fellow and was recently voted both one of the “20 most talented and most influential people in Seattle” by Seattle Magazine. She is recent Jacob Lawrence fellow at the University of Washington and the winner of the Museum of Northwest Luminary Award in Innovative media.
Learn moreChris Riser is a human, husband, father, and educator living and working on the stolen lands of the Chinook, Clackamas, Kalapuya, Kathlamet, Molalla, Multnomah, Tualatin, and other peoples who have been here since time immemorial. He works in the field of education as a means of planting the seeds for a world that does not yet exist. He currently serves as the Administrator of HOLLA School in East Portland, with a mission to change the academic narratives for Black, Brown, and Indigenous youth.
Learn moreCleo 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.
Learn moreC. Riley Snorton is a scholar, author, and activist whose work focuses on historical perspectives of gender, sexuality, and race. His publications include Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (U Minn Press, 2014) and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (U Minn Press, 2017). Snorton is Professor of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Chicago.
Learn mored.a. carter is a writer, teacher, and cognac sipper. He is co-editor of The Iconic Obama, 2007-2009: Essays on Media Representations of the Candidate and New President (2012). He is currently completing Obscene Material, a book examining black girlhood and scandal in 1919 Washington, D.C. and is also a member of the Queering Slavery Working Group, an interdisciplinary scholarly collective that uses Tumblr to place black queer studies in conversation with the history of enslavement: http://qswg.tumblr.com and http://qswgremix.tumblr.com. He is an assistant professor of Black Studies at Portland State University, with research interests in 20th Century African American History, gender and sexuality studies, and black cultural studies.
Learn moreDan Handelman is a co-founding member of Peace and Justice Works and its police accountability project group Portland Copwatch. In 1991 he also helped co-found Flying Focus Video Collective, which has produced a program on cable access every week on social justice topics. Dan attended nearly every police oversight meeting in the City since 1992 (PIIAC 1992-2001/Citizen Review Committee 2001-present). He was appointed to sit on four City commissions looking at the oversight system - Mayor Katz's Work Group in 2000, on stakeholder groups in 2010 and 2016, and the Police Accountability Commission in 2021-2023. He is a member of the Steering Committee of the Albina Ministerial Alliance Coalition for Justice and Police Reform.
Learn moreDennis Scholl is the Vice President of Arts for the Knight Foundation. He oversees the foundation's national arts program, including the Knight Arts Challenge and Random Acts of Culture. He is well known as a collector of contemporary art for over three decades. Scholl is also the founder of a series of initiatives dedicated to building the contemporary art collections of museums, including the Guggenheim, the Tate Modern and the Pérez Art Museum Miami. He is a four-time regional Emmy winner for his work in cultural documentaries. His first feature documentary “Deep City: The Birth of Miami Sound,” premiered at the 2014 SXSW Film Festival. Dennis is also the co-founder of Betts and Scholl, an award-winning wine project. In 2012, Scholl was a Harvard University Advanced Leadership Fellow, focusing on the role of culture in community engagement. Dennis is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. Previously, he was a practicing attorney and CPA.
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 moreDorothée Munyaneza (Marseille, France) is a singer, writer and choreographer who spent her childhood in Rwanda. Her style of creating and performing on stage is directly inspired by what life has so intensely given her. Her artistic research draws from the diversity of her cultural heritage but more so by her appetite for encounters. In all her projects, the human dimension is especially of great importance. Her artistic curiosity and interest for a dialogue between music and other modes of expression blossomed through her participation in François Verret’s shows. In 2013, she created Compagnie Kadidi to start developing her own work, including “Samedi Détente,” her first work as a choreographer which has been presented 100 times touring all over Europe and in the USA.
Learn moreDr. Simonis has a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Cornell University and is the Owner & Lead Scientist of DAPPER Stats, a Portland, OR-based quantitative ecology consulting company. They are also the Founder & Director of the Chemical Weapons Research Center, a research, education, and activism organization focused on understanding the impact of chemical weapons on people, communities, and the environment.
When not working, Dr. Simonis plays competitive roller derby, and is a current member of the four-time, currently defending world champion and #1 ranked Rose City Rollers Wheels of Justice. Alongside competing, Juniper has been recognized for their activism and advocacy for inclusion of transgender athletes.
Website: https://www.juniperlsimonis.com/
Learn moreCulp is an associate professor in the Communications Department at Universidad Iberoamericana, and he is currently working through his PhD thesis in art history at the UNAM. He is also one of the organizer-curators of Re-positionings: Contemporary Performing Arts Forum in Mexico City. He was the assistant curator at the Mexican Pavilion of the 54th Venice Biennale and is one of the founding partners of Conejoblanco Galería de Libros. His publications include film criticism articles in Nexos (Mexico) and as part of the book Cine Mexico 1970-2011 (Gran NumeronceProducciones, Mexico).
