Artists Archive
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Alex Ian Smith is an artist, musician, and curator based in Portland, OR.
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 moreAlissa DeRubeis lives in Portland, where she works for 4MS and S1. A co-founder of the S1 Synth Library, Alissa enjoys teaching intro workshops, facilitating library hours, and patching pre-amps and resonant filters. Her interests include playing music, curating, collaborating, education, improvisation, sharing, and experiments.
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 moreAmanda Lee is a queer artist located in Los Angeles, CA.Their primary mediums are media and ceramics (porcelain). In addition, they love to create hand-made flora inspired earrings.
@amandalee_faa
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 moreAnna Vo is a radical educator for 8 years in over 20 countries in Inclusion, Refugee Support, Trauma-Informed Care, and Racial Justice. Editor of an internationally renowned publication for People of Color that has been going for 6 years, and a speaker, artist and musician who has exhibited and toured in Australia, Germany, The Netherlands, Croatia, Finland, Denmark, Sweden and the States. Anarchist and local festival organizer.
Learn moreI make artwork that uses conversation as a medium and as a subjective research method. My work explores experiences of interdependence and disconnection, questions my own idealistic beliefs, and investigates how people make culture and culture makes people.
My work often takes place in public space and struggles with questions about who we are to each other in our society and what it means to be in public, or to be part of a public. These projects are usually participatory, sometimes collaborative, and range in scale from intimate interpersonal situations to large group activities. They have been exhibited as both live events and as photographic, written, recorded, electronically transmitted, and handmade documentation.
I am deeply committed to art having a fundamental role in society beyond the professional confines of the discipline. I therefore aim to make work to be discussed and circulated outside the art world's paths of distribution and dialogue, yet remain articulate and relevant in art discourse. For me, the question "who is art for?" continues to be inspiring and interesting, however often it is asked.
I see my art practice as embodied research and an experiential testing zone for cultural, political and philosophical possibilities. My work inherits the long history of attempts to merge art and life but acknowledges that it is in the acute and delicate distances art offers us from the everyday that we are able to notice and reconsider how we live.
Ariana holds an MFA in Art & Social Practice from Portland State University. She has exhibited work and organized events at apexart and Smack Mellon in New York City, Betonsalon in Paris, France, The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s Time Based Arts Festival, The Portland Art Museum, and Gallery Homeland in Portland, OR, Southern Exposure, in San Francisco, CA; and in many public places.
Her work has been included in the NW Biennial at the Tacoma Art Museum, Disjecta’s Portland 2012 Biennial, The Open Engagement Conference and the Discourse and Discord Symposium at the Walker Art Center. 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 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 moreChloe Alexandra Thompson is a Cree, Canadian interdisciplinary artist and sound designer. Thompson approaches sound as a mode of connection—embracing the kinesthetic agency of sound to compose abstract feats of spatialized audio recording and synthesis. Her work engages tactics of material minimalism to create site-specific installations that sculpt droning, maximalist experiences out of space and sound.
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 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 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 moreJulia Arredondo is an Artist Entrepreneur currently living in Chicago. Originally from Corpus Christi, Texas; Julia is pursuing her MFA at Columbia College Chicago. Julia's latest art business venture currently explores the crossroads of Avon and botánica culture, titled Botánica Avon. Julia founded independent publishing entities, Vice Versa Press and Curandera Press; and continues to explore the intersections between art and business.
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.
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