Cliff Notes
Normally, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Jaydra Johnson, Brittney Frantece, Blessing Greer Mathurin, and Quintessa Matranga pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast. This week we had a scheduling conflict, so VW Associate Editor Ella Ray provided a few art picks from Oregon and California.
Carlos Agredano: Fume
Ongoing nomadic sculpture in freeway-adjacent communities in Los Angeles, CA
February 24 – June 1, 2025
Motivated in part by Senga Nengudi’s 1978 performance Ceremony for Freeway Fets, as well as artist’s ongoing artistic research practice that considers the toxic environmental impacts that urban planning has on communities of color, Fume is Carlos Agredano’s roving sculptural work that collects and displays air quality data in “freeway-adjacent” communities in Los Angeles. The big silver sculpture, which is hauled by a pickup truck, is installed for one day in public spaces and parks. Agredano hosts conversations and collaborative activations at each stop, inviting other LA artists to contribute to the larger dialogue and to the artwork itself. This is real deal hyperlocal, site specificity and I’m here for it. And, there’s something about the performative aspect of this piece that I’m stuck on. After looking at documentation from an earlier stop on Fume’s tour, I found myself thinking about the role artistic performance could, or maybe can’t, play in organizing with our neighbors. Then I started thinking about data literacy and if art could bridge that gap. I came to no real conclusions sadly, but amongst a whole lot of “community-centered” artwork that lives comfortably within white wall galleries, the idea of Agredano both making and exhibiting this piece within its own context is energizing.
Reflection: How does science inform your practice?
Esteban Raheem Abdul Raheem Samayoa: Blood Be Water
ICA San Jose, San Jose, CA
March 22 – August 24, 2025
One of the last good things about the internet is the ability to witness someone’s artistic practice blossom and change. In the case of Esteban Raheem Abdul Raheem Samayoa, I remember stumbling across his monochromatic charcoal on cloth drawings, and then later airbrushed works, something like five or six years ago. Fast forward to the present tense, and the artist is having their first institutional solo exhibition, Blood Be Water, at the ICA in San Jose.
An exhibition drawing on biblical and personal beliefs about transformation, Samayoa’s typically black and white “world” is flooded with earthly elements like soot, burlap, cement, and clay; rooting his buoyant, dream-like illustrations of kin and cultural icons within a larger ecosystem of sculptural, mixed media, and ceramic works that reflect the artist’s greater desire to transcend, to endure, to connect.
Reflection: When’s the last time you became a new person?
Grit & Grain
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR
May 15 – June 14, 2025
If I wasn’t a participant in this show, I would be sprinting to PICA trying to see Grit & Grain before it closes next month. Described by nůn studios’ co-founder Sharita Towne as ““an ode to ancestral grit, grain as food, as paper, as film, as dirt, as direction, as particle, texture & time,” this exhibition looks back on the dexterous, and sometimes anarchic, body of work the cooperative risograph print studio has produced since its inception in 2020. Mounted in PICA’s Resource Room, each piece of ephemera reveals another tether between the studio and a wider community of Black and Indigenous printmakers, writers, activists, thinkers, poets, and image makers in Portland and elsewhere. The mesmerizing gradient washes of fluorescent orange and teal installed on auxiliary walls throughout the space provide a meditative moment between technically and topically intricate books, prints, zines, and posters on Palestinian liberation, Black ancestral grief, re-memory, pleasure, and power. Linked together by the studio’s distinctive sensitivity to artistic autonomy and signature stylistic choices that differentiate nůn from the local pack, it’s refreshing to visit a print exhibition that isn’t pretending to be apolitical. In a place like Portland, which has for better and worse seen massive change in five years, Grit & Grain is evidence of the often overlooked ways artists are sharing and creating power in our city.
Reflection: What role does printmaking play in our collective liberation?