Learn moreEileen Isagon Skyers has worked with contemporary art and nonprofit arts organizations including the Whitney Museum, David Zwirner, Rhizome, the New Museum, Frame Contemporary Art Finland, PICA, and the Digital Museum of Digital Art (DiMoDA). Her first book, Vanishing Acts, was published by LINK Editions (Brescia, Italy) in 2015, and her writing has been published in the New Museum Catalogue Trigger: Gender as a Tool and Weapon, NATASHA, Wreath, Glass Press of the Future, Web Safe 2k16, Printed Web, and New World UNLTD, among others. Her moving image work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in the U.S., U.K., France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Mexico. Skyers holds a BA in philosophy and a BFA in studio art from the University of South Florida (Tampa, FL) and an MA in critical studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art (Portland, OR).
Learn moreElliott Young is a Professor in the History Department at Lewis and Clark College. Professor Young is the author of Forever Prisoners: How the United States Made the World’s Largest Immigrant Detention System, Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through WWII, and Catarino Garza’s Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border, as well as co-editor of Continental Crossroads: Remapping US-Mexico Borderlands History. He is a co-founder of the Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational History of the Americas, the Migration Scholar Collaborative (MiSC), and the Migration and Asylum Lab (MAL) at Stanford University. He has also provided expert witness testimony for over 600 asylum cases and was a co-chair of the Portland Committee on Community-Engaged Policing (PCCEP).
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 moreGordon Hall, THROUGH AND THROUGH AND THROUGH, PICa 2019, Photo by Evan La Londe
Gordon Hall is an artist based in New York. Hall's sculptures and performances have been exhibited at SculptureCenter, The Renaissance Society, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Whitney Museum of American Art, Movement Research, EMPAC, Art in General, Temple Contemporary, Foxy Production, Hessel Museum at Bard College, White Columns, Wysing Arts Centre, Abrons Arts Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Drawing Center, and Chapter NY, among others. Hall's first institutional solo show, The Number of Inches Between Them, took place at the MIT List Center for Visual Arts in April and May of 2018, for which a catalog by the same title was released at Printed Matter, New York, in April of 2019. Gordon Hall has organized lecture and performance programs at MoMA PS1, Recess, Interstate Projects, The Shandaken Project at Storm King Art Center, and at the Whitney Museum of American Art, producing a series of lectures and seminars in conjunction with the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Hall’s writings and interviews have been featured in a variety of publications including Artforum, Art in America, V Magazine, Randy, Bomb, Title Magazine, Walker Art Center's Artist Op-Ed Series, What About Power? Inquiries Into Contemporary Sculpture (published by SculptureCenter, 2015), Documents of Contemporary Art: Queer (published by Whitechapel and MIT Press, 2016), and Theorizing Visual Studies (Routledge, 2012). Hall was awarded a LMCC Process Space Residency, a Triangle Arts Foundation Residency, the LMCC Workspace Residency, an Edward F. Albee Foundation residency, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ACRE, and the Fire Island Artist Residency. In 2018 Hall was awarded a Production and Presentation Grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts to support List Projects: Gordon Hall at the MIT List Center for Visual Arts. Hall holds an MFA and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from Hampshire College.
Learn moreHolland Andrews (they/them) is a vocalist, composer, clarinetist, and performance artist whose work focuses on the abstraction of operatic and extended-technique voice to build soundscapes encompassing both catharsis and dissonance. Frequently highlighting themes surrounding vulnerability and healing, they create a realm of live performance that is boundlessly present. They have been commissioned by REDCAT, ISSUE Project Room, and the 2024 Whitney Biennial, where they created two sound installations and the performance work Speaker. Notable musical collaborations include Son Lux, Nils Frahm, JJJJJerome Ellis, Christina Vantzou, William Brittelle, Peter Broderick, Darian Donovan Thomas, and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste. Their work is presented nationally and internationally, collaborating with artists such as Bill T. Jones, Sonya Tayeh, Dorothée Munyaneza, Otobong Nkanga, Jenn Freeman, NARCISSISTER, Demian DinéYazhi, Oliver Beer, and Will Rawls. Andrews is a Guggenheim Fellow, Creative Capital Awardee, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Awardee, and United States Artists Fellow.
Learn moreJ. Ashlee Albies has been practicing civil rights and employee-side employment law for almost 20 years. She has devoted her legal career to advocating for clients who have been harmed by discrimination, retaliation, or unfair treatment by an employer or by the government. Ashlee has a long history of civil rights advocacy — working to use the legal system and her legal knowledge to advance human rights. She has provided legal support to many mass demonstrations in Portland and nationally, and represents community groups and individuals seeking to hold police accountable. She also helped organize legal seminars for prisoners and the Life Without Parole Storytelling Project at Oregon State Penitentiary in 2019. She regularly offers community education and continuing legal education seminars on the First Amendment, free speech, creative uses of the law, trial advocacy, and civil rights litigation.
