BOULDER, Colo. (KRDO) – The Indigenous photography exhibition Preserving Our Place: Knowledge is Power is opening to the public at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Mesa Lab in Boulder. 

The exhibition will be open to the public Thursday, June 1, and run through Sunday, August 20, at the NCAR Mesa Lab located at 1850 Table Mesa Drive in Boulder, Colorado.

Organizers of the exhibit said it features the importance of culture and lifeways as well as the consequences of the climate crisis. 

The exhibition comes in conjunction with the Rising Voices Center of Indigenous Earth Scienes’s annual workshop. 

The workshop will bring together a multi-generational network of community leaders and experts from around the world to address and understand extreme weather events and climate change. 

The collaborative exhibition will celebrate the work of two indigenous artists who illustrate the devastating effects of climate change on their native, coastal homes. 

Those artists are Chantel Comardelle, Tribal Executive Secretary of the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation Louisiana, and Dennis Davis, community artist of the Native Inupiat Village, Shishmaref, Alaska.

For more information about seeing the exhibit at the NCAR Mesa Lab, visit the website by clicking here or call (303)-497-4000.

This past Memorial Day weekend, I visited the Seattle Art Museum to see the exhibit “American Art: The Stories We Carry.” This is the first major reinstallation of the museum’s American art collection in 15 years.

The exhibition brings the museum’s historical American collection — predominately comprised of works by artists of European descent — into conversation with Native, Asian American, African American, and Latino art, including contemporary art and new acquisitions and commissions.

“The Stories We Carry” is the result of a two-year process and unprecedented collaboration among SAM curators and staff, regional artists and advisers from the Seattle community. Two key goals of the project were to create a new interpretive framework for the American art galleries that bring forward historically excluded narratives and artistic forms and to deepen the museum’s commitment to inclusive exhibition-planning practices.

The project began with the question, “What is American art?” SAM’s American art galleries were last substantially reinstalled in 2007 for the opening of the expanded downtown museum, giving preference to the historical American art canon over the many perspectives that have driven cultural production in North America from the 17th century to World War II, particularly those of artists active in the Pacific Northwest region’s diverse communities.

SAM’s historical American art collection contains approximately 2,500 examples of painting, sculpture, works on paper and decorative arts. It features works by nationally renowned and historically significant artists and Pacific Northwest artists long overdue for closer examination within the American context. The reinstallation emphasizes a more critical and intimate approach to the story of American art, in particular how it intersects with the museum’s Native American art collection, which is presented in adjacent galleries.

Each of the galleries has a theme. The first one that visitors enter, Storied Places, fittingly starts with the land itself, exploring diverse approaches to place, nature and the landscape genre. The next theme, Transnational America, explores how North America became part of a global network of ideas, economies and cultures and unearths the histories embedded in objects of migration, trade, and exploration.

The visitor then explores Ancestors + Descendants, which considers the complexities of portraiture — long a dominant American art form — and reveals the multiplicity of American identities. Then the next gallery, Memory Keepers, reflects on different cultural approaches to storytelling, remembering and legacies, with a special focus on the Pacific Northwest region.

In the midst of these galleries is a room with the theme “Reaching Back, Guiding the Future.” Here, three artworks come together in a dramatic challenge to the legacy of structural racism and colonialism in the U.S.

The center of this room is Nicholas Galanin’s commission for SAM, Neon American Anthem (2023), which fills the gallery with white light from a custom neon installation that offers a proclamation and an invitation: “I’ve composed a new American national anthem: Take a knee and scream until you can’t breathe.” Galanin envisions the work as a participatory performance piece that engages museum visitors to ring out with sounds of protest, mourning or celebration.

What I also found in one of the museum’s galleries, dedicated to modern American art, was the narrative series “The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture” by Jacob Lawrence. This collection was featured in an exhibit recently at Larson Gallery in Yakima.

Opened in October 2022, “American Art: The Stories We Carry” will continue with rotating exhibits.

The best way to measure the impact of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (b. 1940; citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation) is not narrowly through her historic retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the first such presentation for an Indigenous artist organized by the nation’s premier museum dedicated exclusively to American art.

She’s bigger than that.

A sense of her impact can only be adequately appreciated by widening out.

