Artists Archive
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Master Artist Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr. is Black, Italian, Queer, Non-Binary, Neurodyvergent, and practices primarily in america. Their collaborative approach results in artwork by and for the people.
Stevenson’s practice has been dedicated to supporting young people ages 4 to 18 in developing the necessary skills to encourage advanced imaginative thinking and self-confident expression. In 2019 they developed the Afro Contemporary Art Class at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School which has had many forms since, including Afro Futurist February, and three years of Fred Hampton Summer Camp. Supporting community efforts as well, taking the shape of support for the effort to Save Dr. Martin Luther King School from being displaced by the expansion of Interstate 5 which has triggered the need to move Harriet Tubman Middle School. Stevenson is currently working in the Albina community to develop a Living Archive at Jefferson High School with students, community, and the architectural design team. Stevenson also has a robust portfolio of artist projects centering food and gathering around it, projects involving sculpture, drawing, and photography, and new work in collaboration with currently and formerly incarcerated folks. These include Tin Can Phone, a podcast all about life in and outside of prison, and Gallery Blue, a curation and exhibition project both of which are owned and operated by formerly incarcerated individuals. Stevenson pursues these professional and creative goals passionately because they believe that empowered and open-minded young people and communities are the best and most direct way toward ensuring a sustainable and prosperous future for all.
Learn moreGutierrez is a New York-based dance and music artist who makes solo and group pieces with a variety of artists under the moniker Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People. His work has toured internationally to festivals and venues including American Realness Festival in New York; Festival d’automne à Paris; Antipodes Festival in Brest, France; Out There Festival at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; UNAM in Mexico City; and ImPulsTanz in Vienna. He is the winner of three New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” awards.
Learn moreNana Adusei-Poku, PhD, is Assistant Professor in African Diasporic Art History in the Department of History of Art at UC Berkeley, California. She was previously Associate Professor and Luma Foundation Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York. Her book Taking Stakes in the Unknown: Tracing Post-Black Art was published in 2021 with Transcript Verlag and her articles have been published in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, e-flux, Kunstforum International, Flash Art, L’Internationale and darkmatter. She curated the event “Performances of Nothingness” (Academy of Arts, Berlin, 2018) and Black Melancholia (Hessel Museum Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 2022).
Learn moreForever cascading forward in a positive direction, gleefully instinctive, No Age erupt out of your speakers, blasting away the clouds above the smoggy cityscape to reveal a solar flaring sun. With an ecstatic force bubbling around and beyond their music, they release contagious energy like they’re main-lining a field full of whirring wind turbines, while tuned into an ancient celestial power source.
No Age is the duo of Dean Spunt and Randy Randall, they are on a constant journey to explore the furthest reaches of sound. They set out with one particular rule in mind: To write songs that we would be psyched to listen to. On a first listen, discovering each new dose of their alchemy is exhilarating—they produce perfectly crafted songs, underpinned by infectious melodies and ear-piercing cacophony. This swirling mix of unstoppable momentum is catapulted into the stratosphere by sweeping bursts of symphonic growls. Their power is enunciated through their ability to take their core of catchy song-writing and expand its emotional influence through tone, structure and noise. Everything in Between, their third album and follow-up to 2008’s Nouns has now arrived.
Learn morePieter Ampe grew up in Ghent, Belgium, and studied at the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance, the Arnhem Dance Academy, and P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels. Together with Guilherme Garrido, he has created and performed Still Difficult Duet (2007) and Still Standing You (2010). In 2006, Ampe took part in danceWEB, a scholarship program at Vienna’s ImpulsTanz-festival, and since 2009, he has been an artist-in-residence at CAMPO. Ampe has worked with stage director Jan Decorte, performance duo United Sorry, artist Roland Seidel, noise-rock quartet The Germans, and choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, among others. Guilherme Garrido is a Portugese-born artist, dancer, and musician. Between 2007 to 2009, he was the curator of Show Rooms within the frame of the annual Festival da Fábrica in Porto. He has performed as a dancer with Maria Clara Villa-Lobos, Ibrahim Quraishi, and Tommy Noonan/PVC company. In 2011, he premiered his first solo work, GO JOHN, at Fresh Festival in Croatia, and in 2012 he presented BEST BEAST, his first group piece as choreographer in HAU, Berlin. He has performed Still Standing You with Ampe at Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels, Festival Transamerique in Montreal, and PuSH Festival in Vancouver, BC.
Learn moreAs an artist, Rachael Archibald plays with the conventions of art categorizations and conforms them into digital processes, as an all inclusive art form.
Currently she is expanding her practice into graphic arts and visual communication; having already designed posters and promotional media for other artists, musicians and galleries.
Although living and working in Brisbane, Australia, most of her work has been shown overseas in Bristol, Venice, Brooklyn, and online as part of the The Wrong – New Digital Art Biennale.