Website: http://www.albiesstark.com/
Learn moreJibade-Khalil Huffman is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles. He is the author of three books of poems, 19 Names For Our Band (Fence, 2008), James Brown is Dead (Future Plan and Program, 2011), and Sleeper Hold (Fence, 2014). His art and writing projects, spanning photography, video, performance and poetry, have been exhibited and performed at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, MoMA/P.S.1, Long Island City, NY, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among others.
Learn moreJo Ann Hardesty is a veteran and civil rights leader whose compassionate vision brings Portland together. As the first Black woman elected to city council, Commissioner Hardesty championed the Portland Street Response, relieving the burden on police to respond to mental health crises. She helped build the coalition that set the national standard for local climate action, and at the height of the George Floyd demonstrations, she crafted a police reform measure that 82% of voters approved. She is a former state representative serving North/Northeast Portland and former President of the Portland NAACP.
Learn moreJunaid Sarieddeen (Beirut, Lebanon) His artistic research is oriented towards focusing on the position of the artwork within the time and space contexts of events. “Lorca” (2005), the intrusive event in the streets of Beirut, followed by the installation performance “ish ibka smu sud jud...” (2006) both carried the beginning of this artistic question for him. A question which started developing after he took part in establishing Zoukak Theatre Company in 2006 and later finishing his BA in Philosophy at the Lebanese university in 2008; which led him to consider the artwork as a political proposition. Sarieddeen is the dramaturg for Leila's Death, part of PICA's 2016 TBA Festival.
Learn moreJustine A. Chambers is a dance artist and educator living and working on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations in Vancouver, Canada. Her practice is a collaboration with her Black matrilineal heritage, and extends from this continuum and its entanglements with Western contemporary dance and visual arts practices. At the centre of her practice is a question often posed by her grandmother: “You feel me?” This question is both a declaration of one’s personal orientation, and an invitation to reorient and include what is held in our flesh. Chambers meets this question in her work by attending to individual and collective embodied archives, social choreographies of the everyday, and choreography/dance as otherwise ways of being in relation. Chambers’ work has been hosted at galleries, festivals, and theaters nationally and internationally including Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), Troy, NY; Toronto Biennial of Art, Toronto, ON; Libby Leshgold Gallery, Vancouver, BC; Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, Montreal, QC; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC; Sophiensaele, Berlin, Germany; National Arts Centre, Ottawa, ON; Agora de la Danse, Montreal, QC; Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Toronto, ON; Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC; Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford, PA; Artspeak, Vancouver, BC; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC; Western Front, Vancouver, BC; The Dance Centre, Vancouver, BC; Burrard Arts Foundation, Vancouver, BC; and the Hong Kong Arts Festival. Chambers holds a MFA in Interdisciplinary Art and is currently Assistant Professor in Dance at the School for Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, and Associate Artist to The Dance Centre, Vancouver, BC. Chambers is Max Tyler-Hite’s mother.
Learn moreKameelah Janan Rasheed (East Palo Alto, CA) is an artist, writer, and former public school social studies teacher based in Brooklyn, NY. In her interdisciplinary and research intensive practice, she considers ideas of selective legibility and opaqueness as a political strategy; the tension between narrative contingencies and narrative resolutions; as well as black traditions of covert literacies and self-publishing. She has exhibited at Studio Museum in Harlem, Bronx Museum, Queens Museum, Smack Mellon Gallery, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Project Row Houses, among others. She has been the recipient of awards including the Keyholder Residency at Lower East Side Print Studio, Triple Canopy Commission at New York Public Library Labs, Artadia Grant, Queens Museum Jerome Emerging Artist Fellowship, Art Matters Grant, among others. She is a curriculum writer for NYC public schools, the Arts Editor for SPOOK Magazine, a contributing editor at The New Inquiry, and on faculty at School of Visual Arts. Currently, she is an artist in residence at Smack Mellon.
Learn moreKatherine McDowell has practiced law in Portland since 1988. She started a women-owned law firm in 2006, McDowell Rackner Gibson PC, focusing on energy and environmental law. For the last 30 years, Katherine has volunteered as a civil rights lawyer and community advocate. In 2016, after the National Lawyers Guild trained her as a legal observer, Katherine started the ACLU of Oregon’s legal observer program. Based on her personal experiences as a legal observer, she co-authored comments on Portland Police Crowd Control Directives and advised on police reform legislation. In July 2021, Katherine was appointed to the Police Accountability Board, charged with implementing Measure 26-217. She served as one of the PAC’s rotating co-chairs and helped present the PAC’s recommendations in September 2023. Katherine is committed to advancing racial justice, disability rights, and community safety through robust police oversight and accountability.
Learn moreKayin 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.
