Written by Ella Ray, a writer, curator, and PSU alumna.

I believe art objects speak to each other. More recently I’ve begun to wonder how objects, particularly those installed in public spaces, are existing amongst themselves while we indefinitely wait for the world to “open up.”  

The collection of contemporary art selected for the Vanport Building, a collaboratively owned learning and public health space, was curated to invite regular building-users and passersby into conversations with the work. Beyond ambitions to highlight aesthetic connections and tensions between artists, the selection committee purposefully curated this group of artists as a reflection of Portland’s communities. 

In the process of arranging and installing the artworks, the global pandemic shuttered public spaces. At the same time, global uprisings erupted in response to the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd by police officers. Black people’s inability to take up space, both privately and publicly, is not a new symptom of the virus but a manifestation of anti-blackness exacerbated by a global crisis. Any perceived neutrality about public health or public space was challenged by the intersection of these disasters. When we return to non-essential buildings, our relationship to these spaces, the people who inhabit them, and the objects inside, will have shifted. Although the effect of these shifts will be immeasurable for some time, revisiting the Vanport Building collection revealed to me dialogues waiting to happen. Across a spectrum of methods of making, these works share a durational quality. They require the viewer to shift their weight, look again, look harder, give up, and return. Unfolding over time, the sculptures, photographs, videos, paintings, and textiles feel fit to exist throughout the uncertainty we are experiencing. 

Works by Lonnie Holley and Dao Strom explore negative and positive sculptural space in ways that enmesh both audience and environment. Rooted in the tradition of Assemblage, the overlapping contours of afros, eyes, lips, and chins multiply through closer reading in Holley’s cut steel sculpture, creating a complex composite body that morphs as we adjust our perspective and proximity. Strom’s poetic approach to the building’s façade uses both Vietnamese and English text to render legible air entering and exiting the lungs. The linguistic use of line breaks and ampersands calls for tangible pauses in engagement. 

Jeffrey Gibson’s text-based work ALIVE! reads less as a poem and more as a call to action. Although we should complicate the boundaries between those two categories, the work has the cadence of a punk manifesto-- best screamed at the top of your lungs. “I AM ALIVE. YOU ARE ALIVE. THEY ARE ALIVE. WE ARE LIVING!” The multicolored beads and tin jingles not only affirm the existence of the maker, the viewer, and the larger collective, but through its materiality declare an ancestral Indigenous existence.  

Sharita Towne similarly maps a continuum of life within her work Black Life, Black Spatial Imaginaries: Glimpses Across Time and Space. Throughout the large mixed-process print, vintage black and white images of Black people protesting, resting, and gathering are interspersed with images of vast land and neighborhood homes. The object and place are inseparable-- a house is a beehive and a cloud is a stoop. Brightly colored gradated orbs encapsulate each smaller scene and create a constellation of Black planets. Towne builds a world, connected through metallic cracks running the length of the print, that is equal parts fantastical and archival. 

Srijon Chowdhury’s mythic paintings can be read many ways-- as portals, mirrors, gardens, or headstones. His paintings are densely floral in a way that almost feels Rococo, yet the shades of cyan, moss-green, and deep aubergine mimic a garden in an off-season. Chowdhury’s somber handling of nature acts as an invitation to recognize our own changing, fading environment. 

The three prints by Arielle Bobb-Willis mutate traditional portraiture photography. This suite of images almost appears to have been captured amidst a secret being shared or in the moment a performance slows down. In either scenario, the viewer is implicated as an audience member. With New Jersey and New Jersey 02, her subjects are physically woven together through embrace, obscuring the faces of the sitters and leaving us to consider the strange relationship between intimacy, surveillance, and collectivity. 

Contrasting the anonymity of Bobb-Willis’ portraits, Susie J. Lee’s video work feels remarkably familiar. The video portraits silently depict the people who live, work, and create in the nearby community of the Vanport Building Like much of Lee’s site-specific portraiture work, we encounter the individuals who enliven the site and without which the building would exist only as a place. Eventually looping back to the beginning, the multi-hour video simultaneously introduces us to new faces and reminds us that we’ve known these individuals the whole time.  

Beyond the works named here, there are a myriad of pieces that further explore concepts of time, bodily autonomy, belonging, and stillness. This collection is presented in waiting areas, administrative spaces, classrooms, and passageways. The artworks’ placement enlivens the heavily trafficked areas of this multipurpose building. The quotidian experience of waiting for a recurring appointment or traversing from floor to floor is accented by a constellation of artwork that thoughtfully considers its viewers. The Vanport Building collection interferes with our relationship to immediacy--providing, and maybe requiring, examination of art objects that change as we do. While the degree of separation between installation and public engagement is unclear, the relevancy of this collection only grows as we anticipate a return