Policing Justice - exhibition program, PICA 2024

February 23 – May 19, 2024

Portland, OR

Curators: Nina Amstutz and Cleo Davis

Consulting Curator / Producer: Kristan Kennedy

Programs Manager / Exhibition Design: Erté deGarces

Technical Director: Molly Gardner

Curatorial / Production Assistant: Liz “L” Quezada

Graphic Design: Nia Musiba and Jakob Dawahare

Marketing and Communications: Leslie Vigeant

Curatorial Intern: Mithila Tambe

Prepators / Technical Staff

Brit Abuya

Bill Boese

Rory Breshears

John Foster Cartwright

Beckey Chapman

Alan Cline

Ali Gradischer

Allison Knight-Blaine

Mat Larimer

Molly Mattern

Teddy Overalls

Irene Ramirez

Freddie Wyss

PICA Staff

Jakob Dawahare

Erté deGarces

Erin Boberg Doughton

Arminda Gandara

Molly Gardner

Jeff Hu

Kristan Kennedy

Samantha Ollstein

Van Pham

Liz “L” Quezada

Reuben Roqueñi

Ashley Schmidt

Leslie Vigeant

Many thanks to Roya Amirsoleymani and Victoria Frey

PICA Board

Lynne Bredfeldt Haider

Courtney Dailey

Andrew Dickson

Phoebe Ebright

bart fitzgerald

Allie Furlotti

Emily Fusaro

Shir Grisanti

Peter Gronguist

Shelly Kapoor

Shawna Lipton

Andre Middleton

Cristi Miles

Kevin Washington

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Land Acknowledgment

PICA acknowledges that Portland is on the traditional homelands of the Multnomah, Oregon City Tumwater, Watlala, Wasco, Kathlamet, Cowlitz, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other Indigenous peoples both recorded and unrecorded. People from these lands were relocated to the Grand Ronde Reservation under the Kalapuya etc., 1855 ratified treaty (also known as the Willamette Valley Treaty) and are now part of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde. The Grand Ronde people maintain a connection to their ancestral homelands and continue their traditional cultural practices. Our region’s Indigenous community now includes people from over 380 Tribes, both local and distant. PICA respectfully offers this acknowledgment as a small step on a path towards recognition and repair, with the understanding that acknowledgment is not a substitute for action. To learn more about land acknowledgments, visit usdac.us.

CURATORIAL STATEMENT FROM NINA AMSTUTZ AND CLEO DAVIS

Policing Justice is an art exhibition about Portland and for Portland. Prompted by the extended racial justice demonstrations in 2020—which lasted longer in Portland than in any other city in the United States of America and were met with 6000+ documented instances of police use of force—the exhibition examines police violence in our city and its relationship to longer local and national histories of oppression. While the Portland Police Bureau’s (PPB) actions in 2020 were unprecedented in scale, our exhibition argues that they were not exceptional in kind. The projects on display document how violent and racialized policing was founded in Oregon’s early history as a settler-colonial state and continues to impact our most vulnerable communities today. The systemic problems embedded in our local culture of policing came to a head in 2014 when the US Department of Justice settled a lawsuit against the PPB for its excessive use of force against people with mental illness. The limitations of subsequent reform measures were put on full display in the PPB’s response to civilians exercising their constitutional right to freedom of speech and assembly in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. The intention of the exhibition, however, is not to re-litigate the events of 2020. Rather, it is to create a space to continue the conversation surrounding police accountability, to center the perspectives of those most directly impacted by police violence, and to think beyond what current policy makers are able to imagine. As a reactionary politics has forestalled political change in the criminal legal system in Portland and beyond, art offers an opportunity to reckon with our situated histories and imagine futures that have long been deemed out of reach.

Policing Justice was conceived as a collaboration on multiple fronts. Curatorially, the project evolved through a dialogue between Nina Amstutz, who grew up in Canada, and Cleo Davis, a native Portlander. For Amstutz, an art historian and curator who teaches at the University of Oregon, the project stemmed from a desire to understand the historical roots of the events of 2020 and to connect more deeply to the city that is now her home. For Davis, a social construct artist, designer, researcher, and community member, that history is his own. He brings personal experiences of race-based housing discrimination to this project, offering a unique lens through which to explore Portland’s complex history. His creative contributions merge with his commitment to empowering Portland’s Black communities and highlighting the role of policing and policy in shaping the urban landscape. Institutionally, the project is a collaboration with PICA, an organization committed to driving conversations surrounding the most challenging contemporary issues through uncensored creative expression.