Learn moreKeith Hennessy dances in and around performance. Born in northern Ontario, he lives in San Francisco since 1982 and tours internationally. His performances engage improvisation, ritual, collaboration, and public action as tools for investigating political realities. Practices inspired by anarchism, critical whiteness, post/Modern dance, activist art, the Bay Area, wicca, punk, contact improvisation, and queer-feminism motivate and mobilize Hennessy’s work. Keith’s 2016 collaborators include Peaches, Meg Stuart, Scott Wells, Jassem Hindi, and the collaboratives Blank Map and Turbulence. He teaches in universities, independent studios, and festivals including Ponderosa, Fresh, HZT, Movement Research, Portland State University, Sandberg Institute, and Impulstanz. Awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship, United States Artist Fellowship, a NY Bessie, multiple Isadora Duncan Awards, and a Bay Area Goldie. Keith's writings have been published in Contact Quarterly, Movement Research Journal, Performance Research (UK), Society of Dance History Scholars Journal, Dance Theatre Journal (UK), Itch, Front, and In Dance. Hennessy directs Circo Zero and was a member of Contraband with Sara Shelton Mann. He earned an MFA and PhD from UC Davis.
Learn moreHennessy is a San Francisco-based performer, choreographer, teacher, organizer, and PhD candidate in Performance Studies at UC Davis. He directs Circo Zero and co-founded 848 Community Space/CounterPULSE in San Francisco. Hennessy tours extensively including Queer Zagreb, New York Live Arts and American Realness Festival in New York, ImPulsTanz in Vienna, and YBCA in San Francisco, among others. He has received multiple Isadora Duncan Awards, a New York Dance and Performance Award (Bessie), and the United States Artist Kjenner Fellowship.
Learn moreKemi Adeyemi (TBA:16 Guest Scholar) is Assistant Professor of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. She is working on a manuscript that explores how black queer women manipulate sound and the body to reorganize the racialized networks of pleasure in the nightlife scenes of gentrifying neighborhoods. Her work has appeared in Palimpsest and Sounding Out!, and she is co-editing the first collected volume on queer nightlife studies. Kemi received a PhD from the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University.
Learn morekeyon gaskin. this is not a thing (genius, genius, genius, at Central Public Library, Portland, OR) Photo Courtesy of Robert Duncan Gray
keyon gaskin (Portland, OR) prefers not to contextualize their art with their credentials.
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 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 moreLauren Davis Fisher (Los Angeles, CA) works between sculpture, installation, architecture and performance. She has recently performed and exhibited at The Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Performa15 (New York), Parkview (Los Angeles), MoMA PS1 (New York), Shanaynay (Paris), Chapter (New York), Disjecta (Portland), Human Resources (Los Angeles), and EMPAC at RPI (Troy, NY).
Learn moreOregon native and Portland resident Linda K. Johnson has been a professional dance-based, transdisciplinary artist for 40 years. Over these decades of creative practice, Johnson has taught, performed, choreographed, curated, and produced extensively, influencing and forwarding the development of infrastructure (studios and dance programs), funding (support), and conceptual networks (information and training) for professional colleagues and students. Hybrid in her practice, Johnson’s concerns as an artist are social and environmental—curious equally about both the human and nonhuman, addressing our collective relationship to site, place and community. Since creating her first site-based, large-scale interdisciplinary performance in 1992, Finding the Forest, Johnson has gone on to author over 17 major dance/movement installations, most recently Mycelium Dreams, 2022 and Polka Dots/Pioneer Square, 2020, which have utilized forests, intersections, waterways, derelict lots, neighborhoods, green spaces, warehouses, and galleries, as well as formal performance spaces, as staging grounds for presentation. A recipient of the 1999 Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship, Johnson’s work has been consistently funded and commissioned by public, private, and individual sources, and has received critical review in many venues, including Dance Magazine, Landscape Architecture, NPR’s Living on Earth, Oregon ArtsWatch, and Metropolis Magazine. She has been awarded residencies at the Rauschenberg Artist Residency at Captiva, Yaddo, Caldera Arts, and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology to further the development of her work. She is honored to be one of six international custodians of Yvonne Rainer’s seminal postmodern dance work Trio A, and to have been included in Kristin Timken’s 2015 book The New Explorers: Making Meaning in the 21st Century American Landscape, which includes a forward by Lucy R. Lippard. Now considered a “mother tree” (from Suzanne Simard’s work on forest ecosystems) in her community, Johnson’s current practice is devoted to advancing networks of inclusion and collective memory (Mycelium Dreams).
Learn moreLydia Brawner is the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at New York’s Performa. She holds a Ph.D in Performance Studies from New York University, where she also received her M.A. She is the current assistant editor of Performa Magazine, and previously was the managing print editor of the San Francisco Arts Quarterly (SFAQ), and the reviews editor of Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. She has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, New York University and the College of Staten Island, serves on the advisory committee for the Center for the Arts and Religion at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union, and much of her research focuses on the place of religion and spirituality in contemporary performance.
