Tatiana Simonova, The Speaker Revealed, 2022-24, graphite on paper, 44 x 60″. Courtesy of the artist.

Ekphrasis: A PCC Faculty Exhibition

• Exhibition Dates: February 26, 2026 – April 18, 2026
• Gallery hours: Monday – Friday, 8am-4pm.
• Opening Reception: Saturday, February 28, 5:00 – 8:00 p.m.

PROGRAMMING

• CORE cohort, Opportunity Center students Visit: Thursday, February 26 and Friday, February 27.
• Improvisational Theater Student Performances: Wednesday, March 4, 12:00 – 1:00 p.m.
• YES to College Networking Mixer: Tuesday, March 10, 10:00 – 11:00 a.m.
• Ekphrastic Poetry Reading and Closing Reception: Saturday, April 18, 5:00 – 8:00 p.m.

Ekphrasis comes from the Greek words ek (out) and phrásis (speak), literally speaking out. The Poetry Foundation defines an ekphrastic poem as a vivid description of a work of art. But ekphrasis is more than giving voice to the visual, more than mere description. Ekphrasis offers one’s voice in dialogue with another. In Ekphrasis: A PCC Faculty Exhibition, recent art from ˿����Ƶ art faculty and lab techs is positioned in conversation, both with each other and with writing faculty who composed ekphrastic poems about the work.

Brittney Cathey-Adams, Holding Patterns, 2025, digital print, 16 x 20″. Courtesy of the artist.

Writer Lilliane Louvel explains ekphrasis as an encounter between artistic media. Each artist builds a unique vocabulary of colors, textures, lines, shapes, space, and ideas. Each writer develops a voice with particular words, rhythms, sounds, and silences. And an ekphrastic encounter puts those two unique languages in conversation. In this exhibition, both the artists and writers created their work in the context of solitary artistic practices, yet when brought together in the gallery, they become partners on a path to deeper understanding through intersubjectivity. What unfolds when writers and visual artists position their work in relation to each other? What do ideas developed in solitude look like when placed in relation to the ideas of others? How do the thoughts and understandings of others expand our own perceptions?

Rachel Milstein, The Wounds We Live In, 2020, porcelain, encaustic, wax, 14 x 8 x 6″. Courtesy of the artist.

PCC art and writing teachers provide abundant opportunities to explore such intersubjective questions in their classrooms. They engage students in the frightening and exhilarating process of expressing themselves and encountering the self-expression of others. They work hard to create spaces of experimentation that push students to try new techniques, hone their craft, deepen their understanding of historical context, and find the courage to tell their own stories. This work alone is a full-time job.

Yet in order to do this work well, people who teach in the arts also build and nurture their own creative practice. Each teacher’s creative work becomes a vital component of their students’ learning. And many faculty argue that they learn just as much from their students. Every arts educator, whether visual artist, performer, writer or musician, brings a wealth of experience from their own professional practice into the classroom every day. Their knowledge of the sometimes painful, sometimes thrilling process of creation, becomes a model for students embarking on their own paths. Thus this exhibition also proposes the professional work of PCC artists and writers as a catalyst that encourages students to find and honor their own voices. We need all of you (us) together making art now more than ever.

Petra Sairanen, Belly of Hope, 2021, oil and gunpowder on canvas, 56 x 49″. Courtesy of the artist.

About the Artists and Writers:

The exhibition features work by artists Mark Andres, Ben Buswell, Brittney Cathey-Adams, Shelley Chamberlin, Brenden Clenaghen, Tatiana Gebert, Chrys Giffen, Sabina Haque, Ibrahim Harris, Genie Ilmenev, Todd Johnson, Una Kim, Chris Knight, Michael Lazarus, Dede Lucia, Kim Manchester, Mike McGovern, Rachel Milstein, Lauren Moradi, Sam Morgan, Kathi Rick, Zeinab Saab, Petra Sairanen, sandy sampson, Steven Schiewe, Rachel Siegel, Tatiana Simonova, Marie Sivak, Lisa Smith, Mandy Stigant, Melanie Treuhaft, Phyllis Trowbridge, and Charles Washburn, along with poetry by Rachel Attias, Anna Erwert, Caitlin Dwyer, Erin Ergenbright, Jessica Johnson, Karah Kemmerly, Justin Rigamonti, Selene Ross, Veronica Sandoval, Megan Savage, Scott Sutherland, and Vandoren Wheeler.

For full artist bios, please visit the exhibition.

