Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Fox Whitney, Alitzah Oros, Melika Sebihi, and Kaya Noteboom pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast.
Jaydra Johnson: HARK
Grapefruits Gallery at Mother Foucault’s Bookshop, Portland, OR
July 12 to September 30, 2024
There are angels protecting you if you believe this is so. Jaydra Johnson’s HARK reconfigures angelic forms that do not belong to a particular religious sect, but are born from a renegotiated spiritual necessity. Using decades-old birdwatching magazines and other ephemera from eBay, Johnson’s tonal and textured collages are right at home in Grapefruits Gallery—the gallery in residence within Mother Foucault’s rare book room.
On white porcelain tile (a nod to the latrines Johnson’s matriarchs cleaned for a living), these angels are far from the cherubim tricksters of a Christianized world. They are sharper, more severe. I trust them more. Each compilation of cut parts suggests a personality. One has human breasts and another a penis. I’m drawn to an angel that has the basic shape of a turtle with a Grecian face chiseled from stone. It has four wings or four legs. Not feathered but obsidian glass. I recognize it. It has entered many dreams. It has appeared at my side when I’ve needed guidance no person could supply. It’s my protector and Johnson’s too.
The artist writes of being brought up in a culture largely regarded as trash. In a forthcoming essay collection Low: Notes on Art and Trash, Johnson writes of working class artists who lived with an impetus to make trouble where it was needed, putting these archival figures in contact with living struggle through memoir as if personally reaching out. Both in Johnson’s writing and collage, art exists as an act of spiritual devotion and to fulfill a utilitarian social need.
Reflection: Can art provide salvation?
The Resistance Is Happening Now: Archiving the Black Lives Matter Movement
The Black Gallery by Don’t Shoot PDX
August 1 to October 3, 2024
The gallery walls are sectioned off into ceiling-high panels in clerical hues of mint green, legal pad yellow, and pale blue. Each panel is the accumulation of overlapping documents and photos placed at odd angles as if spread across a table. The ephemera feels unsettled and alive, some lines in the documents are redacted. Perhaps the goal here isn’t to read every word, but to be enveloped in the amassed evidence of the last 10 years of Don’t Shoot PDX resisting anti-blackness in Portland, Oregon and across the nation.
The Black Gallery is celebrating this milestone throughout the month of August with an opening reception on Friday August 9th and a documentary screening of How to Sue the Klan followed by a panel discussion at Clinton Street Theater on Saturday August 10th. I’m thinking about the last 10 years in Portland. At first, remembering them feels heavy as concrete. But the physical residue of local resistance movements like Don’t Shoot PDX shows that even concrete can be cracked, and I think this is part of what we celebrate. Following the lead of Don’t Shoot PDX, I wonder what tools the people of Portland might wield to chip away at our daunting history and if we can write a new one.
Reflection: How does the context of the art gallery influence how people engage with resistance movements?
Reflection: How does the context of the art gallery influence how people engage with resistance movements?