[light music]
It's interesting looking at these again,
after being away from them for a while.
Being able to look at one of these
and then go, "What's going on in her head?
What is she thinking?"
[light music]
I think all of us have told a lie here or there,
even if you would qualify it as a white lie.
And so I knew for these works, I wanted it to evoke
what I was going through at the time,
the sadness and the anger and the frustration
and recounting generational curses,
and just like, "Why isn't my mother like this
or my father like this?
Why are they this way?
Why am I this way?"
For me, it comes down to grace
and being able to give that to family members.
So being able to paint these pieces opened that up for me
and then I could move forward.
[light music]
My name is Sade Dubois.
I'm an Oregon artist and painter.
Hey. Hey, thanks.
Thank you.
CASHIER: See you later. Bye.
I move throughout my life and studio practice
in a very methodical but free way.
I think of everything that comes to me
as this beautiful evolution of life.
It's an amazing time to be here, [chuckling]
And to like be alive and, and to create.
I'm self-taught, and that feels really weird as an artist.
It's really interesting being a student
at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.
it was something that I wanted to do
for the development of it,
and I'm learning so much.
My professor he's like, "Okay, this is how you set up.
As an artist, you want your palette to be
wherever your dominant hand is that you're using.
You'll look at your model.
You're gonna have your canvas right here."
And those were things that I didn't do
in my practice before then.
I'd be reaching over to my palette and then paint.
I see art as something that can be very hard to obtain.
We see a Kerry James Marshall sell
for over a million dollars and it feels unattainable.
And so I wanted to flip that on its head
and create a lot of work that was within a budget
that would work for different households.
And so I created a series of work
where I create these four-by-six pieces
of my style and put a lot of detail and work into these.
And then I sell 'em for a hundred bucks.
[light music]
I grew up in a single parent household
with my mom and three younger sisters, I'm the oldest.
Growing up, my mom saw my desire
to copy every single thing that I did as a kid.
My father would always do doodles and sketches and stuff.
He was in the Navy, but when he would come visit,
we always looked at his work that he would do,
and I was so enthralled with that.
And I was just like, "Oh man, I wanna be just like my dad."
I remember being at Albina Head Start
and everything that I saw, I would sketch.
And through that, my mom saw it and was just like,
"Wow, okay. Let's keep this up."
She put me in a whole bunch of different programs.
Like Caldera was a big one for me
that I stayed in til my last year in high school.
Caldera's in Sisters, Oregon gets inner city youth
out of the city and into nature,
and you're just in this space that's so healing
and so thriving and beautiful,
and that really motivated my work too.
Just being this little black girl
in this wide open, natural space
and feeling so comfortable and confident.
None of my family had gone to college,
so I didn't know what to do.
My mom didn't know what to do.
I decided, "Okay, I'm gonna go to Oregon State University."
I submitted two applications,
one to their engineering department,
one to their art program,
and then with engineering, I got a full ride.
And so I picked the practical choice.
I did engineering.
My family had been so close and while my mom was working,
I picked up a lot of the slack in the house.
So my sisters revered me almost as a mother figure for them,
and so that was really big thing for my family, leaving.
It was almost this feeling of abandonment.
So I dropped out,
'cause I had a lot of mental health issues too at the time,
like how am I going to disconnect from my family unit
and go off and do what I want?
[leaves crunching]
[light music]
2017, it was the first time that I had
separated from my mother's household and went off on my own.
I was doing a lot of running at the time and hiking
and just getting away outdoors,
and all of that became really focal
to my meditative and just practice of self care.
It reminded me a lot of my childhood,
a lot of going to Caldera.
Then I was like, "Wow this feeling that I feel
when I'm out here, I want to bring that into my practice."
So then my work kept portraits,
but then has moved to predominantly landscape backgrounds.
[light music]
Black Muses started off as a love letter to black women.
I did this call and I had so many women reach out to me,
and basically the premise of the project
was to paint women in their favorite natural spaces,
places where black women and femmes felt safe and loved.
[light music]
I'm hoping that through Black Muses,
women will be able to see themselves in this grand way.
Something about seeing yourself in a painting
feels so concrete and so big.
[light music]
So here's our original
and this is the first round of proof.
So we want to be close,
but it's probably not gonna be exact.
Yeah, this is awesome.
[light music]
After George Floyd had been murdered, I said,
"Okay, I'm going to paint my own posters
in resistance to this act that always happens."
Everyone's always so shocked.
Like, "Ah, how did this happen?"
No, it always happens.
And that was my way of healing through this trauma.
That is why I'm giving a free poster
to every person here today, because we see it
as a form of healing in our community
Change is needed and it's gonna come
and we're gonna make sure that it comes.
POLICE OFFICER: Disperse from the area now.
Move east. Disperse from the area.
This is an unlawful assembly.
After I did my resistance works
and was involved in different protests,
I found out about the grant
where the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art,
they're looking for 20 different black artists
and I applied and I got it.
And it was just like, "Okay, I get to create
this resistance work and further my practice as a grantee."
[light music]
I wanna take this composition,
and I wanna focus on the mother's,
the woman experience when a son passes
out of police brutality,
and so this is a collective mourning
between different women of this black man.
[light music]
This is my husband in the piece.
And then my mother-in-law.
I stood in the gap, and I think that's very symbolic
of, you don't know when the stuff's gonna happen.
[light music]
So at first I didn't like that I was in the piece.
And then as I thought about it, I was like,
"No, this is beautiful because
it's not just mothers that are impacted.
There's daughters, there's partners, there's sisters."
And so that's what it symbolized for me.
I do my work and I'm authentic to the work that I'm doing.
I'm doing what I know I should be doing,
and when you're in that combination, things just come easy.
Things open up and as long as you're
ready to take it and grasp it,
'cause that's how I view it, then do it.
Oh, it's so wonderfully beautiful.
Thank you for showing folks and that's [indistinct]
Thank you.
It's crazy how fast it's grown,
and I think about that a lot sometimes, but it's beautiful.
[light music]
[light music continues]