Learn moreConceived in 2002 by Nick Jones and Raja Azar, the group began with a song, Pyrate Love, performed while they were working for the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, and the two set out to create a massive live musical pirate puppet sea saga. Four years, six “episodes,” and hours of bizarre musical material later, Jollyship the Whiz-Bang have toured the US, Canada, Ireland, and have recently finished a residency in Bangkok for the Hoontown Puppet Festival. In 2005, they released their first album, Songs to Drown By, and recorded a DVD (forthcoming) adapting Crabquistador, the latest episode of their saga.
Learn moreRaquel André was born in Caneças, Portugal in 1986. Her artistic path began early on. In 2009, her first performance was created out her the discovery of a box full of handwritten letters from the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s. André has since cultivated an interest in collecting—particularly in the performing arts—and in 2016, she completed her master’s thesis at University Federal of Rio de Janeiro on the subject.
In 2011, she moved to Rio de Janeiro, where a five-month artistic residency in Companhia dos Atores turned into five years. There, she began working with director and actress Bel Garcia on several theater productions. André also worked with actor, curator, and director César Augusto in Galpão Gamboa, where she co-programmed and produced theater, dance and music. André studied in the Theater and Film School of Lisbon, and worked with several Portuguese artists from different artistic languages. Her work has been shown on television, and in Portugal, Spain, Poland, Cuba, Argentina, and Brazil.
Learn moreSahar al-Sawaf (she/her) is an Iraqi-American filmmaker, visual artist, and photographer based in Oregon. Born in Saudi Arabia and raised in Lebanon and Iraq, she fled to California just before the Gulf War. Her work explores war, displacement, and fragmented family memory shaped by her experiences in Iraq and the United States. Her short films “Uncle Ma’an,” “Um Abdullah,” and “Shadow of Paradise” have screened internationally, including at DOC NYC, Chicago International Film Festival, and Animafest Zagreb. She was a Creative Culture Fellow at the Jacob Burns Film Center in New York, NY, and a NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Video/Film. Most recently, she completed a photogravure intensive at Mullowney Printing, supported by a Regional Arts Cultural Council grant. Her photo-performance work is featured in the 2026 Artists’ Biennial, The Price of the Ticket, at Oregon Contemporary.
Learn moreSalimatu Amabebe (they/he), is a Bay Area-based chef, multimedia artist and the founder/ director of Black Feast. Amabebe's work focuses on the intersection of food and art, drawing from family memories, Nigerian recipes, and Black culinary history.
@salimatuamabebe 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 moreSarah AbuAbdallah lives and works in Qatif, Saudi Arabia and studied art in both Rhode Island School of Design for a Masters in Digital Media, and in the College of Art and Design in University of Sharjah. She is currently an artist and puzzlemaker. Working with video, installation, poetry and images. Shown work in Sharjah Biennial 11, Serpentine Galleries Marathons, Fluidity in Kunstverein in Hamburg, Co-Workers in Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Do it Arabic, Prospectif Cinéma/Filter Bubble in Centre Pompidou and Luma Foundation, Private Settings in Warsaw Museum of Modern Art; Arab Contemporary in Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Rhizoma in the 55th Venice Biennale, amongst others
She is the recipient of Sharjah Art Foundation’s production programme grant (2016) in collaboration with Josh Bitelli for their project To Gaze at Ten Suns Shining and is a shortlisted artist for Abraaj Group Art Prize 2017.
Learn moreSounds et al is an independent record label exploring sound, product design, collaboration and curation.
Learn moreJacob Ciocci is an artist; a current Eyebeam Fellow; one third of the American art collective Paper Rad; and a prolific producer of music, installations, websites, and animations. David Wightman is completing a PhD in Music Composition at UC San Diego where he is a Lecturer of Pop Music Studies. Some of his many musical projects include Fortress of Amplitude, Powdered Wigs, and Chariots of Fire. Together, Jacob and David connect like Voltron in the high-NRG electronic music band Extreme Animals. They have toured the country every summer for the past 8 years presenting their music, videos, and art.
Selected Press
Eleven Evocations (For Paper Rad), Ed Halter, Rhizome, September 2, 2009.
Learn 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 moreBorn and raised in L.A. but based in Portland, Alana Chenevert became left-field rapper/singer The Last Artful, Dodgr when she moved up the Left Coast. Chenevert grew up in the middle of Los Angeles, with one of her earliest memories being a drive-by shooting that left her brother bleeding on the porch. She was only three years old, and her brother survived, but this kind of crime drove the young MC indoors, where she recorded her debut mixtape, 199NVRLND (2013). That same year, she moved to Portland, where her tape caught the ear of the local Fresh Selects. In 2015, Dodgr released the Fractures EP with production from Neill Von Tally. A year later, she partnered with Australian beatmaker DJ WNTD for the single "Squadron" and released the collaborative EP Rare Treat with Myke Bogan. Preceded by the lead single "Oofda," Chenevert and Von Tally released the collaborative LP Bone Music in early 2017 via Eyrst. Her single "Win Is Enough" was released in July 2018 on her own PARTySIZE imprint.