Learn moreMac Smiff is a longtime journalist focused on Northwest culture for outlets such as The Oregonian, Portland Mercury, Vortex Music Magazine, and his own vehicle, We Out Here Magazine. Well known for holding police and government entities accountable, as well as his call to Defund The Police, his social justice activism has been chronicled by the New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post, The Intercept, NPR, Rolling Stone, and others.
A professional problem solver, his hobbies include gardening and raising children who understand basketball analogies.
Learn moremadison moore is an artist, cultural critic, dj and performance-maker based in London and Berlin. His work touches pop culture, queer studies, nightlife, sound, media, visual culture and contemporary art. madison holds a ph.d. in american studies from yale university and is currently an ERC funded researcher in 'Modern Moves' in the Department of English at King's College London, where he is also the Director of the Queer@King's research centre.
madison's scholarly and popular writing has been published by The Creators Project, Splice Today, Thought Catalog, Out, Aperture, Interview, Art in America, Theater, The Journal of Popular Music Studies, Dancecult: the Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture and The Cambridge Companion to the Singer-songwriter. He has given invited lectures, held residencies and performed at universities, art galleries and nightclubs around the world, including King's College London, the University of Oxford, Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of St. Andrews, University College London, Reed College, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, CUNY Graduate Center, the Barbican, East Bloc (london), Elektrowerkz (London) and Performance Space Sydney. His first book, The Theory of the Fabulous Class: Creativity at the Margins, will be published by Yale University Press in 2018. He is currently working on a new project on club culture and creativity as well as an EP.
Learn moreMarc Bamuthi Joseph is an inaugural recipient of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship, the winner of the 2011 Alpert Award in Theater, and an inaugural recipient of the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award. He is the founding Program Director of the exemplary non-profit Youth Speaks, and is a co-founder of Life is Living, a national series of one day festivals designed to activate under-resourced parks through hip hop arts and focused environmental action. Mr. Joseph recently premiered the Creative Time commission “Black Joy in the Hour of Chaos” in New York’s Central Park, and is currently completing new works for the Chautauqua Symphony, the Philadelphia Opera and South Coast Repertory Theater while serving as Chief of Program and Pedagogy at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. His evening length piece “/peh-LO-tah/” has been commissioned by the Kennedy Center and will premiere at YBCA in the Fall of 2016.
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 moreMath Bass (Los Angeles, CA) received her MFA from UCLA. Recent solo exhibitions have been presented at PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, NY (2015); and Overduin & Co., Los Angeles (2014). Exhibitions of Bass’s work have been presented by Cooper Union, New York, NY (2015); Tanya Leighton, Berlin, Germany (2015); The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2014); White Flag Projects, Saint Louis, MO (2014); Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, NY (2014); Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm, Sweden (2014); and Silberkuppe, Berlin, Germany (2014).
Learn moreMaya Mikdashi (TBA:16 Guest Scholar) is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University. Her current research/manuscript focuses on law, citizenship, secularity, religious conversion, sexual difference, and the war on terror. She has been a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow from 2014-2016 at Rutgers University, and a Faculty Fellow/Director of Graduate Studies, Center for Near Eastern Studies, New York University (2012-2014). She has published widely in journals including International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Study of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, and the American Indian Culture and Research Journal. She is a co-founding editor of Jadaliyya.com, co-director of the feature length documentary About Baghdad (2004) and co- founding member of filmmaking cooperative Quilting Point Productions. A film she co-conceptualized and co-wrote with Carlos Motta, Deseos, is screening at the 2016 TBA Festival.
Learn moreBorn in Johannesburg, South Africa, Moya trained in ballet under the direction of Dianne Sparks. She studied contemporary and African dance at the Tswhane University, and P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels. In 2003, she was nominated for a best dancer award at the “ITS” festival, and was awarded the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for dance at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, South Africa. In 2005, Moya became a member of the ROSAS Dance company. Moya has worked on commissions in India, China, Germany, South Africa, and Austria. Her latest work includes “Darling,” in collaboration with Igor Shyshko which premiered at Stuk Leuven, and “A_part” which premiered in Sommerszene Salzburg in 2015. She currently lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.
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 morePepper Pepper is a Portland, OR-based multidisciplinary artist. His work transforms vulnerability into spectacle - using artifice, technology, and camp to metabolize trauma into luminous, often magical performance worlds. Pepper has presented performances on stages and at festivals including Risk/Reward, the Time-Based Art Festival (TBA), Performance Works Northwest, NCECA, and internationally at OFF! Biennale Budapest. Their visual and installation work has been exhibited at Oregon Contemporary, Linfield University, Seattle Central College, and The Budapest Art Fair.
Pepper has incubated new experimental works at residencies like MacDowell, Monson Arts, Playa, Caldera, Signal Fire, and PonderosaTanz (Germany), Pepper’s practice bridges experimental performance and nightlife legacy. With over 20 years in cabaret and drag production, Pepper has appeared at and been featured at The Austin International Drag Festival, OUTstages (Victoria, BC), and is co-host of The Portland Drag Theatre Festival alongside frequent collaborator Anthony Hudson.