The exhibition itself was built collaboratively with the participating artists. A variety of local artists and organizations were commissioned to create installations that represent diverse voices and lived experiences, and that emphasize archival research and direct action. These groups and individuals are all committed educators, who use their practice to lift up their communities and give voice to Portland’s most vulnerable citizens. Each project lead was given the freedom to choose their own collaborators from their network of artists, organizers, and impacted community members, with a general prompt: explore Portland’s history of policing in relation to racial, environmental, spatial, or juvenile justice. These are broad themes with complex histories that cannot be disentangled from each other. In turn, the projects do not claim to offer a comprehensive account of each issue, nor do they promote a single point of view. What holds the different projects together is the conviction that the PPB’s responses to the 2020 protests were not isolated events but rather representative of a harmful model of policing rooted in systemic racism that must be urgently challenged. As a collective, these projects create a space to imagine a variety of futures for public safety that are inclusive and community driven.

Complementing these local commissions, we worked with the British research organization Forensic Architecture over the past three years as they developed a series of investigations into the PPB’s conduct during the 2020 protests and beyond. The results of their research are on display for the first time in a multi-media installation. To situate Portland’s history of policing within a national context, the exhibition also includes a selection of loans by nationally recognized artists who have demonstrated a commitment to civil rights and police accountability. Together with an active schedule of public programming, the work in Policing Justice spans traditional media, video, installation, and social practice art.

Policing Justice seeks to thoughtfully present the uncomfortable realities that exist beyond the gallery walls by offering a space for reflection without the threat of violence, and from the perspective of those most directly impacted, including but not limited to Black and BIPOC communities, activists and organizers, the unhoused, and formerly incarcerated individuals. No work in this exhibition has been censored in any way and, respectively, the curatorial team does not seek to regulate your experiences as viewers.

POLICING JUSTICE: PIVOTING FROM PROTEST TO SELFDETERMINATION BY MAC SMIFF

“It seems really trite to say, ‘If you don’t study history, you’re doomed to repeat it,’ but nothing illustrates that more than the history of policing.” ~Chenjerai Kumanyika

Over the last 186 years, since Boston instituted America’s first public police force at the behest of merchants, policing in the United States has been riddled with trouble. When viewed as a workforce created and dedicated to marginalizing people—immigrants, Black and brown people, Indigenous Americans, those with disabilities or those who suffer from mental illness, queer folks, women, the indigent and unhoused, labor unions and organizers—through selective criminalization and violence with impunity, one can argue that police, through all of their evolutions, have remained consistent and effective. But when viewed as a solution to crime, police and the larger prison industrial complex repeatedly fail to succeed by any measurable standard. In fact, since 2019, police funding in the US has increased significantly, yet solve rates for violent crimes are down from 46% to 37%1, while property crime solve rates plummeted from 17% to a measly 12%. From a more urgent perspective, the number of people killed by police has increased2 every year since 20193.

In Portland, Oregon, amidst a global pandemic, tensions over police violence famously reached fever pitch in the late Spring of 2020. The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery at the hands of police and white supremacists fueled provocative displays of outrage across the country, but the heavy-handed reaction of the Portland Police Bureau, in particular—already out of compliance with a Department of Justice settlement over police violence—set the stage for over 100 consecutive days of public demonstration in which protesters demanded police accountability, a reduction in police funding, and an investment in community.

In the aftermath of Portland’s 2020 protests, many art exhibits have attempted to examine the fracas without delving into the delicate politics surrounding the moment. Indeed, the months people spent in the streets, masked through a pandemic and emboldened by a sense of righteousness to publicly cause trouble in furtherance of a revolution, made for beautiful, heavy, and vibrant works of art. Montages of tear gas, graffiti, flaming dumpsters, and leaf blowers serve as romantic imagery of the retrospectively short-lived era. Images of pained faces screaming at police, masked agitators climbing fences outside of the Courthouse, freeway takeovers, and police tensely surveying the crowds allow us to feel the tension of the times. One could argue that while it’s easy to get caught up in the

revelry and pontificate about the sort of collective trauma that would necessitate that sort of public response, few exhibits have truly dug into the many specific—and often ongoing—reasons that Portlanders are so fed up with the police; namely, the actions and impacts of the police themselves.