Widening out to Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke) at the Columbus Museum of Art. Exhibitions of contemporary Indigenous photography at the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Denver Art Museum. The first presentation of contemporary artwork from Seminole Indians in a Florida art museum. The Counterpublic triennial in St. Louis prominently featuring Anita Fields (Osage/Muscogee) and Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara/Lakota). Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Choctaw-Cherokee) at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville.

A small sampling of the prestigious exhibitions of Native American art on view this spring around the country.

Smith influenced each of these artists, directly or indirectly emboldening each of them and 1,000 more to share unapologetic, contemporary, sometimes confrontational stories of indigeneity. She influenced each of these institutions and hundreds more, blazing a trail into their revered spaces, her artwork clearing a path for others to follow.

She has both made the way and shown the way, embodying the spirit of lifting as she climbs.

“I feel like somebody has to do it,” Smith told Forbes.com. “It might as well be me since my years of experience make me a good candidate, but I bring my community with me anywhere I go.”

Her impact takes especially dramatic form four miles from the Whitney in Brooklyn Bridge Park where Nicholas Galanin’s (Lingít and Unangax̂) 30-foot-tall In every language there is Land / En cada lengua hay una Tierra sculpture boldly affirms that we are on native land. All of us.

None of this happens without Smith who it would be impossible to argue is not the GOAT of contemporary Native American art–the greatest of all time. At least for influence.

She didn’t do this by herself.

Maria Martinez (San Ildefonso Pueblo), Nampeyo (Hopi-Tewa) and other Indigenous potters demonstrated more than a century ago that the artistry and skill of Native American material culture was on a level with anything else on view in a fine arts museum. They cracked the museum door.

Fritz Scholder (Luiseño) and T.C. Cannon (Kiowa, Caddo) proved Native people could do the same with so-called “fine art.” Their paintings and Allan Houser’s (Chiricahua Apache) sculpture pushed Native art metaphorically into the lobby.

Over her 50-year career, Smith has made it all the way inside, generations of Native artists following in her wake, taking up residence in art museums across America–the good ones anyway. Not so long ago–in this century–Indigenous art got the side eye when on display in these hallowed halls. Now such spaces get the side eye when failing to display it, anymore, an inexcusable omission.

“(This exhibition) cannot signify a benchmark for a whole race of people,” Smith said. “It can signify to an individual Native artist that perhaps that buckskin ceiling has been broken and possibly more Native artists might follow.”

They are.

Cara Romero (Chemehuevi). Marie Watt (Seneca). Doug Hyde (Nez Perce, Assiniboine, and Chippewa). Emmi Whitehorse (Diné). Julie Buffalohead (Ponca). Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne). Rose Simpson (Santa Clara Pueblo). Virgil Ortiz (Cochiti Pueblo). Yatika Starr Fields (Cherokee, Creek, Osage).

A dozen more.

And a dozen more.

That’s Smith’s impact.

Finally

This journey has been excruciatingly slow going.

Unbelievably, Smith became the first Native American artist to have a painting acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 2020. 2020! As in three years ago 2020.

The National Gallery of Art for the United States of America did not deign to acquire a piece of Native American painting until 2020. The museum was established in 1937.

That’s not progress, that’s an outrage. An utter dereliction of duty.

“If we honor our ethnic groups such as Asian Americans, African Americans, Latinx Americans and leave out Native Americans, then we are missing a quarter of our American culture, a quarter of our knowledge base and a major part of our American history,” Smith reminds. “This is significant ignorance.”

That ignorance has been purposeful.

Native art and artists are everywhere and have been everywhere as long as these institutions have been open. Native art doesn’t fill these spaces because of scarcity or lack of quality, it doesn’t fill these spaces because the curators, directors and collectors who make those decisions deemed it unworthy. By extension, they deemed Native people unworthy.

Smith cites the murder of George Floyd by police, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the water protectors at Standing Rock staring down militarized private and government mercenaries as calling attention to the galling lack of minority and Native American representation in “mainstream” museums. Make no mistake, historically and today, these artists have had to force their way into these spaces.

The Whitney’s invitation to Smith, late arriving as it was, remains atypical.

But that’s changing, and it’s changing because of Smith.