His ongoing project Pink Moment explores PINK as queer energy, ritual, and resistance while hybridizing performance, photography, and installation into an evolving archive of embodied glamour.
@thepepperpepper
www.thepepperpepper.com Learn morePrem Krishnamurthy (b. 1977) is a designer, author, and educator. He received the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Communications Design in 2015 and KW Institute for Contemporary Art’s “A Year With…” residency fellowship in 2018. His professional papers were acquired by Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies in 2019. In 2022, Domain Books published his book-length epistolary essay, On Letters, which was named one of Fast Company’s “Best Design Books of 2022”. Prem graduated with a B.A. in Fine Art from Yale College in 1999 and was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Germany the same year.
He currently directs Wkshps, a multidisciplinary design studio, and organizes Department of Transformation, an itinerant workshop that practices collaborative tools for social change. In addition to leading design projects with artists, cultural institutions, and nonprofit organizations across the world, he has curated several large-scale exhibitions. These include Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows, the 2022 edition of FRONT International, Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art; Our Silver City, 2094 at Nottingham Contemporary; and Ministry of Graphic Design in Sharjah, UAE. Previously, Prem founded the design studio Project Projects and the exhibition space P! in New York.
Learn moreRian Dundon (b. 1980) is a photographer in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of the books Protest City (2023), Fan (2015), and Changsha (2012), and the recipient of a 2020 Magnum Foundation fellowship. Dundon is a contributing photographer at the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. He teaches photography at Clark College in Vancouver, WA.
Website: https://riandundon.com/
Learn moreRobert 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.
Learn moreRobert Mackey is an investigative journalist who joined Forensic Architecture in 2023. Before that, he was a senior writer at The Intercept and a reporter for The New York Times. His visual investigation of how Fox News and the Trump White House used deceptively edited video of Black Lives Matter protests to smear racial justice protesters won a Mirror Award in 2022.
Learn moreRobert Trafford is a journalist by training, and an assistant director with Forensic Architecture, a human rights research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, with whom he has worked since 2017. There, he leads investigative research projects, writes and edits for exhibitions and publications, and supports other team members to bring investigations to publication, and to think about how their research can be activated across a range of forums in pursuit of accountability. His work with Forensic Architecture has covered the extrajudicial killing of civilians by Cameroon’s special forces, chemical weapons attacks by the Assad regime, and counter-protest violence by US police. He has jointly led investigations into the 2020 right-wing terror attack in Hanau, Germany, the 2011 killing of Mark Duggan by London’s police, and the agency’s acclaimed TRIPLE-CHASER investigation, which premiered at the 2019 Whitney Biennial in New York.
Learn moreRobin Deacon (born 1973 Eastbourne, England) is a British artist, writer and filmmaker currently based in the USA. Active from the 1990’s, his work explores questions of memory, absence and fiction in performance, through a constant reconfiguration of his role as an artist - as journalist and biographer, operator and technician, imposter and stooge. His recent research projects have explored histories of video documentation and outmoded media formats, and the practice and ethics of performance re-enactment. His live and screen based work has been commissioned and programmed throughout Europe, the US, and Asia. A MacDowell Fellow, he has been a recipient of a variety of awards and fellowships from organizations such as the Delfina Foundation, British Arts Council, Live Art Development Agency and Franklin Furnace Inc.
Learn moreRoza Moshtaghi (Tehran/Iran) lives and works in Oslo. Her works are situated within the performing arts field as a choreographer and performer. Questions of how she, buildings, streets, nature, events, bodies, and objects in general react or adapt to structures have been crucial to most of her work. Roza holds an MA in choreography from Oslo National Academy of the Arts. She presents her works internationally and continues to develop projects with other artists, both as a collaborator and as a performer. Her most recent projects are Only Forever (2018), Flonch (2017), The Smell of Its Shirt (2016), Water Graffiti (2016).
Learn moreTBA:16 Guest Scholar Sampada Aranke (PhD, Performance Studies) is an Assistant Professor in the History and Theory of Contemporary Art at the San Francisco Art Institute. Her research interests include performance theories of embodiment, visual culture, and black cultural and aesthetic theory. Her work has been published in Art Journal, Equid Novi: African Journalism Studies, and Trans-Scripts: An Interdisciplinary Online Journal in the Humanities and Social Sciences at UC Irvine. She’s currently working on her book manuscript entitled Death’s Futurity: The Visual Culture of Death in Black Radical Politics.