• Exhibition Dates: November 1, 2025 – January 27, 2026 (dates extended)
• Gallery hours: Monday – Friday, 8am-4pm, select Saturdays 12-4pm (11/8, 11/22, 12/6, 12/13, 1/10, 1/17) and by appointment.
• Opening Reception: Saturday, November 1, 1:00 – 4:00 p.m.
• Artist Talk: Thursday, November 13, 12:00 – 1:00 p.m.
• Thinking Machines: Art, Authorship and the Future in the Age of AI panel discussion:�� Saturday, January 17, 12:00 – 1:00 p.m.

In a world where machines become more like humans, and humans become more like machines, what does it mean to be alive? From self-help and romantic chatbots, content generation, productivity boosters, population surveillance and more, artificial intelligence has entangled itself in every corner of life. While AI offers new pathways into the future, it also poses risks to human agency, authorship, privacy, and equity, and accelerates climate change through its growing energy demands.

In Neural-Lithic Harvests, the evolving relationship between humans, nature, and artificial intelligence takes root in a shifting terrain of sculpture, paintings, poetry, and sound. Drawing on metaphors from ecology and agriculture, the exhibition asks: what fruit will we harvest from our relationship with AI and just who is the farmer, and who is being farmed?

Hannah Newman, Machines and People, 2025, mixed media (Photo: Mario Gallucci)

Throughout the exhibition, AI-generated imagery and hand-built sculptures co-exist, probing the tension between human agency and machine creation. Anchoring the exhibition, a soundscape composed from human-written texts loops through the space, narrated by an AI voice that lends its own inflections to the words. Sculptures and paintings incorporate silicon rocks, wires, circuit boards, and surveillance cameras intermingled with organic materials, blurring the boundary between digital and natural, living and non-living, while grounding the work in the material realities of connected technologies.

Hannah Newman, Harvest is Nigh Best, 2025, mixed media sculpture (Photo: Mario Gallucci)

As we chase productivity, optimization, entertainment, and endless progress, Neural Lithic Harvests questions what we are cultivating––and to what end? What unknown harvests await us in the data fields?

This exhibition was made possible by generous support from the Regional Arts and Culture Council.��

All events are free and open to the public.��

About the Artist:

Hannah Newman is an interdisciplinary artist reuniting digital technologies and experiences with their physical, emotional, and material sources. She has exhibited with galleries and artist-run spaces across the U.S. including Oregon Contemporary in Portland OR, SOIL Gallery in Seattle WA, Outback Arthouse in Los Angeles, CA, Her Environment and The Yards Gallery in Chicago, IL and Neon Heater/Real Tinsel in Milwaukee, WI, and has been awarded grants from the Regional Arts and Culture Council and Portland State University. Newman is a co-founder of the artist collective WAVE Contemporary and a former member of Carnation Contemporary. She received a Master of Fine Arts from Oregon College of Art and Craft and a B.S in Ceramics and Fine Arts from Indiana Wesleyan University, and currently lives and works in Portland, OR. Newman believes individuals can create art, but together artists can create culture. She looks for spaces, communities and fellow artists with which to build intentional and inclusive culture.

Hannah Newman, Tree Flowers detail, 2025, mixed media sculpture (Photo: Mario Gallucci)

• Exhibition Dates: September 15 – October 23, 2025
• Gallery hours: Monday – Friday, 8am-4pm, Saturdays by appointment
• First Thursday Performances featuring Wild Strawberries, Francisco Botello, Stars without Make Up and Shana Palmer performing with The Tenses: Thursday, October 2, 4:00 – 8:00 p.m.
• Closing Reception with performances from Music and Sonic Arts students: Thursday, October 23, 5:00 – 8:00 p.m.

Full Circle: The Harmonic Sum of Current and Light,��is an immersive environment of sculpture, sound and light by the artist Shana Palmer. The exhibition foregrounds the importance of interconnection and the impact we have on each other and our world. Circular forms are evoked throughout the gallery, via the multi-channel sound encircling the space, a harmonic sundial and a series of code-drawn radiating spheres that evoke portals or apertures. The work in Full Circle also resonates with the lineage of women who have used voids or tunnels as sculptural language. The artist is informed by Barbara Hepworth, who described holes as a way of liberating mass into connection and Nancy Holt, whose Sun Tunnels frame constellations and serve as intermediaries between human presence and the cosmos.

Shana Palmer, The Sound of the Spheres: Day Notes, 2025, code drawings (Image credit: Shana Palmer).

Throughout this installation, Palmer employs the cosmos as material for poetic storytelling. Inspired by the Pythagorean idea that celestial bodies create music when they move, the artist immerses visitors in a composition written by the sky itself, via a dial that reads the sun’s shifting light and translates that light into data and sound. Many works in the show evoke resonance between the material and the dematerial. Further, the influence of variable light on sounds in the gallery underscores the idea that everything is interconnected.��

Shana Palmer, Venus de Medici hands, cast bronze + stone, 2025. (Photo by Christine Weber).