“We need to not let up the pressure in order to decolonize the major institutions throughout the U.S.,” Smith said. “Just because these institutions may not exist next to a reservation doesn’t mean there are not Natives there—we are everywhere, so my advice is to be aware.”

Smith’s other advice, her hope for the nation’s culture-bearers, is to hire Native people across the museum. It’s no longer enough to show Native American artwork. Native Americans must be hired as curators–as docents–they must sit on boards and be hired in directorial positions. They must be hired as lawyers and contractors and accountants and art handlers and conservators and chefs in the café and in every other role museums require.

Memory Map

“Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map” opened at the Whitney on April 19^th as the most significant solo exhibition for a Native American artist ever. The prestige of the museum, the scale of the show–the largest and most comprehensive of her career displaying more than 130 works across two floors–its location in New York, all are unrivaled in stature.

She more than just takes up space there, she owns it.

Smith has been creating complex abstract and representational paintings, prints, sculptures and installations since the 1970s. Some of her earliest work, rarely seen in public, is on view.

Her distinct visual language combines appropriated imagery from commercial slogans and signage, art history–Picasso, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg–and personal narratives. Maps figure prominently; maps of America. They are perhaps her most iconic device. If not maps, then canoes–trade canoes full of objects she’d like to send back to the colonizers: Christianity, syringes, trash, single use plastic. She uses text, George Armstrong Custer and the buffalo, rabbit and coyote deeply symbolic to many Native American cultures.

All are employed, along with heavy doses of humor and satire, to convey her insistent socio-political commentary with powerful clarity.

“The big get is to show people that we exist, that we are still here, that we have not vanished as we invade white institutions,” Smith said.

Native people exist and are contemporary. If visitors to “Memory Map” or any other exhibition of contemporary Native American art take something from the show, let it be that.

In conclusion of her email interview with Forbes.com, she shared a poem she had recently written entitled, “A Short History of America:”

Snow White came from Europa

She kissed the Frog

Who turned into

A Ledger Book Prince

She converted corn

Into Fritos

And soon

She put everything

Up for sale.

“Memory Map” will be on view at the Whitney through August 13, 2023, before traveling to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth later this year.

Charleston’s thriving cultural milieu stems in part from the thousands of West and Central Africans brought to the coastal Carolinas to work on cotton, rice, and indigo plantations. Because these regions were so remote (some included barrier islands), descendants of enslaved residents were able to retain certain elements of their Indigenous African culture.

Out of this, a new language, Gullah, was born, along with new artistic traditions that blended traditional and American elements. Today, Charleston has many artists in residence who aim to keep Gullah history alive.

Chanteuse Quiana Parler

One of the most renowned artists in the Lowcountry, Quiana Parler began her professional singing career at The Carolina Opry, a musical variety show in Myrtle Beach. Since landing in the top 48 of season two of American Idol in 2003, she’s performed all over the world and shared the stage with the likes of Clay Aiken, Kelly Clarkson, Ruben Studdard, Bobby McFerrin, Miranda Lambert, and Maroon 5.

Parler currently tours with Charleston’s two-time Grammy-winning jazz ensemble Ranky Tanky—named for a Gullah expression that means “work it” or “get funky”—as the lead female vocalist, and as a lyricist and composer. Along with drummer Quentin Baxter, trumpet player Charlton Singleton, guitarist Clay Ross, and bassist Kevin Hamilton, she serves up contemporary arrangements of old Gullah songs, which were historically performed using only a cappella voices and body percussion, as well as original compositions.

Fifth generation basket weaver Corey Alston

Basket weaving is a cornerstone of West African culture that traces more than three centuries back. In South Carolina, sweetgrass—a supple, perennial grass native to the Lowcountry islands—along with bulrush, pine needle, and palmetto leaves, was used by enslaved people to create baskets used in rice cultivation on the Sea Islands.

A fifth-generation artisan, Corey Alston’s family has been weaving traditional sweetgrass baskets for nearly 100 years. Like his Gullah ancestors, he harvests his own materials from the local landscape, uses no synthetics or machines, and keeps the art form alive by passing down his knowledge to his children. In 2022, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. commissioned a custom sweetgrass basket from Alston that took four months to complete. Charleston visitors can find his works at City Market.

