Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Hayashi Wilder, Emily Small, Jade Ichimura, and Renée Reizman pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast.
BLACK MATTER
Patricia Reser Center for the Arts, Beaverton, OR
September 5–November 7, 2025
For most of my childhood, nothing existed outside of blackness. I don’t say this to mean that my child self had an awareness of the complex connections of race as a foundation to every issue that exists today. I mean this as my world was all black. Other than my Japanese mother, every nook, psalm, and caress was tenderly steeped in Black life and culture. Blackness wasn’t a haunting; it was a fellowship.
BLACK MATTER carries that same tenderness and saturation, a Blackness without all the white people shit connected to it. Curated by Tammy Jo Wilson, this traveling group exhibition showcases Oregon-based Black artists and places them against the slowly unraveling backdrop of the Western art canon. I’m especially drawn to the exhibition’s critique of the underlying symptoms of racism in art collecting practices, where, to be celebrated, Black artists are expected to carve their value out of suffering and impending doom.
This group of artists gives rise to a nuanced conversation about the being of Blackness, where art and its creation are unburdened by the need to translate for the white gaze. It illustrates how Blackness is as much about living as it is about surviving, a matter and presence that doesn’t need permission to be.
Reflection: Where do you find yourself asking for permission and what would it look like to stop asking?
Osamu James Nakagawa: Kai: 廻 Following the Cycle of Life
Blue Sky Gallery, Portland, OR
September 4–27, 2025
Kai: 廻 Following the Cycle of Life is about living and dying and how we have to experience it over and over, and over again. In a photo series spanning two decades, Osamu James Nakagawa grasps onto life as it arrives and departs, reminding us of the lingering inevitability of living and dying.
The series began when Nakagawa discovered his father was dying due to cancer at the same time his wife was carrying their unborn daughter. I was charmed by the light in each photo. Its surface is so soft, like felt, gentle but itchy. It reminds me of the annoying parts of grief, the frustration and the fear, cocooned by love and memory.
Each death, like each photograph, draws me closer to death itself. So much so, like in Kai, it starts to become an anticipated character you never look forward to meeting, but are no longer surprised by its arrival. The images feel fragile, almost too cherished, not like we could break their contents, but perhaps it is breaking on itself while we all watch.
There is a cruelty in realizing how much of our existence is braided with exchange. It’s a constant deal between presence and absence, celebration and mourning, beginning and end, birth and death. In Kai, we see a meditation of the photographs themselves becoming an ancestor, just like the photographer will one day be an ancestor, and so will we all, carrying lived histories, insisting nothing is lost, only transformed, only circling back again to start the cycle over.
Reflection: As a future ancestor, what message do you want your descendants to know about grief?