In Full Circle, Palmer invites embodied engagement, translating the cosmic to an intimate human scale. Touch-capacitive bronze sculptures, modeled after the hands of the Venus de’Medici, activate an evolving sonic drone and audio-reactive visuals when visitors touch them. For the artist, this activation further evokes our interdependence. The art relies on an intimate act of sonic co-creation.��

Installation view of Full Circle, immersive sound installation by Shana Palmer, North View Gallery, 2025. (Photo: Christine Weber).

The works in this exhibition are hybrid gestures, part poetry and part science. They give auditory and visual form to the often hidden relationships, orbits and vibrations in our environment. The gallery becomes a contemplative space rewarding patience with microshifts in color and tone. Full Circle is not a closed circle but an ever-evolving spiral. The artist hopes that in our polarized world, this opportunity to touch, feel, see and listen becomes an invitation to hold each other in solidarity. In Palmer’s work, the void is not empty, but a space filled with light and potential.��

This exhibition was made possible by generous support from the Regional Arts and Culture Council.��

Additionally, this work could not have been realized without the equipment, knowledge, ingenuity and collaborative community of the Music and Sonic Arts Program at PCC. This visionary program is marked for closure in the next two years, making this exhibition an important opportunity to better understand the powerful experimentation and collaborations between staff, faculty and students that the program fosters.��

All events are free and open to the public.��

About the Artist:

Shana Palmer is a multidisciplinary artist whose work bridges sculpture, sound, and interactive media to create immersive environments that invite participation and attunement. Drawing from her background in painting, performance, and sonic arts, she combines hand-built forms with creative coding, analog video, and music synthesis to explore cycles of connection and repair.

Her installations often incorporate tactile and responsive elements, such as touch-capacitive or light-reactive sensors that transform light and sound into generative visuals shaped by the presence and actions of viewers. Spiritualism is central to her process and visual language, rooted in a deep engagement with nature. Through close encounters with plants, rocks, minerals, and bodies of water, she nourishes this connection, and the resulting works take on an animistic quality, presenting the body, materials, and even code as forms of “sacred” terrain.

Palmer’s practice examines how sensory experience can serve as both a site of beauty and a tool for reckoning with personal and collective histories. Her experimentation moves fluidly between collaboration and computational feedback, shifting from analog to digital, from 3D printing to ancient practices like bronze casting. Recent works integrate sculptural objects with sound-responsive systems, transforming spaces into living compositions of light, resonance, and shadow.

Her projects have been presented in regional and international exhibitions, often in partnership with musicians, coders, makerspaces, and craftspeople. She lives and works in Portland, Oregon, where she also supports the Music and Sonic Arts program at ˿����Ƶ.

Recent artwork by ˿����Ƶ Students

• Exhibition locations and dates:

  • Paragon Gallery – May 7 – May 28
  • Helzer Gallery – May 5 – June 7
  • North View Gallery – May 12 – June 7

• Awards reception and conversations with jurors

  • Paragon Gallery – May 28, 5-7 pm
  • Helzer Gallery – May 29, 5-7 pm
  • North View Gallery – June 7, 11-1 pm

The Helzer Gallery, North View Gallery, and Paragon Gallery,�� at ˿����Ƶ are pleased to present our fifth college wide student art show — Art Out Loud: PCC Art Student Exhibition 24/25. This year our guest jurors are Jess Nickel, Sheyam Ghieth and Jamin London Tinsel for the Helzer, Paragon and North View galleries, respectively.�� Students have selected the gallery where their work will show and opening dates and award ceremonies are specific to each participating gallery.

Art Out Loud, ˿����Ƶ’s 5th Annual college-wide art student exhibition features student art made across the PCC District in PCC’s three art galleries, during a time when the arts and humanities are facing unprecedented challenges. The arts at ˿����Ƶ are also experiencing cuts that will inevitably impact the equitable access to art that our students currently have. But PCC students are passionate and resilient. They have spent this past year making art that speaks openly about their struggles, fears, joys and even the beauty that they still find in the world around them. Art Out Loud amplifies the diverse voices of PCC students and honors their commitment to education and their deep engagement with the arts.

Please join us in celebrating the many students who have taken Art classes at PCC this past year and are raising their voices about the things that matter to them.