Musical alchemist Charlton Singleton

Charlton Singleton is one of those people who was seemingly born to be a musician. Raised just outside of Charleston in Awendaw, South Carolina, he began his musical studies at age three with the piano. The son of a preacher, he made his stage debut just one year later when he performed Amazing Grace at church.

Singleton went on to embark on what would be a distinguished career as an in-demand performer, composer, arranger, and speaker—what Charleston Magazine sums up as “a musical alchemist, a magician.” He’s taught music at the elementary, middle, and high school levels, served as adjunct faculty member at the College of Charleston, and cofounded the Charleston Jazz Orchestra and Ranky Tanky, for which he won a Grammy Award for the jazz- and Gullah-inspired album Good Time in 2019.

In 2021 this accomplished artist received the Governor’s Award, the highest honor for the arts in the state of South Carolina. Singleton currently serves as Artistic Director for the Charleston Jazz Orchestra, a nonprofit dedicated to performance, education, and outreach in celebration of the city’s jazz history.

The South Side’s street art Color Park — located along the Three Rivers Heritage Trail near The Highline — received what some would call a needed facelift last week. Others on social media offered a decidedly different opinion.   

Volunteers from Friends of the Riverfront — the nonprofit tasked with protecting and maintaining riverfront trails and access — primed the concrete blocks in the space with a fresh coat of white paint last Tuesday morning, May 23, creating a blank canvas for what organizers call a park “refresh.”

Volunteers and local artists spent Thursday evening before the holiday weekend adding new colors and fresh works of art to the space. 

“I think it’s an amazing concept,” says Kelsey Ripper, executive director of Friends of the Riverfront. “Artists need a space to experiment and hone their craft and do it safely. I’m excited to keep the tradition going.”

Started in 2017 with local artist and former Steelers running back Baron Batch, the park was originally designed to be an ever-changing street art gallery with annual updates. But the lack of events, in part due to Covid, left the park susceptible to less savory and sometimes vulgar graffiti that led to some backlash from area residents. 

“I think it’s a good idea in theory, but it needs to be curated,” says Allentown resident Nancy Lomasney. “It’s good to activate the space for sure, but I think it’s been neglected. I think it is a naive hope that it’s going to be self-regulated.” 

Thursday’s refresh is a step in the right direction, says Ripper, acknowledging that some of the graffiti had gotten out of hand and exceeded the park’s intended boundaries. Going forward, Friends of a Riverfront plans to organize annual refreshes. 

“Next year we’ll do an even bigger push to let people know this is happening,” Ripper says. 

In the meantime, street artists are encouraged to add their work or cover older pieces whenever they want.

Batch was on hand Thursday assisting amateur artists, adding some of his own flair on the murals and just taking in the scene, laughing and chatting with others who came by to paint. 

“It’s about moving to the next phase of what this project actually is,” Batch says. “It’s a place of expression.”

He hopes the idea can be expanded or used regularly for events.

Beltzhoover native and artist Dejouir Brown says the park has been an important space for him since it began. A father, and line cook by trade, Brown works on his art in his spare time. 

“It’s a place where people can come and experiment. A lot of people don’t have studios or places in their house where they can express their color and just try stuff,” Brown says. 

For him, it’s also a place of stress relief.

Talking with Batch and another artist, Brown adds, “Especially as Black men, we’re always looked at to be angry or upset. This art is how we can channel our emotions and express how we feel or let out our emotions. I found myself escaping to the park. It’s a heavy escape for me. When I am in my feelings or when I am feeling stressed out about things I don’t have control over, I jump into art.” 

As to the explicit, sloppy or expletive-laden graffiti, he says it has no place in Color Park and is generally frowned upon by the street art community.

“I don’t like it. I want people to do their research. Don’t do dumb stuff,” he says. “Don’t come down here doing profanity. That’s a waste of your time.” 

For full-time artist Korey Edmonson of Baldwin, Thursday was an opportunity to try a new medium and work with spray paint. 

“It’s my first time doing something this big,” Edmonson says of a colorful image he painted on one of the blocks. Speaking of the refresh he adds, “Hopefully it encourages some positive art.”

