(upbeat music)
- All right.
Cool.
Great.
- There is lot of ways to describe what I do.
Some people call it, community-based art.
Some people just throw it
in some kind of contemporary art category.
I like to think of what I do as a black geographic Praxis,
like it's black geography
as a verb.
I live in a certain place and time
and all the work I do is essentially turning
black collectivity, black celebration,
black presence into form.
It rises from a community need
and desire and a community voice.
[Video] You've heard all the gun fire,
and I just grabbed my chest.
[Sharita] In my particular practice,
I really liked to wed community organizing
and civic happenings with art practice.
(engines roaring)
[Sharita] I was born in Oregon.
I grew up and down the West Coast
between Washington Oregon, and California.
And so a lot of the need I see is coming
from my own position as a great grandchild
of the great migration, right?
So black people arriving to the West Coast
and essentially making place here.
We have so many needs,
the need to celebrate ourselves.
The need to hone and keep our histories
our family histories, our neighborhood histories.
There's a need to spatialize community memory in this place,
in a place that is built on constantly
pushing out black people.
So this is a print that I've been working on
for two years now,
the title Black Life & Back Spatial
Imaginaries Glimpses Across Time & Space.
Each of these have like a element
that's from the present and from the past.
So this is the lower Mississippi river
going all the way up to St. Louis.
And then this is LA, Portland and Seattle.
So this is about the migration
from the alluvial Plains of the Mississippi river
westward following I-5 that's connecting these three cities.
(upbeat music)
Looks like Superman ice cream.
I love growing up on the West Coast.
We have such wide slices of sky.
And so I've always really taken to
dusk and dawn in a particular way.
And so I'm kind of been geeking out
on making these circle gradients.
And I think of them as kind of a snapshot
of black imagination under a particular sky.
Oh, yes.
I like making things that can have a life
away from me with people in there every day.
I like that they would carry their groceries or their books
in a tote bag.
I like that they would pass along a zine that I made
that somebody that doesn't even live in my city can read.
So I've done screen printing since I was like 15
in my neighborhood, screen printing shirts.
And printmaking is just totally accessible.
And it's like such a democratic wonderful form.
Right now I'm working on a project
that's called a Black Art Ecology Takes Place.
And that we actually had a portrait of Keaton in the middle.
And it's really the culmination of years of research
and community organizing and relationships.
It's the original animation.
So it'll be low tech in that way.
It's a project that conceptually takes the mid-century
logic of blight, that black people
are a detriment to an urban ecology
and need to be excised from the map,
like some kind of disease.
- [Announcer] Hello, and welcome
to the closed caption podcast exhibition, Black Life On Air.
- Which we have seen time and time again here in Portland,
be at the Memorial Coliseum or Emanuel hospital,
or now with the gentrification
that in some ways would like to make a plaque
or a mural rather than having a black family next door.
It takes that logic of blight
and counters it and says it's false
and acknowledges that black people have always
had a thriving contribution to place.
And so to put resources in the hands of artists
and communities,
to continue breathing life into a place.
It's not only making art, making videos, making projections,
it's simultaneously building the infrastructure
that you want that art to exist in.
(construction sounds)
In terms of actual physical things that happen,
it's a range.
I'm working with PCRI to do some public art
on their new King parks building.
(construction sounds)
It's at the corner of
Rosa Parks Boulevard and Martin Luther King Boulevard.
(upbeat music)
Also working with the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art
to give space and resources to black artists
and their space, which is on Vancouver and Williams,
very gentrified streets.
In some metrics we could even say that
Williams is the most gentrified street,
in the most gentrified city of the century.
So what does it mean to hand over resources
to black artists, curators and creatives
in a space that has like free rent for 20 years?
It's actually looking at not only community fabric as form
but looking at institutional infrastructure as form.
And what it means for an institution to lend their resources
so that black people can make their
own self-determined infrastructure.
- [Announcer] Same story about like their community.
- I think of the projects and the relationships
that I have within this piece, it's not attempting to say
that it's the entire black art ecology of Portland.
It's a black art ecology
is really just acknowledging the networks
and underground root system that forms a community.
And that is the life force in this place.
(piano music)
- I think Sharita really gives you a platform
for what to do now and moving forward.
- The way she's able to like not just do it,
but do it on this type of scale,
I think is very impressive and very necessary.
- Sharita is tremendously important
to the Portland art scene
because she's an artist who's really focused on
process and bringing her community along with her.
[Jonny] I hope the exhibit inspires people to act.
- There's a certain amount of catharsis
and healing that comes through collaborating.
There's this exponential force
that bubbles up when we put our
heads and minds and hearts together,
that is the form.
If a sculptor makes a sculpture
and then there's dust scattered across the studio.
To me, it's like if I put up an exhibition,
it's like the relationships and the laughter of the people
is the dust that's scattered around the artwork.
I hope that this work endures,
I hope to see more spaces designated
for black creatives and community.
I hope that the feature of this work
is more and more spatialized transformation
of the place that we live in.
And it honors and centers black lives.
(upbeat music)