About the guest jurors

Helzer Gallery | Bio for Jess Nickel

Jess Nickel is an independent curator, writer and arts manager based in Portland, Oregon. She received a BA in Fine Art focusing on painting, and a BA in Literature from the University of Oregon in 2009 and began her career in the arts as an artist. During a year-long artist residency in 2010 at Engage Studios in Galway, Ireland she found her artistic practice in curating, organizing pop-up shows of fellow residents in vacant spaces. A career in arts administration followed, with directorship positions at Disjecta Contemporary Arts Center, Upfor Gallery, Converge 45 and public art collective Site Specific. Nickel founded SATOR projects, a roving exhibition program with the mission to seed arts into fallow spaces in the community through exhibitions, public programs and events. She has organized sixteen exhibitions over the past four years, with more to come! She currently works for Saatchi Art with the art advisory team, and as a coordinator for the Oregon Arts Commission Percent for Public Art program.��

Paragon Gallery | Bio for Sheyam Ghieth

Sheyam Ghieth is a queer Egyptian multimedia art liberator and propagandist, working to connect the dots of our creativity and our liberation. As a writer, designer and illustrator, Sheyam is the author of “عكس الحرام / The Opposite of Haram: A Queer Muslim Manifesto”, co-author and illustrator of “MASK UP, We Need You: Palestinian Solidarity, Covid-19, and the Struggle for Liberation,” “COVID is a LABOR ISSUE” and “FLOOD: Print Propaganda in Practice.” As an artist and graphic designer, their work has been seen on TV shows like Ramy, The Americans, and Orange Is The New Black, and in group shows in Portland, NYC and Rome. They are also known for producing and co-directing the award-winning web series BROTHERS about a group of trans masc friends in Brooklyn. As an organizer, they are a co-founder of Creators for Gaza, a mutual-aid network connecting artists and amplifiers with Palestinian families surviving the genocide.

North View Gallery | Bio for Jamin London Tinsel

Jamin London Tinsel is a studio artist and art educator working in Portland, Oregon. She received her MFA in Ceramics from The University of The Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 2007.�� Jamin’s artistic process is a deep dive into self exploration and memory. She seeks answers, attempting to understand the things bubbling to the surface that haunt, taunt, and trouble her, or make her laugh and spark joy. As memories churn inside and seek release, Jamin creates physical objects to share and relate to the experience of other humans to achieve a sense of resolution, acceptance and integration of these issues. Her current body of work came into being through a summer residency at Oregon College of Art and Craft, a group residency at Red Lodge Clay Center in Red Lodge, Montana, and a two-week stint at Ceramic Kingdom in Berlin, Germany.

About the PCC art galleries

˿����Ƶ is home to three art galleries: the Helzer Gallery, the North View Gallery, and the Paragon Arts Gallery, each located on one of our campus locations in Portland, Oregon. The Art Galleries are dedicated to supporting education and community building through the arts.��

Funding for student awards was generously provided by��HARTS (The Humanities and Arts Initiative)��along with the Art Student Supplies Fund through the I Heart Art project and the Associated Students of ˿����Ƶ (ASPCC).

_{Collage of artwork (left to right, top to bottom): Maria Malankina, “Epy Vision”, 2024, stoneware, oxide wash, 14 × 6 x 4”; Madeline Eason, “Piercings of 2050”, 2024, Graphix watercolor ink on Duralar paper on a lightbox, 14 x 17”; Ali Parsons, “LIBERATION”, 2025, intaglio, hardground, aquatint, etching, embroidery floss, 10 × 10.25”; Sharon Texta, “Quipu #524”, 2024, charcoal, pen, thread on Bristol, 11 × 14”; Alexandra Kalinina, “Strokes on the Horizon”, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 18 × 24”; Bo Young, “Sun Drunk”, 2025, digital photograph, 8 × 11”; Ida Price, “Little Angel”, 2025, Mac10 clay, underglaze, clear glaze, 7.5 x 9 x 5”; Mick Geronimo, “Still Life”, 2025, digital photograph, 10 x 12”.}

DATES OF EVENTS:

• North View Gallery��Exhibition Dates– May 12th��– June 7th
• Paragon Gallery Exhibition Dates:��May 7th��– May 28th
• Helzer Gallery��Exhibition Dates��– May 5th- June 7th

• North View Gallery Award Ceremony and Reception: June 7th, 11-1pm
• North View Gallery Guest Juror: Jamin London Tinsel
• North View Gallery Hours:
  • Monday – Friday, 8 – 4 pm,
  • 1200 SW 49th, Portland, OR, 97219

• ��All events are free and open to the public.

The North View Gallery, the Helzer Gallery and the Paragon Gallery at ˿����Ƶ are pleased to present our fifth college wide student art show — Art Out Loud: PCC Art Student Exhibition 24/25. This year our guest jurors are Jess Nickel, Sheyam Ghieth and Jamin London Tinsel for the Helzer, Paragon and North View galleries, respectively.�� Students have selected the gallery where their work will show and opening dates and award ceremonies are specific to each participating gallery. This means that each of our three art galleries is featuring work made by students on-campus at the Sylvania, Cascade, Rock Creek and Southeast campuses, along with the Hillsboro and Newberg centers and in remote and fully online classes.