Both Edmonson and Brown express interest in seeing an expansion of Pittsburgh’s street art scene. Brown points to places like the Wynwood neighborhood in Miami — an old industrial area that has embraced mural parks and transformed into a revitalized arts district — as a good example of larger scale street art projects. 

The property in and around Color Park is owned by the Urban Redevelopment Authority of Pittsburgh (URA) and includes a large unused paved space. Batch and Ripper both see the potential for expanded use of the space for festivals, concerts and other projects.

While much of the response to Thursday’s refresh was positive, there was some backlash on social media, especially concerning some of the artwork that was created by artists who are now deceased, that was covered up. Because of the scarcity of information, others mistakenly assumed that Color Park was abandoned and the space had just been painted white.

Happy with the refresh as a whole, Brown agrees with some of the criticism.

“I wish that the people that orchestrated this situation could have reached out to somebody to get more information on the culture,” he says. “Other than that, I love it.”

While all of the blocks at the center of the park were primed white, some of the existing art on the ground was preserved and painted around.

Defending the decision to paint over much of the park, Ripper says that was always the original intent of the space. “That’s the nature of graffiti. It’s always going to be changing.”

In an email, she writes that members of Friends of the Riverfront discussed saving some of the pieces, but ultimately decided, “We didn’t want to be the arbiters of what is good art and what is not. We looked at every piece of art before the refresh and didn’t see any indication that there were memorial pieces in the park. The original intent of Color Park, and what keeps it interesting, is that it is ever-changing.”

The park is open to artists to come and add their works to the space at any time. Covering up or simply adding around older works is a generally accepted practice in the street art community. 

Curating the newly reinstalled Arts of Africa gallery at the Denver Art Museum—on view to the public for the first time since 2016—Adekunle Adeniji wanted to bring the spirit of Africa to life inside the Colorado-based institution. His goal is to present African art as a “living, dynamic, and relevant process, deeply interwoven with societal practices and values,” he tells EBONY. “It’s how art embodies individual and communal identities, power dynamics and transformational experiences, serving as an adornment of ordinary living and an expressive language that narrates the intricate tapestry of African life.”

And what a job Adeniji, who received the Anderman Family Fellow for African Art to bring together the installation, and his team has done. The small but mighty space showcases approximately 800 objects from the continent, which includes paintings, sculptures and personal objects, like wooden combs, from the past two centuries.

Anchoring itself around three themes: self, power and transformation, and manifestation, the collection “unveils the richness and diversity of African aesthetics and elicits a deeper appreciation of Africa’s profound influence on the art world,” Adeniji shares. “I hope to illuminate the past while shaping a compelling narrative for the present that extends beyond Africa’s physical boundaries and invites visitors to explore the vast landscape of African artistic creativity and cultural heritage.”

That sentiment is seen in DAM’s large-scale work Rain Has No Father by El Anatusi. The Ghanaian artist created the piece using found objects like metal bottle caps. “Anatsui creates sculptures that serve as a powerful commentary on colonialism, consumerism and the environment,” Adeniji says. “This piece serves as a testimony to the transcultural nature of contemporary African art, a narrative of a society’s complex relationship with material consumption and a tribute to African ingenuity. Anatsui’s work metaphorically represents the resilience and adaptability of African creativity, culture and spirit, reflecting the transformative nature of African art.”

The renovated gallery is part of a bigger refresh across several areas in the museum, including its contemporary art collection that features works of renowned Black artists like Kerry James Marshall and Denver native Jordan Casteel.

Here are four more must-see pieces by Black and African artists now on display at the Denver Art Museum.

Sylvia’s (Taniedra, Kendra, Dedelia, Crizette, De’Sean), Jordan Casteel

Working from a photograph, Denver native Jordan Casteel immortalizes the descendants of famed restaurateur, Sylvia Woods, in their family-owned establishment in Harlem, New York. Casteel aims to create a mesmerizing gaze between the subject, artist and the viewers. “My goal is to capture something that’s only felt when thoughtfully engaging with someone,” she shares with DAM. 

Better Homes, Better Gardens, Kerry James Marshall

Part of a series of paintings that Marshall titled the “Garden Project,” it portrays a scene that suggest the complexity of life in low-income housing projects. “What I wanted to show in those paintings is that whatever you think about the projects, they’re that and more,” he shared with DAM. “If you think they’re full of hopelessness and despair, you’re wrong. There are actually a lot of opportunities to experience pleasure in the projects.”

