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. Read on for this month’s column from Hayashi.
If We Could Talk
Black Gallery, Portland, OR
December 2, 2025 – February 16, 2026
As a Portland implant, I don’t pretend to completely understand the history of racial violence in our housing ecosystem, but I’ve been displaced before and think about displacement quite a bit—how the word doesn’t seem to hold the whole experience of forced migration and gentrification.
The term displacement can feel abstract and academic, and it’s spoken about in such a way that the pure violence of it can sometimes be washed over by conversations and jokes about Starbucks and Whole Foods. But what does it mean to name a place and then lose it—a home full of familial and ancestral history, a land of agricultural knowledge and practices, a collective of people who found connection and love despite it all? In If We Could Talk, a group exhibition from the residents of the Dr. Darrell Millner Building in North Portland, there is a vulnerable and open conversation about our shared lineage of Black displacement—always being forced to move to survive, forced to move so others can thrive, and yet, here we are, still here.
The Dr. Darrell Millner Building in North Portland is an initiative to address gentrification by supporting residents with historical connections to North Portland with affordable housing. The residents attended an eight-course photography workshop to explore the meaning of place and home. From this workshop, we are gifted with a gallery filled with intimate photographs of a community who, through resistance and hope, have managed to take place with them—through generations and centuries of systemic violence and suffering. This group exhibition documents Black presence as proof of place, existence, and culture, and how, when displacement is an inherent experience that is always to come, and when our roots are unable to be bounded in land, they can, instead, be bounded in each other.
Reflection: What things or people define home for you?
Malleable Shield – Cayla Skillin-Brauchle
The Arts Center, Corvallis, OR
January 6 – 31, 2026
It’s that time of year in Oregon—a continuous sky full of grey and falling water, less vitamin D, and more seasonal depression. I have bi-polar disorder so this time of year can be especially emotionally and mentally dangerous for me. To combat this (and speaking of place), I try to be more present in place through my body, environmental and material reflection, observing and responding to the happenings around and to me, and generating warmth and light, both literally and conceptually. All this to say, this winter I started knitting and my body has never felt more awake, and yet, softly meditative.
This is why I’m excited about Malleable Shield, opening this weekend. There isn’t much information about this exhibition yet but the exhibition description highlights Skillin-Brauchle’s recycling of fabrics to produce problem-solving artworks that responds to feelings of grief, despair, and fear in our current political atmosphere and environmental decline. I know, it’s some heavy shit during a heavy season, but it’s just as important to sit in grief as it is to move past it. If it’s anything like their previous works, plan to see some absurdity, a diversity of materials and surfaces, and the emotional and physical labor of a body.
Reflection: In what ways does grief show up in your body, and what can you do with your body to process it?
—Hayashi Wilder