Black Artists of Oregon show opens at Portland, OR Art Museum

PORTLAND, Ore. (PORTLAND TRIBUNE) — For “Black Artists of Oregon,” which celebrates the work of Black artists in Oregon over more than a century, the Portland Art Museum tapped one of its favorite artists, photographer Intisar Abioto, 37, to curate the show.

She drew on private collections and the museum’s own scant collection of works by Black artists from Oregon. (The show runs Sept. 9 to Mar. 17, 2024, with a temporary closure from Nov. 26 through Jan. 17 to accommodate construction at the museum.)

Abioto was already researching Black artists in 2018 when she got a grant to support and expand her work and turn it into an official institutional show. COVID-19 intervened, giving her even more time, and the result is finally at the Portland Art Museum.

Abioto talked with Pampin Media Group recently about a few highlights. For example Charlotte Lewis, an illustrator designer, textile artist and arts educator. She was a Portlander who moved here as a child from Prescott, Arizona. Lewis passed in 1990.

Abioto found one of Lewis’s pieces hanging in the North Portland library, called “Isis,” as in the Egyptian goddess. “It’s a fabric collage, with cowrie shells and all kinds of fabric, not really a tapestry,” said the curator. The different piece of fabric sewn down together to make an image of a woman with wings, standing on a body of an animal.