Art Out Loud, ˿����Ƶ’s 5th Annual college-wide art student exhibition features student art made across the PCC District in PCC’s three art galleries, during a time when the arts and humanities are facing unprecedented challenges. The arts at ˿����Ƶ are also experiencing cuts that will inevitably impact the equitable access to art that our students currently have. But PCC students are passionate and resilient. They have spent this past year making art that speaks openly about their struggles, fears, joys and even the beauty that they still find in the world around them. Art Out Loud amplifies the diverse voices of PCC students and honors their commitment to education and their deep engagement with the arts.

Please join us in celebrating the many students who have taken Art classes at PCC this past year and are raising their voices about the things that matter to them.

Funding for awards was generously provided by HARTS (The Humanities and Arts Initiative) along with the Art Student Supplies Fund through the I Heart Art project and the Associated Students of ˿����Ƶ (ASPCC).

About the Guest Juror:

Jamin London Tinsel is a studio artist and art educator working in Portland, Oregon. She received her MFA in Ceramics from The University of The Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 2007.�� Jamin’s artistic process is a deep dive into self exploration and memory. She seeks answers, attempting to understand the things bubbling to the surface that haunt, taunt, and trouble her, or make her laugh and spark joy. As memories churn inside and seek release, Jamin creates physical objects to share and relate to the experience of other humans to achieve a sense of resolution, acceptance and integration of these issues. Her current body of work came into being through a summer residency at Oregon College of Art and Craft, a group residency at Red Lodge Clay Center in Red Lodge, Montana, and a two-week stint at Ceramic Kingdom in Berlin, Germany.��

Learn more about her work at .

Jamin London Tinsel, Towel Table, 2024-2025, mixed media. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

• Exhibition Dates: April 5 – May 1, 2025
• Gallery hours: Monday – Friday, 8am-4pm, Saturdays by appointment
• Opening reception: Saturday, April 5, 2:00 – 5:00 p.m.
• Artist Talk: Thursday, May 1, 12:00 – 1:00 p.m.

“Homemades” is a term that some, including Tinsel’s Italian grandmother, use to describe handmade pasta. In this exhibition, Tinsel investigates the making of home, examining influences from the homes in which she grew up and inviting viewers to consider the ways their own experiences of home have shaped their identities. What does it mean to make a home? How are concepts of home shaped by families of origin? In what ways do the things we learn in our childhood homes inform our building of new homes as adults?

After the death of her mother in 2016, Tinsel began investigating concepts of home, first using cave-like forms, inspired by her interest in Buddhist nun Tenzin Palmo, who spent twelve years living in a Himalayan cave. During a residency at Oregon College of Arts and Crafts in 2018, Tinsel built diverse ceramic caves, thinking of them as spaces of comfort and retreat, even escape from the home. Homemades positions those early caves in dialogue with recent mixed media sculptures that engage with the comforts and discomforts of home through a mix of ceramics and found materials, including salvaged wood and reclaimed textiles.��

Jamin London Tinsel, Eighty-Two Tiny Caves, 2019, dimensions variable, ceramic, stains, glazes. Photo: Mario Gallucci.

Tinsel’s mother was schizophrenic and bipolar, and her parents separated before she was born. As a child, her father’s home became a place of stability and constraint, a contrast with the boundaryless home her mother made. One particularly strong memory from visits to her dad’s house is feeling comforted and intimidated by shelves filled with neatly folded stacks of fresh towels. The ceramic and fabric towels found throughout Homemades reference the comfort of her father’s home, yet their precarious positions imbue the comforting forms with instability.

Jamin London Tinsel, Towel Stack, 2024, ceramic, 12” x 24” x 12”. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

Wooden structures on which ceramic towels and houses teeter in the center of the gallery visualize the tensions of Tinsel’s early childhood. The wooden platforms read like broken sawhorses, reminders of the construction process, or for the artist, patriarchal dinner tables and the pedestal upon which she placed experiences with her father growing up. Throughout the exhibition, Tinsel contrasts her father’s home with the home she lived in with her mother.

Jamin London Tinsel, House Table, 2024-25, 5 x 3 x 1.5’, ceramic, reclaimed wood, socks. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

Her mother was an artist, and her home, while chaotic and at times dangerous, was also wildly creative. As a teen, Tinsel felt both loved and suffocated in her mother’s house and was often eager to leave. She remembers escaping out of her bedroom window via a portable fire ladder. The ladders suspended throughout the exhibition evoke these memories. They extend from unseen windows in the gallery ceiling and hang from ceramic home forms that recall Louise Bourgeois’ anthropomorphized Femmes Maison.