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 T. Hamid (she/her/no preference) is an immigrant, Muslim, and abolitionist working at the intersection of technology and global/domestic warfare. Currently the PDX Lead Organizer for Freedom to Thrive, she co-founded and helps advise the Carceral Tech Resistance Network, an archiving and knowledge-sharing network for organizers building community defense against the design, roll-out, and experimentation of carceral technologies, and serves on the coordinating team for the inside/outside research collaboration, the Prison Tech Research Group. Sarah also sits on the board of the Lucy Parsons Lab in Chicago, and helped create the #8toAbolition campaign: a police and prison abolition resource built during the 2020 uprisings against state violence.
Learn moreShawna Lipton is Chair of the MA in Critical Studies Program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA). She received her Ph.D. in Literature and Cultural Theory from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is a literary scholar whose work is fundamentally informed by interdisciplinary gender and sexuality studies.
Learn moreStephanie DeGooyer (TBA:16 Guest Scholar) is Assistant Professor of English at Willamette University. Her work focuses on the intersections of law, politics and aesthetics. She is co-author of The Right to Have Rights (forthcoming from Verso Books) and is completing a manuscript titled The Aesthetics of Democracy. Beyond the academy, DeGooyer writes for the art magazine frieze. She is also co-organizer of Moonlighter Presents, a lecture series that invites scholars to speak on topics outside their field of expertise.
Learn moreSterling Cunio, is an award winning author, playwright and poet. An Oregon Literary Arts Fellow, Pen America Arts for Social justice Fellow, and a World Yes Jammer whose work has been published in The Marshall Project, L.A. Book review and performed by various artist including Grammy award winning musician Antino Sanchez. Sterling sits on the board of Directors of Oregon's Transformative Justice Community and acts as lead facilitator for Regroup, a support and empowerment network of Returning Citizens that played an instrumental role in abolishing the authorization of slavery from Oregon's constitution. Along with currently working for Church at The Park in Salem serving its houseless community, Sterling also works as a lead consultant on the Ubuntu Climate Initiative, a global climate resilience movement focusing on Reuniting people and planet through joy, art and sustainability.
Learn moreTai 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 moreHoping to get the unruly Tarek Halaby (performer) out of her hair, his mother signed 12 year old Tarek up for a jazz dance class. He hasn't stopped dancing since. His formal training continued at The University of Iowa, where he received his BFA in Dance Performance. During his three year stint in New York, Tarek worked closely with The Powerful People and the company ChameckiLerner. Other credits include working with Alexandra Beller, Gerald Casel, Doug Elkins, Chris DC Ramos, and behind the scenes with Susan Marshall. In September of 2004, Tarek moved to Brussels, Belgium to live, dance and study at the Performing Arts Research and Training Studios (P.A.R.T.S.), under the direction of choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.
Learn moreThe Javaad Alipoor Company (TJAC) is a contemporary theater company that makes work for a changing world and a global audience. Rooted in experimental and multiplatform practice, their work asks the most pressing questions we all face. With a commitment to internationalism, complexity, diversity, and fun, they make work for the twenty-first century, transforming what people think theater can be and what it can do.
Learn moreTiona Nekkia McClodden is a visual artist, filmmaker, and curator whose practice explores and critiques issues at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. McClodden has exhibited and screened her work at many institutions and galleries, including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; The Museum of Modern Art; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and more recently, Performance Space New York. The recipient of many awards and fellowships, she most recently awarded the 2018-2019 Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism and won the 2017 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. McClodden also curated the exhibitions A Recollection. + Predicated. featured within Julius Eastman: That Which Is Fundamental, presented in collaboration with Bowerbird in Philadelphia in 2017 and The Kitchen in New York earlier this year.
Learn moreTristen Edwards is an attorney at Metropolitan Public Defender, where she represents individuals charged with major felony crimes and works on policy issues related to promoting the use of restorative justice as an alternative to prosecution. Tristen is a Coordinating Committee Member of the Restorative Justice Coalition of Oregon and leads the coalition’s legislative advocacy efforts. She also serves on Governor Kotek’s Racial Justice Council’s Criminal Justice Reform Committee and chairs the Council’s Subcommittee on the Department of Corrections, which focuses on supporting restorative justice efforts led by incarcerated men. Tristen holds a strong commitment to diversity and is the founder and chair of the Oregon Criminal Defense Lawyer’s Association’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee. Tristen has been recognized for her work amplifying the voices of marginalized people and promoting effective and compassionate responses to harm by the Oregon New Lawyers Division, the Oregon Criminal Defense Lawyer’s Association, and Oregon Women Lawyers.