Policing Justice, a multi-disciplinary art exhibition and interactive discussion, which runs from February 23 to May 19, 2024 at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) with related programming at the Clinton Street Theater, aims to express the need to uproot our patently destructive systems of policing and mass incarceration in favor of programs and solutions that collectively aim to eliminate the drivers of violence and restore existing communities through a lens informed by justice—rather than profit—here in Portland and beyond.

For so many of us here in Portland and beyond, the 2020 protests were but a moment in a growing evolution of our understanding of and resistance to the constant carceral violence under which we live. The protests were merely a reaction to a sort of tyranny that Americans largely recognized; but truly, what was important was the resistance. While the media—large and small—inundated us with images of marches, arrests, beatings, and tear gas, the resistance moved fervently behind the scenes to feed the hungry, house the unhoused, protect one another, compile information, plant food, and create spaces and systems outside of the reach of the police. These concepts, crucial to self-determination and the ability to imagine a world beyond policing, in praxis, were what truly mattered in bringing forward a lasting revolution.

With this understanding that the protests were not the point, Policing Justice looks to (1) explore Portland’s history of policing in relation to racial, environmental, spatial, and juvenile justice; (2) give voice to the lived experiences of those most directly impacted by police misconduct and the criminal injustice system; and (3) create space to imagine a multitude of possible futures for public safety that are intentionally inclusive and driven by community. This is accomplished by commissioning the multi-faceted works of local artists, the research of activist organizations, and the experience of local community leaders and then giving them the freedom to imagine and create.

An immersive experience, Policing Justice boasts a number of installations at PICA that challenge the narratives of what’s possible. The exhibits go beyond reiterating what is and what has been, leaping forward to explore what can be if we accept the challenges of change. Beyond policing as a simple discipline, the artists and research teams take on urban planning, the school to prison pipeline, gentrification, and settler violence, frequently delving further to explore the concepts of spacial, juvenile, and environmental justice and what that could look like in the near and far futures.

What does public safety look like in a world where housing is guaranteed? Or in a world where Black and brown children are assisted instead of criminalized? In a world where the land is respected and the water is clean? When we start to peel away the layers of limitations that we’ve placed on ourselves in the name of capitalist gain, we can begin to glimpse a future where carceral solutions become less and less necessary.

So much more than an art exhibit, Policing Justice looks to clearly connect policing’s troubled past to its troubled present, unveiling how policing is not broken, but rather is working as designed: for a select few. In addition, the multi-faceted exhibit looks toward the future, at tangible solutions for improving public safety and equity for all.

1 Asher, Jeff. “Police Departments Nationwide Are Struggling to Solve Crimes.” New York Times, December 5, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/opinion/police-crime-data.html

2 Korhonen, Veera. “Number of people killed by police in the United States from 2013 to 2024.” Statista, January 29, 2024, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1362796/number-people-killedpolice-us

3 Yancey-Bragg, N’dea. “2023 was the deadliest year for killings by police in the US. Experts say this is why.” USA TODAY, January 17, 2024, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/ nation/2024/01/17/police-killings-record-2023/72174081007

LIST OF WORKS AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Black Aesthetic Studio

BAS RUT 3000

The Design Collaborative known as the Black Aesthetic Studio (BAS)—formed by artist team Cleo Davis and Kayin Talton Davis, with Robert Clarke, Assistant Professor of Architecture at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and Kimberly Moreland, President of the Oregon Black Pioneers—explores the historical and contemporary practices of controlling and regulating the movement and presence of Black individuals within urban environments and public space. Focusing on racist urban planning in Portland’s historically Black neighborhoods, the installation reconsiders police-enforced policies such as redlining, nuisance ordinances, and urban “renewal” from an Afrofuturistic perspective, set in the year 3000 CE.