Jamin London Tinsel, Mom’s House, 2024, 24 x 5 x 2”, ceramic, stains, glazes, toothpicks. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

Much like Bourgeois, Tinsel’s work is full of forms that both comfort and disturb, reminders that children’s lives can be expanded and/or restricted by the family systems in which they grow. Throughout this exhibition, the artist engages with the ways that families of origin shape us, considering how early childhood knowledge of what home and families look like impacts the homes that adults make. Tinsel’s interest is in the ways that family informs our understanding of ourselves and how we move through the world. While the metaphors Tinsel explores in her work are specific to her own experiences, evidence of prolonged introspection via material and form, they provide space for each of us to consider our own childhood and how our early understandings of home making, inform our engagement with the world around us.

This exhibition was made possible through a generous grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council.

About the Artist:

Jamin London Tinsel is a studio artist and art educator working in Portland, Oregon. She received her MFA in Ceramics from The University of The Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 2007.�� Jamin’s artistic process is a deep dive into self exploration and memory. She seeks answers, attempting to understand the things bubbling to the surface that haunt, taunt, and trouble her, or make her laugh and spark joy. As memories churn inside and seek release, Jamin creates physical objects to share and relate to the experience of other humans to achieve a sense of resolution, acceptance and integration of these issues. Her current body of work came into being through a summer residency at Oregon College of Art and Craft, a group residency at Red Lodge Clay Center in Red Lodge, Montana, and a two-week stint at Ceramic Kingdom in Berlin, Germany.��

Learn more about her work at .

With their freshness and deft brushstrokes, Trowbridge’s paintings can be read as spontaneous images of the places she loves. And they are partly that: she works directly on her canvases, blocking out the main elements of a composition before she proceeds. While paintings usually require more than one session, she does not work from photographs, and edits judicially, so as not to distract from her principal subject. But over the years, many of these landscapes have also become an unintentional document of the dramatic effects of climate change. Extreme winds, heat domes, fire, and drought continue to take their toll on our region’s oldest trees and to challenge the lush green woods of the Pacific Northwest.

Phyllis Trowbridge, Green Forest, Newton Road, 2018, 30″ x 36″, oil on canvas. Photo credit: Jim Lommasson.

These ravages are especially evident in some of the paintings of Sauvie Island’s oaks. Several of these trees are nearly three-hundred years old, and Trowbridge has observed and painted them for more than a decade, creating what could be considered portraits or character studies. Among the most stunning of these works is The Old Oak, 2024. Trowbridge emphasizes the scale of this tree by cropping it, as though it is so big that it cannot be contained within the confines of a canvas. Its age is suggested not only by its size but by the limbs it has shed, and the gnarled trunk and leafless, twisted branches that reach into the background, tangling with clouds in a moody sky that stretches down to the low horizon line.

Phyllis Trowbridge, The Old Oak, 2024, 36″ x 48″, oil on canvas. Photo credit: Phyllis Trowbridge.

Trowbridge is an inspired and knowledgeable gardener (certified as a Master Gardener in Oregon), and like many people she found refuge in her garden during the pandemic, painting her flower borders through the seasons, and filling them with perennials and annuals, which she starts from seed. But here too, the effects of climate change cannot be ignored. She has replaced some of her water-loving shrubs and flowers with more drought-tolerant varieties. Despite her best efforts, hot dry summers can be brutal, as a painting of a camellia with its leaves browned and burned shows us.

Phyllis Trowbridge, July Garden, 2022, 15″ x 24″, oil on canvas. Photo credit: Adrian Stewart.

She is best-known for her plein air painting, but Trowbridge has also made wonderful still lifes, most of them with plants gathered from her garden. These small compositions are as carefully observed and considered as her larger works, and they are filled with life, contradictory as that might sound. She pays as much attention to the gawkiness of a fading pink zinnia or the tremulous delicacy of the season’s last daffodils as she does to her beloved oaks or to the lush green stillness she finds in Forest Park.

Full disclosure: I have known Phyllis for many years, as a dear friend, PCC colleague, and hiking partner. I’ve gone on several of her painting excursions. We’ve covered many miles in the Columbia Gorge, had a grizzly encounter in Montana, and shared some strange offroad adventures in Eastern Oregon. I have never seen Phyllis when she doesn’t have a sketch book at hand. I don’t think there is a single day in her life when she doesn’t draw, make a watercolor, pack her car to go painting, or work in her studio. She is always learning, always open to new ideas. While she has traveled widely, she has chosen to focus on her home terrain, knowing that she will never exhaust its possibilities, and turning a saddened but unflinching eye to its ever-hastening transformations.

