KSMoCA prepares for 10th birthday with new funding to celebrate

Photos by So-Ming Kang

With its red brick exterior, rows of windows, and playground nearby, Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School might look like an ordinary school in the historic Albina neighborhood. But this school contains something rare and unexpected: a museum celebrating contemporary art, known as the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School Museum of Contemporary Art (KSMoCA). And this is no ordinary museum. The galleries and display spaces are run by young elementary school students, as part of an innovative partnership with the PSU School of Art + Design’s Art and Social Practice program.

At KSMoCA, Professors Harrell Fletcher and Lisa Jarrett, who launched the program in 2014, work with their undergraduate and MFA students, to facilitate the work of creating a museum. Their days are filled with mentoring the kids, introducing them to professional artists and their work, discussing how to evaluate a work of art, and teaching them about curatorial practices. 

Introducing these young children to the concept of a museum is important, because many in this historically Black neighborhood may not feel entirely welcome at a traditional museum. Early on, Fletcher and Jarrett considered KSMoCA as a way to bring the museum to the children, as opposed to the other way around.

The museum, which exists throughout the school building, boasts an enviable permanent collection as a result of collaborations with professional artists, tucked into intimate corners and lining the school’s wide corridors. A who’s who of internationally renowned artists have engaged in collaborations with KSMoCA — Hank Willis Thomas, Byron Kim, Addoley Dzegede, Wendy Red Star, Laylah Ali, Alec Soth, Jim Goldberg and other photographers from Magnum Photos, to name a few — and the school is filled with visual reminders of these partnerships.

The students learn about the artist’s work, the artist’s personal history, training and artistic process, and the meaning behind the art, even before the artist sets foot in the building. When the artist in residence arrives, there are lectures, workshops, and exhibitions showing the professional’s work alongside the students’ work. And it’s the children who act as the curators, preparators, historians, publicists, and docents for these shows.

Children helping to run a museum, working with renowned artists, and learning how to practice the curatorial arts is remarkable in and of itself. But there’s a deeper intention at work here. 

“The one-on-one relationship between the mentor and the child is the thing that’s of real value here,” Lisa Jarrett tells her university students as they sit around tables in an MLK Elementary School classroom. “We’ve talked about art being the thing that facilitates different kinds of thinking, or empowers the student. As a social practice project, here at KSMoCA, we’re using this framework of the museum, alongside some things that are informed by being in an elementary school setting, to create a circumstance in which something different can happen in workshops where the kids are working with artists.”

“In small groups, you can see that the younger kids enjoy it so much, and I see the bigger workshops and exhibitions as a reflection of that individual experience but on a larger scale,” says Kiya Reimann, one of the undergraduate student mentors. “It’s a completely different experience, but it’s also kind of similar.”

The work going on at KSMoCA sits at the intersection between art and social practice, which embraces community engagement and collaboration as both an art medium and a way of creating positive change in individuals and communities.

On a recent sunny Thursday morning, the PSU students and their young mentees were preparing for the spring 2023 artist in residence, photographer Wendy Ewald, who has taken the art of photography and turned it on its head. Her career has taken her from Colombia to India to the Appalachian Mountains, collaborating with communities and empowering them to tell their own stories through photography. A recent project, depicted in her book “The Devil Is Leaving His Cave,” took root in 1990, just before the Zapatistas staged a violent revolt in Chiapas, Mexico. Instead of taking photos of the people in this Mayan community, she guided them to take their own photos of their everyday lives, sharing their viewpoints, hopes and dreams.  A similar project is underway at KSMoCA, where MLK Elementary students are taking cameras home with them to photograph their families, friends, pets and neighborhoods.

Planting Seeds

Sitting on a bench in a shady spot near the playground, Moises, a fourth-grader, was talking with his undergraduate student mentor, Omar Arras. The two were preparing the captions for Moises’ photos that were soon to be included in the exhibition, alongside work by Wendy Ewald. 

“This is a staff [person] that worked there, Mr. Dickey, and that’s my friend,” Moises says, showing off a photo taken near the school on a dark, brooding day; a man wearing a bright red blanket wrapped around his body strides purposefully down the street, a child at his side.   

“What encouraged you to take this picture? Did you like the way he had the blanket wrapped around him?” asks Omar.

“Yeah, and how you can see the design on the backpack,” Moises responds.

“We explored different topics and photography based on the book by Wendy Ewald,” says Omar. “Here’s Moises at the school in front of one of the paintings there,” showing a photo of a mural celebrating Martin Luther King Jr., featuring school-aged children in a sunny Oregon landscape. Moises, wearing a bright yellow shirt, stands next to the painted children. Have you noticed this, Moises? It’s almost like you’re matching the painting.”

“Yeah, but my hair’s different now,” he responds. 

Reflecting on his conversations with Moises, Omar says the work of KSMoCA is like planting seeds. 

“I believe that when these kids grow up and end up leaving KSMoCA, it’s going to be an experience they look back on,” Omar says, adding that he envisions how working with individual children will benefit the broader community over time. “For me, for that reason, it feels like we’re really just starting the job. And we’re going to wait for these little sprouts to grow.”

With KSMoCA, and social practice in general, the growth coming out of this art methodology can go both ways, Fletcher says. “Oftentimes, the practice provides an educational component not only for the people in the community, but also for the artists working in the place. It's an opportunity for the artists to learn by exploring–working with different people, different contexts, different histories–as opposed to the idea that the artist is sort of doing all of their work in the studio.”

In one of Fletcher’s favorite projects, the school partnered with artist Byron Kim to create a MLK Elementary School-centered version of his Synecdoche. A PSU graduate student set up a camera and photographed the skin color of every child in the school in 2019, and the group created a photographic grid of the diverse hues, which is installed in the library alongside a document showing where to locate each kid’s photo. 

“I think that’s an exciting thing that continues to be significant,” Fletcher says. “Even after all of those kids have left the school, it’ll still be an interesting document that they might return to. And at some point, their own kid might see their parent there, being that multiple generations of kids within a family attend MLK Elementary. It’s a way of taking the traditional class photo and intersecting it with a contemporary art practice, while offering a way for people to ask ‘where am I within this?’”

In late 2022, the work of KSMoCA was recognized through two significant grants, one from Meyer Memorial Trust’s Justice for Oregon Black Lives program for $75,000, and another from Ninety-nine Girlfriends for $70,000. 

“This funding allows us to work toward giving more equitable access to all of the things that we’re building in the school,” said Jarrett.

Jarrett and Fletcher have a long-term vision of having more mentors from the public. They also hope to create exterior museum signage for the building, make improvements to the KSMoCA library, conduct more research into the artwork that has been a part of the school building for decades, and create KSMoCA badges for everyone who works on the museum, from the children to the teachers to counselors and maintenance staff.

“We are really grateful for the support,” says Jarrett, “and there’s something really incredible about having that support come from Portlanders.”