BAS RUT 3000 reveals ways in which past, present, and future policing practices are imprinted on African Americans’ psyche and aesthetic, as well as the refusal of African Americans to be contained by such practices. The installation consists of three temporal gateways created in the Black aesthetic of Afro-Futurism (Afro-Atomic style). Forged through shipping containers, these architectural time capsules draw viewers into Black spaces of different time periods, illuminating how African Americans see their own histories, spaces, environments, and futures—those which have been policed under white authorship from the founding of our nation. These constructed visions critique Oregon’s racist history and policies, allowing viewers to understand how migration and oppression have informed Black identity and its expressions, and continue to do so today. Viewed through a futurist lens of 3000 CE, they also allow us to envision the potential for transformative change in the ways we navigate and inhabit urban environments.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to Kris Young and Jeremiah McCoy, of Elemental, for meeting our tough timeline to create this innovative Afro-Futurism project. We are grateful to Paul West Sr, Paul West, Jr. Dajuan West, and Sylvester Staples for your invaluable assistance moving the project forward. Thank you, Corey Davis, of Cookie-Cutter LLC, for bringing together the fabrication team that went the distance to complete the project. Special thanks go to Green Anchors for not only the use of your space but the use of your heavy equipment. We are honored to work with artist and designer Rahsaan S. Muhammad. Final acknowledgement to PICA for hosting BAS’s first exhibition. The Black Aesthetic Studio team, Robert Clarke, Cleo Davis, Kayin Talton Davis, and Kimberly Stowers Moreland are grateful for all the time, skills, and talent needed to bring this project’s vision and design to fruition.

Don’t Shoot Portland

The Center of Injustice 2024

Don’t Shoot Portland, a local arts and education organization dedicated to promoting civil rights through direct advocacy, considers the 2020 protests in Portland against the city’s entangled history of police violence and white supremacy. Their mixed media installation, created in collaboration with Media Pollution, presents historic evidence of police violence and political retaliation against local Black activist communities in Portland. Through intensive archival research and by centering first-hand lived experiences, their work bridges past and present, documenting the ways in which racialized policing has evolved—and persists in our city throughout the past century.

The installation tells the story of the Ku Klux Klan’s close ties with the Portland police and city government in the 1920s; it recounts cases of police intimidation and attacks on local Black businesses in the 1980s; and it offers individual testimonies and resistance footage from activists today.

In the aftermath of 2020 and the unprecedented scale of the PPB’s violence against citizens exercising their first amendment rights, Don’t Shoot Portland has played a leading role in the legal fight for police accountability. The organization published a report on riot control agents, which drew the police violence in Portland to the attention of global agencies such as Physicians for Human Rights and Forensic Architecture. In November 2022, Don’t Shoot Portland’s lawsuit against the City of Portland ended in a settlement, requiring the PPB to follow all City and State policies and laws that restrict how and when weapons can be used in and against crowds, as well as to decommission all less-lethal crowd control munitions, such as pepper spray, flash bang rubber ball devices, and FN303 rifles.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Don’t Shoot Portland would like to express our deepest gratitude to our close supporters, donors, and volunteers. Without your continued solidarity, we would not be able to sustain our community programming.

We’d like to thank PNCA for being our artistic collaborators in protest for nearly ten years, and making so much of our art programming come to life. We’d like to thank our legal advocates, civil rights attorneys (Ashlee Albies, Jesse Merrithew, Franz Bruggemeier, Juan Chavez, Viktoria Lo, Oregon Justice Resource Center, National Lawyers Guild), and the community at large for their commitment to social change and dedication to dismantling racist and violent legislation.

Thank you to PICA, and Forensic Architecture for being important collaborators in this defining work. We are forever grateful and indebted to Portland’s communities of activists, street action medics, caretakers, and upholders of mutual aid services that have made the most vulnerable in our city seen and heard.

Forensic Architecture

From Toxic Air to Toxic Language

2023-24

Over the last three years, the British research agency Forensic Architecture (FA) has undertaken a constellation of investigative research projects focused on police misconduct during, and in the aftermath of, the 2020 protests in Portland. Building on their previous investigations into the use of chemical weapons by law enforcement agencies around the world, FA analyzed the PPB’s excessive use of tear gas against demonstrators in downtown Portland on June 2, 2020, known as “Tear Gas Tuesday,” focusing not only on the PPB’s violation of its own policies but also on the public health and environmental impacts of exposure to CS gas.