Prudence F. Roberts

Tree at My Window

Tree at my window, window tree,
My sash is lowered when night comes on;
But let there never be curtain drawn
Between you and me.

Vague dream head lifted out of the ground,
And thing next most diffuse to cloud,
Not all your light tongues talking aloud
Could be profound.

But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,
And if you have seen me when I slept,
You have seen me when I was taken and swept
And all but lost.

That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather.

Robert Frost, 1928

Phyllis Trowbridge, Green Forest, Newton Road, 2018, 30″ x 36″, oil on canvas. Photo credit: Jim Lommasson.

• Exhibition Dates: February 24 – March 21, 2025
• Gallery hours: Monday – Friday, 8am-4pm, Saturdays by appointment
• Opening reception: Saturday, March 1, 3:00 – 5:00 p.m.
• Cultivating Presence in Nature: plein air painting workshop in conjunction with the WOHESC Conference: Wednesday, March 5, 1:00 – 2:30 p.m. (WORKSHOP FULL)
• Artist Talk: Wednesday, March 12, 2:00 – 3:00 p.m.
• Saturday Hours: March 15, 11:00 – 1:00 p.m.

In the News:

Phyllis Trowbridge has been closely observing the Pacific Northwest landscape for decades, often returning to the same site year after year, tracking subtle and dramatic changes in each environment she selects. Ranging from massive canvases on which dignified oaks tower, to smaller, more intimate views of her garden and the flowers it produces, Trowbridge’s work hints at the value of careful attention and the joys of returning to a site again and again, painting in time.

Art historian Prudence Roberts, who wrote the essay accompanying this exhibition, describes Trowbridge’s work as spontaneous images of places the artist loves. Trowbridge does not work from photographs and instead paints her canvases directly on site, returning to a site multiple times to complete each piece. This approach gives her work an immediacy and intensity, yet, as Roberts notes, it has also meant that Trowbridge’s landscapes have become unintentional records exposing the impacts of climate change.

Phyllis Trowbridge, The Old Oak, 2024, 36″ x 48″, oil on canvas. Photo credit: Adrian Stewart.

Thanks to Trowbridge’s careful attention, the work in this exhibition inadvertently documents the consequences of drought, fire and heat domes on the ancient trees that populate Sauvie Island or the lush, moss-covered greenery of Forest Park and even on the choices Trowbridge makes in the personal landscape of her garden. As Roberts explains, “In her landscapes as in all her paintings, Phyllis Trowbridge shows us what is there. Not what she hopes to see, not an idealized vista, but what she finds when she takes out her oil paints or watercolors and sets up her easel at one of her favorite sites.”

This exhibition features a decade’s worth of Trowbridge’s careful observations in the Pacific Northwest, highlighting the diversity of her plein air painting. It is accompanied by an essay written by art historian, Prudence Roberts.

Phyllis Trowbridge, July Garden, 2022, 15″ x 24″, oil on canvas. Photo credit: Adrian Stewart.

About the artist

Phyllis Trowbridge has been working outdoors, painting and drawing in the landscape year-round for over 35 years. Since moving to Oregon in 1992, she has exhibited her work in local galleries and in numerous invitational and juried shows. She received her MFA from American University in Washington, DC. and since then has taught painting and drawing classes and workshops at a variety of local colleges and programs around the state. She currently teaches at the Rock Creek campus of ˿����Ƶ. Learn more about her work at .

An exhibition immersing viewers in the world of Godhead, an interactive webcomic that proposes an Afrofuturist vision of the United States in the nineteenth century.

• Exhibition Dates: January 6 – February 20, 2025
• Gallery hours: Monday – Friday, 9am-5pm, Saturdays by appointment
• Opening reception: Wednesday, January 8 from 12:00 – 2:00 p.m.
• Artist Talk: Wednesday, February 5 from 2:00 – 3:00 p.m.

Godhead is an ongoing interactive webcomic that Tronci-Bell began in 2017. The narrative centers on a girl genius named Walnut, enslaved in a historical United States where slavery is still legal. The story follows Walnut as she develops an unlikely friendship with a celestial god, the titular Godhead, who lands on earth and begins to interact with inhabitants via a computer monitor. Once Godhead meets Walnut, they start working together to build a flying machine so that Walnut can escape, both the plantation on which she is enslaved and the Earth itself. Through this story, Tronci-Bell seeks to humanize the people who are enslaved in Godhead, inviting readers to relate to them, and reconsider the fairness of many oppressive systems.

