We talked to the curators of Policing Justice about the upcoming exhibition at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA).
Q: Let’s start with the basics: Where did the concept of this exhibition Policing Justice come from?
A: The exhibition emerges out of the protest movement against police brutality that swept across the U.S. in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder.
Law enforcement’s widespread response to these demonstrations with further violence once again drew attention to the deep-rooted problems at the core of policing practices across the country. It came as a further surprise that Portland, OR, a city known for its progressive politics, was one of the cities in which that violence was most sustained: the Portland Police Bureau used force more than 6,000 times during the over 100 consecutive days of protest. Although the scale of this violence is staggering, it did not come out of nowhere.
We felt it was worth exploring the historical conditions that led to this flare-up in our city, and what kind of reckoning would need to happen for public safety to be inclusive and community-driven.
The exhibition itself is less about the direct violence of 2020 and more about following the various threads that got us to that breaking point.
In other words, what are the ways in which our institutions and public policies have sought to control Black liberty, Indigenous sovereignty, and the rights and dignity of our most vulnerable citizens since Oregon territory was settled, of which policing is only the most extreme form of enforcement. The artists in the exhibition are exploring this history from different but intersecting perspectives, including environmental, juvenile, racial, and spatial justice.
Q: What does justice mean in 2024?
A: Justice means different things to different people, and the ethos of Policing Justice is precisely not to speak on behalf of others on this issue. Instead, we have sought to create a space in which folks directly or indirectly impacted by police violence and/or related forms of enforcement can speak their truth and call for justice, whatever that means to them.
That said, we do have a few reflections to offer. In order to speak about justice, we first need to understand injustice. Injustice is really about denying folks their basic humanity, disregarding their inalienable rights, and limiting opportunity. We also need to understand how injustices have been imposed on groups of people, including Black, brown, and Indigenous folks, the indigent and unhoused, and the mentally ill, among others. There is the law, and there are those who enforce the law. When the law or its application is unjust, its enforcement creates further injustice.
So what about justice? A just society is one in which justice is not reserved for a select few and is not at the expense of the justice of others; it is one in which we can challenge the dominant narratives that underpin our institutions without fear of violence or retaliation; it is one in which we listen to and take seriously the perspectives of those with lived experiences, even when their experiences do not align with our own; and it is one in which a variety of perspectives have a seat at the table and are given the agency and opportunity for self-determination.
Q: Why is it important to have this exhibition in Portland, OR, rather than in other cities in the U.S.?
A: Portland is not alone in its systemic problems with police violence, but our situated histories and political possibilities are unique. We began this interview with the point that it was not an accident that Portland became the place where the 2020 racial justice protests lasted longer than anywhere else in the country, and in turn, were met with record police violence. These conditions cannot be disentangled from Oregon’s unique racial politics, which are rooted in its founding as a white supremacist territory that simultaneously prohibited slavery and excluded free Blacks, the state’s early history as a hotbed of KKK activity with direct channels to the police, and the site of a steady stream of complaints and legal action against the police for misconduct, violence, and intimidation in Portland’s Black neighborhoods since at least the 1960s. In other words, Policing Justice is very much born out of this place.
The exhibition itself brings locally focused commissions into dialogue with national artists—Alfredo Jaar, Sandy Rodriguez, and Carrie Mae Weems—who tackle parallel issues across the country in order to tease out where Portland sits in relation to larger currents of injustice. Indeed, the histories our local artists are exploring through their work, such as the school-to-prison pipeline, the intersection of policing and racist urban planning, or the historical connections between police and white supremacy, all have national resonances. Still, there is value in examining their specific local manifestations.
When it comes to policing, we feel that political change is most effectively pursued at the local level. In most cities, including Portland, police are managed and funded by mayors and city councils. By looking critically at our local histories, and imagining alternative futures in the place we live, the participating artists are not speaking to some abstract notion of justice but instead to the lived experiences, conditions, and possibilities of our own community.
Q: How can artists affect our understanding of justice and injustice today?
A: Artists have the power to help us see things differently, to uncondition our field of vision when it becomes too narrow. Through creative imagining, they can shift ideas and expose things in ways that people can connect with. This ability is particularly valuable when it comes to dismantling rigid institutions.