A second investigation revisits the 2022 murder of June Knightly by a far-right extremist. The investigation brings together the situated perspectives of those closest to the tragedy, including the surviving victims, witnesses, and the individual responsible for halting the attack. Through exclusive analysis of videos of the scene, the work reveals new findings about the PPB’s conduct that night, and their distortion of the event in its immediate aftermath, as well as providing the most detailed account to date of the moments leading up to June’s death.

Additional research—from munitions fired during the 2020 protests to analysis of the PPB’s own “use of force” reports from the same period—connects the two films, from the toxic air which suffocates our right to protest, to the toxic language which gives oxygen to murderous vigilantism.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The whole team at Forensic Architecture is grateful for the invitation to contribute to the struggle against racist and violent policing in Portland and across the US, and to act through our particular techniques in support of local movements for racial justice, antifascism, and police accountability. We’re grateful to Nina and Cleo for their attentive stewardship of this exhibition, to Don’t Shoot PDX for their thoughtful and caring guidance, to ACLU Oregon for the wealth of background information and the invitation to contribute to legal avenues, and to everybody—researcher, activist, citizen— who has shared their time and insight in support of our work. Finally, we’re immensely grateful to Erté and the whole team at PICA, who set a high bar for thoughtful, creative, and patient production.

Alfredo Jaar

06.01.2020 18.39

2022

Alfredo Jaar’s experiential video installation viscerally captures the racial justice protests of June 1, 2020 in Washington, DC’s Lafayette Square—not far from the White House—just six days after George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Coupled with industrial strength fans, the video recreates the sensations of being there in three acts. Drawing on approximately three hours of video footage from witnesses, activists, and journalists, the installation situates the viewer amidst the peaceful demonstration, then into the chaos of the dispersing crowd as tear-gas, stun grenades, and rubber bullets were fired at protesters, and finally under National Guard helicopters as they illegally bear down on the scene. The footage documents

measures taken by then-President Donald Trump to clear the area for a photo-op in front of St. John’s Church holding up a Bible, but the specific context of the event is left implicit. Of the significance of the footage Jaar explains, “When, starting at 6:39pm, authorities set off a series of explosions in the middle of the crowd in Lafayette Square, I thought about my own experience in Pinochet’s Chile. A few hours later, I watched with horror the arrival of the helicopters. That is when I realized that I was witnessing fascism. Fascism had arrived in the USA.” For Jaar, the installation embodies the abuses of power at the hands of the government, abuses that blur the lines between our democracy and a police state—but it also speaks to the power of resistance.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Alfredo Jaar would like to thank Daqi Fang and Masahito Ono, Associated Press (New York), Ruptly GMBH, Jay Jay Thakar, Ravi Rajan, Tommy Voeten, Emmett Palaima, Lyndon Barrois Sr, Steve Cossman, Ajay Kapur, Mark Ritner, and Mary Sabbatino.

This work is dedicated to Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Hank Willis Thomas, Tony Cokes, Marc Lamont Hill, Fred Moten, Orchestra Baobab, Samuel Yirga, Emahoy Tsegue-Maryam Guebrou, Nicolas Jaar, and Evelyne Meynard.

Sandy Rodriguez

Tear Gas Map of the United States of America in 2020

2020-2023

Tear Gas- Day No. 26, Day No. 57, Day No. 58 2024

Calavera Copter

2018

Rooted in history, research, materiality, and place, Chicana artist Sandy Rodriguez creates anticolonial maps that look back to pre-Columbian cartography. Rather than telling the story of imperial conquests, they serve as testimonies of resistance to human rights concerns today. Rodriguez’s Tear Gas Map of the United States of America in 2020 documents 100 cities in which racial justice demonstrators were gassed amid the COVID-19 respiratory pandemic, zooming in on a handful of the most powerful scenes of protest that circulated in the media. Three additional images capture egregious moments during Portland’s marches against

police brutality, in which police indiscriminately declared a riot and barraged peaceful protesters with tear gas.