Aboki, Cornelius Annor

Ghanaian artist Cornelius Annor draws upon family photographs and uses fabrics sourced from his wife, mother and aunts to create intimate portraits of everyday life in his native Ghana. This piece, acquired by the museum in 2022, is based on a photograph of two childhood friends in 1967. Annor uses rust-colored hues to recall the sepia tones of antique photographs and the passage of time.

Realness, Mark Bradford

Mark Bradford’s wall-sized collage is made from found objects and home good items. The intricate patterning of swirls across the canvas are in response to impromptu networks—underground economies, marginalized communities and abandoned urban buildings. It’s represents the social unrest of the world, which Bradford explores through his abstract paintings.

Los Angeles’ beautiful diversity is reflected by the various exhibitions by artists in the city’s museums and galleries. From serene paintings to somatic installations, these artistic gems celebrate unique experiences, reflections, and approaches.

Since exhibits are on display for only a short time, Shondaland has compiled a guide for you of five exhibits worth checking out this spring and summer.

“Handwriting on the Wall” by Thornton Dial

Blum & Poe

Through June 10

Thornton Dial, a native of Emelle, Alabama, was a significant contemporary artist. His artwork highlighted his experience as a Black person in the South, along with his various trades and professions — from picking cotton at age 5 to making train cars for 30 years. Exploring Dial’s artwork is the equivalent of delving into an inclusive and complex version of American history through the eyes of someone who’s witnessed and experienced the human condition in many landscapes. Dial’s work reflects themes of the Great Migration, the civil rights movement, the election of the first Black president, and beyond. He has diverse artistic creations, but his drawings focus on women and their intricate roles as sources of power and love. His grandmother and great-aunt raised him, and their influence on his life and art was profound and enduring. Dial’s exhibit at Blum & Poe is something you don’t want to miss.

Chiharu Shiota

Hammer Museum

Through August 27

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Berlin-based Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota’s captivating installation is the first featured in the Hammer’s newly renovated lobby. Shiota’s installations, sculptures, and performance art are powerful conduits to psycho-geographic spaces where memory, emotions, and the cyclical nature of life and death intertwine. Shiota meticulously weaves intricate environments using red, black, and white yarns that extend across entire galleries, evoking organic structures like cobwebs, veins, and fractals.

“The Flower Show”

L.A. Louver

June 7 to September 1

“The Flower Show” at L.A. Louver features more than 50 artists, each bringing their unique craft and cultural perspectives to the table while using flowers as a motif. Flowers have continued for centuries to be an enduring source of inspiration for artists. The diverse approaches encompass various styles, mediums, and time periods. Through the work of artists, including sculptor Zemer Peled and contemporary artist Ang Tsherin Sherpa, this exhibit brings forth a rich tapestry of artistic expressions centered around beautiful flowers.

“Coming Back to See Through, Again” by Njideka Akunyili Crosby

David Zwirner

Through July 29

David Zwirner’s new gallery features the work of Nigerian-born, Los Angeles-based artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby. She was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship in 2017. In 2022, her artwork was featured in a solo exhibition curated by Hilton Als for the Yale Center for British Art. Her artwork mirrors her personal experiences and the complexities of African diasporic identity by merging painted portraits, locations, and themes from her life with photographs sourced from her personal images and Nigerian magazines.

Party/After-Party by Carl Craig

The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA

Through July 23

Carl Craig is a Detroit-based DJ and producer. He boasts 30 years of international experience and has headlined at Berlin’s infamous nightclub Berghain. His immersive installation, which complements the architecture of the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, is a somatic experience that creates a journey for visitors where they experience a club night through a DJ’s point of view. The entry point of the installation honors the trailblazers of techno and electronic music who were Black artists. In addition to the immersive installation of Party/After-Party, Carl Craig extends the experience with “Party/After-Party Sessions,” a series of three live concerts.

Sharmin Rahman is a fiction writer and screenwriter, who recently completed the UCLA Writers’ Program. Raised in Brooklyn, Rahman currently lives in Los Angeles where she is working on her first short story collection. Follow her on Twitter @sharminerahman.