Learn moreAngell was born in Portland, Oregon and lives and works in New York where he has produced and studied video, film and music. His work has been exhibited in Portland, New York, London, Europe and Australia and recently at the Istanbul Biennial. Angell gained notoriety in New York City by projecting his first nature video Jackie-O Forestry Center on the Guggenheim Museum and at Ground Zero. This year at the Caldera residency he inaugurated the first of his “myth building” public art projections on the snow-covered mountains and trees of central Oregon for the edification of unsuspecting drivers.
Learn moreThe Speculative Archive (Julia Meltzer and David Thorne) produces videos, photographs, installations, and published texts. From 1999 to 2003, Archive projects centered on state secrecy and the production of the past. Current works address the use of documents—images, texts, objects, bodies, and physical structures—to project and claim visions of the future. The Archive is a collaboration of Los Angeles-based artists Julia Meltzer and David Thorne. Recent projects have been exhibited in the 2006 California Biennial (Orange County Museum of Art), Gallery Akbank Sanat (Istanbul), Kunstmuseum Goteborg (Sweden), Palazzo de la Papesse, (Siena, Italy), Apex Art (New York), Momenta (New York), the Hayward Gallery’s (London) travelling exhibition program, Whitechapel Gallery (London), the Oberhausen Short Film Festival (Germany), the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the New York Video Festival, the Margaret Mead Film Festival, and the Toronto International Film Festival, among others.
Julia Meltzer believes in the power of art to build and transform communities and has worked to create opportunities for the marriage of art and advocacy for nearly three decades as a filmmaker and the founding director of Clockshop in Los Angeles.
She directed two feature films and multiple short films. Her films about a women’s Qur’an school in Damascus and a mother-daughter who arrive in LA escaping the war in Aleppo, Syria, are quiet feminist stories that upend expectations about who Muslim women are and what they can be.
Her film and video work has been broadcast on POV as part of the 25th anniversary season and as the opening film of the 30th anniversary season. Meltzer is a recipient of multiple grants including the John Simon Memorial Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. She was a Fulbright Fellow in Damascus, Syria in 2005-6 where she taught independent filmmaking at the University of Damascus. Her current project focuses on documenting and preserving histories of the neighborhoods along the LA river in Northeast LA where she lives with her family.
David Thorne is an Australian humourist, satirist, Internet personality and New York Times best-selling author. His work has been featured on the BBC, The Late Show with David Letterman, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Thorne gained public recognition in late 2008 for an email exchange in which he attempts to pay an overdue bill with a drawing of a seven-legged spider. The exchange spread virally via email and social networking sites, leading to a surge of visitors to his website 27b/6 (27bslash6). 27b/6 features a collection of humorous emails and articles from Thorne's life. These and additional essays appear in Thorne's book, The Internet is a Playground. Published by Penguin Group and released on 28 April 2011, the book debuted at number four on The New York Times Best Seller list.
Learn moreThird Angle New Music Ensemble is one of the foremost producers and performers of contemporary chamber music in the United States, and is recognized as a primary creative force in the cultural landscape of Portland and the Pacific Northwest. Since 1985, Third Angle has presented more than 90 programs of contemporary music, commissioned more than 25 new works and released nine recordings to critical acclaim.
Learn moreTim Smith-Stewart | Jeffrey Azevedo is a Seattle based artist duo creating contemporary art at the intersection of performance and installation. They are currently artists in residence at On the Boards, where they are developing their latest project Salvage Rituals. Tim was recently a resident artist in the spring 2018 PICA Creative Exchange Lab cohort.Tim and Jeffrey premiered Awaiting Oblivion—Temporary Solutions for surviving the dystopian future we find ourselves within at present at On the Boards in February 2017 and The Perpetual Insurrection of Claude Cahun at the Henry Art Gallery in October 2017.
Twenty-minute selections of Awaiting Oblivion have been presented at: On The Boards NW New Works Festival (SEA), Risk/Reward Festival (PDX), and Fresh Oysters Performance Research (MSP). Tim and Jeffrey have presented multiple installations including their video/paper tapestry installation, Queer City Lost, at New Tomorrow, Erasure curated by the Lion’s Main Art Collective, and the Velocity Dance Center Big Bang. They also presented Stained glass in my replacement church at the 2014 Lofi Arts Festival.
From 2011-2013 Tim & Jeffrey co-created The Eternal Glow Project—a four part performance/installation which premiered work at The Seattle Center Next50 (The Eternal Glow of Electric Hearts), On the Boards NorthWest New Works Festival 2013 (Ω<1), and Lofi Arts Festival at Smoke Farm 2013 (Less than red, more than violet).
Learn moreWeird Allan Kaprow (WAK) is a post-colonial conceptual karaoke band comprised of artists Mariah Carrie Mae Weems, Yoko Bono, Jasper John Lennon, and Joseph Beuys II Men.
WAK projects have been featured in the Agitprop! exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, New York; the Out Of Sight Survey of Northwest Art in Seattle, Washington; the Writ Large festival at The Great Wall of Oakland, California; the Auto Body exhibition in Miami, Florida; the Faena Art Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Shine a Light at the Portland Art Museum, the POW Film Fest, the Converge 45 art fair, and the Hollywood theater in Portland, Oregon.
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