Rodriguez began making tear gas paintings in 2014 during the Ferguson unrest in the wake of the police shooting of Michael Brown, at which time there was widespread media coverage of the gassing of protesters. Rodriguez sought to draw attention to the paradox of local governments allowing CS gas to be used on civilians as a crowd control mechanism when the Geneva Protocol has prohibited the use of chemical weapons in international armed conflicts since 1925.

Rodriguez creates her own organic pigments out of plants and minerals specific to the regions and contexts she studies to amplify her subjects; here she incorporates carcinogenic pigments to evoke the poisonous fumes represented in her paintings. Towering over these scenes of resistance is one of Rodriguez’s large format copter mobiles, a motif she has been playing with since 2000 that speaks to the panoptic gaze of the modern surveillance state.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Joshua Tree Highland Artist Residency for providing the space to finish the works for the exhibition; Fine Art Solutions for fabricating the Calavera Copter; Efrain Danza for making the sacred amate paper; and Joshua Gomez for your support in the studio.

Master Artist Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr. and Blue

Mapping the Pipeline 2024

Master Artist Michael

Bernard Stevenson Jr. and Blue’s installation is a multi-media collaboration with a sculptural project supported by Mariano Dijorio and M. Lawrence, media and interviews by Queaz Otti, Armon Poostpasand, and Buddy Terry of the Tin Can Phone podcast, and a statistical project in collaboration with Lily Copenagle and Adrien Allorant. The installation builds on Stevenson’s ongoing creative collaboration with young people of Albina neighborhood schools, in addition to Stevenson and Blue’s collaborative projects with folks who have been policed and/or incarcerated. Their socially engaged work seeks to interrupt the school-to-prison pipeline documented in their installation, which specifically speaks to the impacts of policing on youth in Portland.

Six tabletop map sections represent critical sites in Portland that elucidate the connection between community policing, gang patrols, the presence of police in and around schools, and local prison populations, including Albina area schools, the Cottonwood School of Civics and Science—which is adjacent to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Office Homeland Security, and the US Department Of Homeland Security—and Columbia River Correctional Institution in NE Portland. The last table examines the specific losses of Armon Poostpasand and Derrick Clark, both Washington county residents whom our systems failed to support as youths and guide toward stable integration with society as young adults. Collectively, these tables document the situated history of a national phenomenon that perpetuates inequality and splinters families, the criminalization of youth in schools.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Master Artist Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr.

I want to thank Intisar Abioto and Mack McFarland who are the reason I was curated into this show; Nina Amstutz for doing the critically important work of navigating this context as a person of a particular positionality; Blue and Mariano Di Yorio for ensuring the physical work made it into the room; Buddy Terry for their diligent work in managing the Tin Can Phone Archive; Queaz Otti and Katie Rose Caalaman for their enthusiasm in this work; Lily Copenagle and Adrien Allorant for their diligent statistical wizardry. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary, Harriet Tubman Middle, and Jefferson High School communities for enduring the challenge of educating in the 21st century. Thanks to the folks at Vanport Mosaic, PICA, We Rise Media, BORA, Portland State University, and Reed College; to my parents Nancy and Michael Stevenson for their unwavering support; Kent Ford for being my biggest fan; and Kelly Lynn Lunde for helping me develop compassion and grace.

Blue

I would like to express my special thanks to Master Artist Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr. for their dedication to social justice initiatives, humans dealing with a post-carceral context, and the youth of Portland. They have a collaborative spirit that amplifies the voices of others and they lend their platform freely. I would also like to recognize The Insight Alliance, Open Hearts Open Minds, and the Open Road for their support and love. These organizations welcome people back to Portland and create a foundation of friendship, understanding and acknowledgement of people’s lived experience. Last, PICA has been a steadfast supporter of criminal justice reform and helps art and artists to transcend the machine of government and oppressive systems and for this, I am eternally grateful to you. Who welcomes people into their spaces can have a profound effect on the world—oftentimes more than we can imagine.