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This month’s round-up of exhibitions circles the precarity of memory through retrospectives and homages, as if holding on to what we can remember. It’s been said that as we get older, the days seem shorter and the impact of time lessens, perhaps because our experience of time expands and it feels less new. Sometimes it feels as though things blur together– what was I doing yesterday? What did I eat for lunch last week? Who was I talking to just a few hours ago, and about what?

Our memories seem to collapse in on one another, creating overlaps and gaps in clarity. Sometimes the act of remembering itself is intimidating and slippery; Derek Franklin and Danielle Ross explore this phenomenon through painting and movement. For Justin Favela, remembering can be celebratory and honors the work of those that came before us. The title of Todd Norsten’s show at Adams and Ollman (closing this month) perhaps encapsulates this instability best: it feels like experiencing An Imprecise Recollection of an Inaccurate Memory.

An Imprecise Recollection of an Inaccurate Memory
Todd Norsten
May 20 – June 17
Adams and Ollman
418 NW 8th Ave., Portland (Wed – Sat 11am – 4pm)

Minneapolis-based artist Todd Norsten presents a collection of new paintings that toe the line between witty, satirical word-play broadsides and a nihilistic critique of everyday graphic design. While minimal in appearance, Norsten’s paintings are complex meditations on the unending presence of visual information in our lives and the existential dread it can bring. While you’re there, make sure to check out We Recording Tonight, an exhibition of Hasani Sahlehe’s recent atmospheric color-stain paintings that draw inspiration from the freeform nature of improvisational music.

Vistas del Cielo
Justin Favela
May 27 – November 26
High Desert Museum
59800 US-97, Bend (Daily, 9am – 5pm)

High Desert Museum welcomes a large-scale installation by multidisciplinary artist Justin Favela, who considers the history of vaqueros and braceros–Mexican and Latinx cowboys and farmworkers–through lenses of place, intersectional identity, and authenticity. Favela’s use of brightly colored piñata paper as his primary material gives the work an air of celebration and playfulness, offering joy and dimension to his explorations. As a whole, the installation pays homage to Favela’s grandfather, who was a vaquero himself, and the deep history of Latinx experiences in the High Desert region.

Grief is on my calendar every day at 2:00 p.m.
Derek Franklin
June 8 – July 29
Elizabeth Leach Gallery
417 NW 9th, Portland (Tues – Sat 10:30am – 5:30pm)

In his first solo exhibition since 2018, Derek Franklin contemplates performativity and performance in many aspects: the rituals of everyday life, the action of painting, and the staging of art objects in an exhibition. It’s as if nothing is arbitrary in the age-old dialogue of subject/object relationships; everything has a role, be it prop or player, in the space it inhabits. Franklin focuses on this precarious (and, honestly, often harrowing) structure of perception and its both visible and invisible tendrils through a series of layered paintings and concrete sculpture.

Touch ‘em with Love
Shelley Turley
May 27 – July 1
Helen’s Costume
7706 SE Yamhill Street, Portland (Sat – Sun 1pm – 4pm, or by appointment)

Shelley Turley’s new exhibition of paintings, Touch ‘em with Love, revisits the ideas and themes surrounding the single-world title of Helen’s Costume’s first show in 2020, Touching. In an interplay between scenes of domesticity and contemplations of our inner lives, Turley’s paintings ponder the interconnectedness of breath and touch, public and private, and the thin line between life and living. In both style and concept, the work evokes the Impressionists (particularly Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt) and their attempts to grasp at the modern world that was constantly shifting and changing.

Music for Ghosts
Tom Prochaska
June 6 – August 26
Melvin Henderson-Rubio Gallery, Hallie Ford Museum of Art
700 State St., Salem (Tues – Sat 12pm – 5pm)

Over 50 years of work by printmaker, painter, and draftsman Tom Prochaska is surveyed in an exhibition of 70 paintings, drawings, prints, and glass works. Curated by Jonathan Bucci, Music for Ghosts takes a retrospective look at the development and maturation of Prochaska’s career that skillfully shifted between many mediums and processes over time. Accompanying the exhibition will be a panel discussion moderated by Bucci on Saturday June 3 at 5pm, two gallery talks on June 13 and August 8 at 12:30pm, and a forthcoming publication titled Tom Prochaska: Music for Ghosts at the end of the summer.