Learn moreVictoria Hunt is an Australian-born Maori performance artist. Her ancestral affiliations are to Te Arawa, Rongowhaakata, Kahungunu, Irish, English and Finnish. She works to reinstate the power of Indigenous creativity and knowledge into contemporary staging, exploring liminal spaces through provocative interdisciplinary and intercultural collaboration. Victoria has a BA (Photography, Griffith University 1996) and First Class Honours in Performance Studies (UNSW 2016). Since 1999 she has trained and worked with BodyWeather pioneer Tess de Quincey as a founding member of De Quincey Co performing in over 40 productions. Her work has been presented at Liveworks Festival (Syd); Dance Massive (Melb); Origins Festival of First Nations (Lon/UK); Ecocentrix: Indigenous Arts, Sustainable Acts (UK); In-between Time Festival (Bristol/UK); IMPACT 15 (On/CA); Scène Contemporaine Autochtone, Festival TransAmériques Arts Centre (Montreal/CA); Biennale of Sydney; Ngiyagina Festival (Wagga); Gathering Ground (Syd); and Peats Ridge (Syd) among others.
Learn moreW.A.G.E. (WORKING ARTISTS AND THE GREATER ECONOMY) WORKS TO DRAW ATTENTION TO ECONOMIC INEQUALITIES THAT EXIST IN THE ARTS, AND TO RESOLVE THEM.
W.A.G.E. HAS BEEN FORMED BECAUSE WE, AS VISUAL + PERFORMANCE ARTISTS AND INDEPENDENT CURATORS, PROVIDE A WORK FORCE.
W.A.G.E. RECOGNIZES THE ORGANIZED IRRESPONSIBILITY OF THE ART MARKET AND ITS SUPPORTING INSTITUTIONS, AND DEMANDS AN END OF THE REFUSAL TO PAY FEES FOR THE WORK WE'RE ASKED TO PROVIDE: PREPARATION, INSTALLATION, PRESENTATION, CONSULTATION, EXHIBITION AND REPRODUCTION.
W.A.G.E. REFUTES THE POSITIONING OF THE ARTIST AS A SPECULATOR AND CALLS FOR THE REMUNERATION OF CULTURAL VALUE IN CAPITAL VALUE.
W.A.G.E. BELIEVES THAT THE PROMISE OF EXPOSURE IS A LIABILITY IN A SYSTEM THAT DENIES THE VALUE OF OUR LABOR.
AS AN UNPAID LABOR FORCE WITHIN A ROBUST ART MARKET FROM WHICH OTHERS PROFIT GREATLY, W.A.G.E. RECOGNIZES AN INHERENT EXPLOITATION AND DEMANDS COMPENSATION.
W.A.G.E. CALLS FOR AN ADDRESS OF THE ECONOMIC INEQUALITIES THAT ARE PREVALENT, AND PROACTIVELY PREVENTING THE ART WORKER'S ABILITY TO SURVIVE WITHIN THE GREATER ECONOMY.
W.A.G.E. ADVOCATES FOR DEVELOPING AN ENVIRONMENT OF MUTUAL RESPECT BETWEEN ARTIST AND INSTITUTION.
W.A.G.E. DEMANDS PAYMENT FOR MAKING THE WORLD MORE INTERESTING.
Learn moreZach Blas (b. Point Pleasant, West Virginia, USA) is an artist, filmmaker, and writer whose practice spans moving image, computation, theory, performance, and science fiction.
Blas engages the materiality of digital technologies while also drawing out the philosophies and imaginaries lurking in artificial intelligence, biometric recognition, predictive policing, airport security, the internet, and biological warfare. The Doors (2019) is an immersive environment that imagines a new psychedelic age fueled by AI, nootropics, and tech culture. SANCTUM (2018) is a sex dungeon-cum-detention center that recasts security and surveillance through BDSM. A film installation, Contra-Internet: Jubilee 2033 (2018) follows author Ayn Rand on an acid trip, in which she bares witness to a dystopian future of the internet. im here to learn so :)))))) (2017), a four-channel video installation and collaboration with Jemima Wyman, resurrects Microsoft AI Tay to consider the gendered politics of pattern recognition and machine learning. Facial Weaponization Suite (2012-14) consists of amorphous masks that demand opacity against biometric facial recognition systems.
Blas has exhibited, lectured, and held screenings at venues internationally, including the de Young Museum, Tate Modern, Walker Art Center, 2018 Gwangju Biennale, the 68th Berlin International Film Festival, Matadero Madrid, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Art in General, Gasworks, Van Abbemuseum, Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, e-flux, Whitechapel Gallery, ZKM Center for Art and Media, and Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo. His practice has been supported by a Creative Capital award in Emerging Fields, the Arts Council England, Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council.
His work is in the collections of Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, and Whitney Museum of American Art. Blas’s practice been written about and featured in Artforum, Frieze, ArtReview, BBC, the Guardian, and the New York Times.
Blas’s writings can be found in the collections You Are Here: Art After the Internet, Documentary Across Disciplines, and Queer: Documents of Contemporary Art, as well as e-flux journal and various exhibition catalogues. With Melody Jue and Jennifer Rhee, he is co-editor of the anthology Informatics of Domination, forthcoming from Duke University Press. His artist monograph Unknown Ideals is published by Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst and Sternberg Press.
Blas is an Assistant Professor of Visual Studies in the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto.
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