Carrie Mae Weems

Painting the Town #1 & #4 2021

Seat, or Stand and Speak 2021

Carrie Mae Weems’s work has returned to the theme of policing and racial violence at many points in her career. In her Painting the Town series (2021), what at first glance look like abstract colorfield paintings are in fact documentary photographs of storefronts boarded up during the 2020 demonstrations in downtown Portland, Oregon, which is Weems’ hometown. The broad strokes of color that cover the plywood barriers were applied by local authorities or business owners to remove protest graffiti, speaking to the ongoing erasure of Black voices even amidst the largest racial justice protests since the civil rights movement.

These abstract photographs have their origin in, and give visual testimony to, a particular time and place. Simultaneously, their quiet and timeless aesthetic encourages a variety of memories and associations that bridge the present with the past, including the less visible manifestations of racial injustice in American cities. Co-curator Cleo Davis sees echoes in these works of the blight that characterized Albina in the 1980s, where decades of disinvestment and discriminatory housing policies left a once thriving Black neighborhood boarded up, crime-ridden, and impoverished.

Seat, or Stand and Speak, a sculpture created in the wake of the George Floyd protests, serves as an invitation for viewers to both reflect on and speak out against the injustices their communities face. In 2024, the work serves as a re-invitation to voice these concerns, and in Portland, Oregon, a reminder that the fight for police accountability is ongoing and requires us to continue to speak up and demand more of our elected officials.

CURATORIAL ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to the entire team at PICA for all the work they have done to make this show happen. A special thank you goes to Kristan Kennedy for taking a chance on a guest-curated project and bringing her years of experience and passion to the project. Special thanks, as well, to Erté deGarces for his beautiful exhibition design and exceptional organization as project manager. As the show progressed, Rueben Roqueñi, Leslie Vigeant, Jakob Dawahare, L Quezada, Samantha Ollstein, Arminda Gandara, and Molly Gardner have all offered their support and expertise in bringing this project to life.

Beyond PICA’s immediate walls, we want to give a special shoutout to Mack McFarland, who played an instrumental role in getting this project off the ground; Mac Smiff for contributing his thoughtful writing and input, and offering outreach support and local expertise; Laney Ellisor for her work on programming and her expertise on local issues surrounding the criminal legal system; Nia Musiba for bringing their exceptional design sensibility to the project and getting the look of the show just right; Killeen Hanson for her grant writing assistance; Tristin Aaron for her help with communication; Margaryta Golovchenko and JoAnna Reyes for their research support; and Sarah Miles for opening up her heart and home to talk about her immeasurable loss.

We would like to thank all the participating artists for putting their trust in us to create a space in which their diverse perspectives and stories can be in conversation. We are humbled by the vision, passion, and integrity that they brought to their projects and are grateful for the curatorial feedback they offered along the way.

Nina would like to thank her husband David, not only as partner in life and co-parent to two beautiful beasts, Artemis and Petunia, but also for his unfaltering support for this exhibition from the

very beginning. His two decades of experience and advocacy in criminal justice reform inspired me to pursue this project and invariably shaped its evolution.

Cleo would like to begin by expressing my heartfelt gratitude to the Creator. Without our Eloah, none of this would have been possible. I want to extend my warmest thanks to my beloved wife, Kayin Talton Davis, who is not only my soulmate but also my invaluable partner in this journey. Your unwavering support and the brilliant conception of visions have been my driving force. To my parents, Cleo Davis Sr. and Ora B. Harden (may her memory live forever), I am forever indebted for your enduring belief in me and your steadfast support. A heartfelt shoutout to two of my most cherished people in the world, my Sister and Brotherin-law Tastonga Davis and Kappaya Goodson. Your patience and understanding of the creative process have been a tremendous source of strength for me. I extend my thanks and love to the entire Davis family, the Talton family, my children, and nieces for their unwavering support and love.

To my longtime friend and communal elder, Noni Causey, your listening ear and unwavering support meant the world to me. I want to express my gratitude to Winta Yohannes and Brandon Ross for being endless sources of inspiration and motivation. And last but not least, I offer my special thanks to the partners of the Black Aesthetic Studio. Mrs. Kimberly Moreland, your faith, patience, and impeccable sense of order have been invaluable. To Robert Clark, your trust, openness, and visionary outlook have been instrumental in our collective journey. Thank you all for being a part of this incredible endeavor.