Protection: Adaptation & Resistance
May 19 – August 4
The Center for Native Arts & Cultures Foundation
800 SE 10th Avenue, Portland (Fri 4pm – 7pm)

The Native Arts & Cultures Foundation (NACF) welcomes the nationally touring exhibition, Protection: Adaptation & Resistance, featuring Indigenous Alaska artists including Dimi Macheras and Casey Silver, Lily Hope, Amber Webb, Katelyn Stiles, and Holly Nordlum. Protection explores various ways Indigenous Alaskan communities come together with strength and resilience, oriented towards the survival and thriving of future generations. The exhibition is organized around themes of Land and Culture Protectors, Activists for Justice, and Sovereignty and Resilient Futures in order to explore collaboration and allyship as tools of resistance.

Sponsor

Lineage
Danielle Ross
June 1-3, 8pm nightly; June 3, 4pm
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art
15 NE Hancock, Portland

Danielle Ross collaborates with Muffie Delgado Connelly, Allie Hankins, Hannah Krafcik, and Emma Lutz-Higgins to present Lineage, Ross’s latest performance. Thinking through the loss of elders and fraught struggles to maintain connections caused by the recent pandemic, the Portland-based choreographer contemplates various lineages, memories, and affective structures that inform our moving bodies through movement strategies of looping, transmission, and remembrance.

hapa.me: 15 years of the Hapa Project
Kip Fulbeck
May 21 – August 13
Japanese American Museum of Oregon
411 NW Flanders St., Portland (Thurs – Sun 11am – 3pm)

Kip Fulbeck initially launched The Hapa Project in 2001, photographing and interviewing over 1,200 volunteers who identify as Hapa–the Hawaiian term for someone of multiracial ancestry, often used for those of part Asian or Pacific Island heritage. 15 years after its first museum exhibition in 2006, hapa.me revisited some of its original participants, resulting in a new exhibition that pairs contemporary portraits and newly written statements alongside their previous counterparts. The comparison shows not just physical changes over 15 years, but new reflections as time and history change the participants’ perspectives and outlooks on the world. 

Cary Weigand
June 3 – July 30
Brumfield Gallery
1033 Marine Dr., Astoria (Tues – Sat 11am – 5pm, Sun 11am – 4pm)

In an exhibition of new ceramic works, Hawaiian-born artist Cary Weigand merges symbolism, mythology, tradition, and memory to reflect her childhood upbringing on the religiously-diverse island. Weigand’s somewhat haunting figures rendered delicately with muted colors bring together references to Indigenous spirituality, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Catholicism in a dream-like space of coexistence.

Bue Kee: An Artist’s Life and Legacy
May 19 – October 8
Portland Chinatown Museum
127 NW Third Ave., Portland (Fri – Sun 11am – 3pm)

Portland Chinatown Museum presents a survey of watercolors, paintings, lithographs, drawings, and ceramics by Bue Kee (1893-1985), developed in partnership with Kee’s family, the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Friends of Timberline, Portland Art Museum, and private collectors. The Portland-born Chinese American was the first recipient of the Carey Prize in 1929 and then an artist with the Federal Art Project under the Works Progress Administration, creating works for Timberline Lodge and Tongue Point Naval Station. The exhibition explores the artist’s oeuvre, revealing his unique perspective of Oregon, memories of the state’s Chinese American history, and intimate view of Portland Chinatown in the first half of the twentieth century.

Art Beyond
May 20 – June 15
Schneider Museum of Art; Various locations
555 Indiana St., Ashland (Tues – Sat 10am – 4pm)

Art Beyond, a biennial outdoor art exhibition hosted by the Schneider Museum of Art, returns this year with a series of site-specific sculptures and installations by 14 different artists. Stretching well beyond the walls of the museum, the exhibition activates multiple locations in and around Ashland from satellite galleries and local businesses to fenceposts on the side of the road, ultimately encouraging viewers (and its participating artists!) to critically consider the intertwining connections between art, place, and society. Accompanying the exhibition will be a series of workshops, performances, and events throughout the month.