Cliff Notes
Each week, 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 hiccup and Associate Editor, Ella Ray, selected the best of the best art exhibitions in Portland, Oregon!
The Oldest Profession: SWer Showcase
Presented by Oregon Safer Workers Coalition at Ori Art Gallery, Portland, OR
August 9, 2025
There isn’t much information available about this showcase yet, but Oregon Safer Workers Coalition (OSWC) is a sex worker-led education, harm-reduction, and direct action organization that is actively fighting for the decriminalization of sex work. In a promotional video, curators Roz and Valentine noted that this exhibition will highlight historical artwork from swers with lived experience in the industry during the 1980s–early 2000s, including ephemera, photos, leather, and drawings. OSWC is doing life-affirming work, and I’m excited to be introduced to some new-to-me artists at the showcase.
Reflection: How do you support your community?
Sophia Baraschi-Ehrlich: The Moment Held
One Grand Gallery, Portland, OR
August 1–September 5, 2025
My Saturn return is kicking my ass. I’ve found that being outdoors is the only salve for being in the astrological trenches. Some call this “touching grass.” When I can’t go to the river and play mermaids or sit and listen to the trees at the park, I’m thinking about doing those things. I <3 NATURE.
Sophia Baraschi-Ehrlich’s debut solo exhibition, The Moment Held, is similarly occupied with the natural environment. Using shadowy tree-filled landscapes—rendered in shades of cyan and ochre that border on bioluminescent—Baraschi-Ehrlich explores the symbiotic relationship between nature and humans. The entanglement of our inner and outer worlds is across this suite of paintings, and this exhibition is an embodied reminder to see your reflection beyond just mirrors or front-facing cameras.
Reflection: When you listen to the trees, what do they say?
Cristina Velásquez: Somos Animales Poéticos
Blue Sky Gallery, Portland, OR
August 7–30, 2025
I don’t remember where I first encountered Cristina Velásquez’s photography, but I can recall being entranced by the artist’s dedication to redacting, or obscuring, crucial components in her portraits. Sometimes, in her works that use archival family images, whole faces are covered playfully with a timeworn animal sticker. In Velásquez’s studio work, her sitters often have their backs to the camera or peek at the viewer through a boundary of bright green leaves.
In concealing the identity of her subjects, is Velásquez protecting the people in her photos or denying their voice? This tension, of wanting to see their faces, to know them if only momentarily, but knowing the violence these subjects endure within conditions of the white wall gallery, is the type of challenge I like in an image.
Somos Animales Poéticos promises a collage and text-based exhibition, embracing “hybridity and speculation… [and] how experience is archived and reimagined through intertwining reality and fiction.” I’m eager to see how the human body is, or isn’t, foregrounded in this exhibition about memory and the archive.
Reflection: When is the last time you let someone take your picture?