There is a concept in political science called the “Overton window,” which essentially refers to the spectrum of ideas that are socially and politically acceptable to the general public at any given moment.
While we tend to experience this window as fixed, it is actually quite fluid. We can see this with how rapidly ideas that were once relatively fringe on the political stage have become mainstream in recent years, especially on the right. Artists have an important role to play in this particular moment with respect to shifting the dominant narratives about policing. Our local politics in Portland have largely failed to implement the changes that our community has asked for since 2020, and our city council, the Portland Police Bureau, and the Portland Police Association are actively limiting what is possible.
Art offers an opportunity to critically engage with our past and imagine futures for public safety that policy makers and lobbyists have kept out of reach.
Q: What types of conversations can the artists in the exhibition start?
A: The commissioned installations by local artists–Black Aesthetic Studio (Cleo Davis, Kayin Talton Davis, Robert Alexander Clarke, Kimberly Moreland), Don’t Shoot Portland (Tai Carpenter, Teressa Raiford), Master Artist Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr. and Blue–all emphasize research, collaboration, and direct action. These groups and individuals are all committed educators whose work blurs the boundaries between art, social practice, and activism. Their projects offer new perspectives on the past and its relationship to present conditions, and they propose new possibilities for the future of public safety. Many of them are also legal, policy, and education advocates whose research is used in the courtroom, legislature, and classroom. In other words, they are already active participants in community conversations that extend beyond the gallery’s walls.
The Black Aesthetic Studio (BAS), for instance, is focusing on racist urban planning in Portland’s historically Black neighborhoods, including local histories of redlining, nuisance ordinances, disinvestment, and urban “renewal.” These police-enforced policies are reconsidered from an Afrofuturistic perspective in the year 3000 CE, which allows us to envision the possibility of transformative change in Portland’s urban environments. Don’t Shoot Portland’s installation bridges art and legal advocacy. In addition to documenting the city’s history of racialized policing, they are foregrounding their own commissioned research on riot control agents, which has been used in the court of law, in addition to supporting the research of Forensic Architecture, whose video installation speaks to the health and environmental impacts of tear gas. Master Artist Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr. and Blue, who actively work with youth and folks who are or have been incarcerated, have created an installation that explores the criminalization of youth in schools, asking us to think about how we invest in education and community.
Collectively, the contributing artists create a space in which the deeply ingrained cultural narratives about policing—largely advanced by police themselves through their direct line to the press—are flipped, and the perspectives of people with lived experience of police violence and related forms of enforcement are foregrounded without being constantly questioned.
Q: Why is this exhibition important now?
A: Police brutality is not a new topic. But in 2020, we saw, perhaps for the first time, a real possibility for meaningful change. Locally, much of that momentum has waned, but the possibility is there. For this reason, we have developed robust programming to accompany the exhibition, which we hope will re-energize communities across the city to demand more of our elected officials.
In our exhibition symposium, Policing in Portland: A Community Conversation, our keynote speaker, Alex Vitale, Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College, will be speaking about the wide-ranging alternatives to policing that have emerged since 2020 across the country, which are showing promising results, even amidst the tremendous backlash against the “defund the police” movement. A series of three panel discussions with local experts and visionaries will then consider the Portland Police Bureau’s record of violence, take stock of attempts to hold police accountable, and, most importantly, discuss alternative ways to promote community safety that do not rely on police. We also have a film series at the Clinton Street Theater that balances local and national films about policing, which includes the Portland premier of Director Matthew Solomon’s new film Reimagining Safety (2023). Additionally, we are hosting an artist workshop led by Mika Martinez dedicated to the ethics of visual storytelling, a podcast launch focused on the communities of care that emerged out of protests in the Pacific Northwest, produced by Jodi Darby, Honna Veerkamp, and Erin Yanke, and a series of partner programs in the form of lectures at local colleges and universities.
In conjunction with the exhibition, these events bring together scholars, journalists, activists, community leaders, the public, and a variety of creatives who are working towards a common goal: to expose injustice and undo the racial politics that have been a mainstay in Portland for more than a century. The resistance of 2020 and its attendant imaginings for a more just future planted a seed, and—as artists, writers, curators, and cultural producers—we want to nurture that seed so that it can continue to grow.
Policing Justice
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art
February 23, 2024 to May 19, 2024