PICA would like to thank Nina Amstuz and Cleo Davis for their persistent vision and dedication to this exhibition and the lives and ideas of artists. We would like to thank all the extraordinary crew who came to this production with all of their own passion and skill, especially Erté deGarces and L Quezada, and to the PICA staff for their support of the project over many years, conversations, meetings, heavy conceptual and actual lifts. Thank you to Laney Ellisor, Mick Rose, Master Artist Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr., and Tristin Aaron for their work in contextualizing the exhibition with sensitive and thoughtful programming, engagement efforts and communication. We would like to thank the PICA Board, our patrons, funders and audiences for supporting our work, that of our artists and for their own unique curiosity and the desire to move culture forward through art and inquiry. Special thanks to those who provided early financial ballast to this project, invested early in the ideas, artistic production and important messages of the show, including the ADAA Foundation for their additional support. Without you all this project would not have been possible.

Supporters

PICA thanks the Art Dealers Association of American Foundation (ADAA) and the University of Oregon College of Design’s Tinker Hatfield Award for Innovation for supporting this exhibition.

Media Partner

PICA WOULD LIKE TO THANK

EXHIBITION:

February 23 – May 19, 2024

PICA

GALLERY HOURS:

Thursday & Friday, 12 – 6PM

Saturday & Sunday, 12 – 4 PM

OPENING RECEPTION:

Friday, February 23, 4 – 8PM

Walkthrough 5PM

ARTIST PANEL DISCUSSION:

Saturday, February 24, 4 – 6PM

Moderator: Mac Smiff

Participants: Tai Carpenter, Robert Clarke, Alfredo Jaar, Kimberly Moreland, Sandy Rodriguez, Master Artist Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr., and Robert Trafford

FILM SERIES:

Clinton Street Theater

Thursday, March 7, 7PM

Reimagining Safety (2023)

Short: Is Portland Dying? (2024)

Q&A: Directors Matthew Solomon and Cory Elia

Moderator: Alex Vitale

Thursday, March 21, 7PM

Arresting Power: Resisting Police Violence in Portland, Oregon (2015)

Short: State of Oregon (2017)

Thursday, April 4, 7PM

Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse (2013)

Short: Just a Dog (2016)

Thursday, April 18, 7PM

Do Not Resist (2016)

Short: Conditioned Response (2017)

Time/Date TBD

Betrayal at Attica (2021)

SYMPOSIUM: Policing in Portland: A Community Conversation

This symposium will bring together panels of local community leaders for discussions on the history of police violence and racist policing in Portland, ongoing attempts to hold police accountable and reform policing practices, and burgeoning efforts to radically reimagine public safety in our communities.

Friday, March 8

Shattuck Hall Annex, PSU

Keynote Address: Alex Vitale, Professor of Sociology, Brooklyn College, CUNY

Saturday, March 9

PICA

Panel Discussions: Join us for a full day of panel discussions with local experts, activists, and scholars discussing topics such as police misconduct, police accountability, and reimagining community safety.

WORKSHOP:

March 23, 4 – 8PM

PICA

Artist Power and Practices: Hosted by Don’t Shoot Portland and M. Martinez

Photo, Artist Power and Practices brings together five different creators to facilitate a community conversation around the power artists hold and examine the ethics around creating. The event invites visual storytellers to discuss ethical practices while collaborating and connecting with other Portland creatives.

PODCAST LAUNCH & LISTENING SESSION:

Saturday, April 27, 1 – 3PM

PICA Annex

Fight The Power, Do No Harm: The Story of the Black Cross Healthcare Collective

Join us for an in-person group listening session of the new audio documentary about Black Cross Healthcare Collective (BCHC)—a Portland-based healthcare collective. BCHC held citizen science trials and found a remedy to neutralize pepper spray, which is used as the antidote to chemical weapon exposure in the streets. Produced by Jodi Darby, Honna Veerkamp, and Erin Yanke.

PARTNER PROGRAMS:

Partner programs include guest artist lectures at Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) and with University of Oregon (U of O) Department of Art, Department of the History of Art & Architecture, and Oregon Humanities Center. These lecutres run from February 15–27 at U of O, streaming online, and at PNCA. Visit pica.org/events/ policingjustice to view the full schedule.

PROGRAM SCHEDULE