Though Godhead is set in the nineteenth century, the webcomic is infused with late 90s/early 2000s Internet aesthetics, drawing on the look of Windows 98 and Windows 7 UI, The Sims, VLC media player and of course, Geocities. Additionally, many of the figures and panels are pixelated and simplified, as if the artist had to work quickly to capture the story as it rushed out. Tronci-Bell is a skilled draftsman, but made aesthetic choices to engage with readers in particular ways. He experiments with navigation tools, letting some pages scroll up and down, some left to right and intermixing dynamic animations that pulse to the beat of music composed by collaborators. Sometimes the reader is invited to play games embedded in the story that glitch and frustrate, while investing them further in the narrative. The relationship between the reader and the webcomic itself is mirrored by Godhead’s interface with Earth, which is controlled by a glitchy operating system whose gravity feels out of whack when too many tabs are open, and Godhead consistently has too many tabs open.

Carmi Tronci-Bell, Godhead staring at a screen, digital drawing, detail from Godhead webcomic, 2017-2024.

Tronci-Bell wrote all of the code for this project and has intentionally designed a format for the epic tale that feels user unfriendly at times. He has explained that this approach is designed to make it slightly uncomfortable or confusing to navigate the story, in part to challenge the ease with which we typically consume online. Tronci-Bell sees Godhead as critical fiction with the potential to expose the dysfunctional and oppressive realities experienced by so many every day. In this sense, Tronci-Bell’s work is aligned with what curator and writer Legacy Russell identifies as artists who employ digital platforms to intentionally glitch systems of oppression and open new possibilities for interaction and new ways of thinking about what it means to be human in our current digital landscape.

Godhead is a fundamentally pro-independent web project that was made as a challenge to the corporatization of the Internet over the past twenty years. In the context of a web whose function it is to sell products (including our attention), Godhead is a form of protest, filling the Internet with functionally useless pages that glitch or exist just for fun. As readers encounter scenes that scroll backwards, read upside down or playfully crash browsers, Godhead asks us to sit with the discomfort of not knowing, the frustration of being unable to fully understand and the joy of experiencing beauty amidst uncertainty.

Carmi Tronci-Bell, Segments from Godhead’s origin story, digital drawings, details from Godhead webcomic, 2017-2024.

About the Artist

Carmi Tronci-Bell is an artist and programmer who has created a variety of webcomix hosted at spicyyeti.com. He is the creator of Spicy Webmasters Discord, designed to encourage young artists to learn how to code and add their own creative voices to the Internet. He has had a solo show at Ori Gallery in Portland, Oregon and in 2023, was an artist in residence at the School of the Visual Arts in New York City.

Apple store mural, Portland, Oregon, 2020. Photograph from the Don’t Shoot Portland archives. (Photo: Mika Martinez)

Graffiti as Resistance

An exhibition exploring graffiti mapping and research in Rio de Janeiro, New Orleans and Portland conducted by Dr. Lorena Nascimento and Cherise Frehner, in dialogue with conservation work by Don’t Shoot Portland.

• Exhibition Dates: November 5 – December 14, 2024
• Gallery hours: Monday – Friday, 9am-5pm, Saturdays by appointment
• Opening reception: Opening reception: Tuesday, November 5 from 12:00 – 2:00 p.m.
• Evening hours: Wednesday, December 4 until 8:00 p.m.
  

  Related Programming:

• Graffiti Mapping Lecture in Portuguese by Dr. Lorena Nascimento and Cherise Frehner: Friday, December 6, 3:30-4:30 p.m.
• Learning about Cultural Landscapes with Street Art: presentations by PCC GIS (Geographic Information Systems) students: Thursday, December 12, 12-1 p.m.
  Alex Clasen –��The Art of Community:Examining the community values expressed through street art in four northeast Portland neighborhoods
  Rebecca Smith – Old Town Beaverton: From Nature to “Nature”
  Libby Martin –����Street Arts and Crafts: An exploration of crafted street art pieces in SE Portland
  Isabel Cary – Street Art of North Portland: A collection and exploration of the prevalent themes and locations of the street art found in this community-driven neighborhood
• Panel Discussion with Teressa Raiford and Tai Carpenter of Don’t Shoot Portland along with Dr. Lorena Nascimento and Cherise Frehner : Saturday, December 14, 1:00 – 2:00 p.m.

Our second fall term exhibition brings together research conducted by Dr. Lorena Nascimento and Cherise Frehner, who have been documenting graffiti and building a framework for others to add to their graffiti archives in Rio de Janeiro, New Orleans and now Portland. Their research will be juxtaposed with the documentation and conservation work conducted by , who in 2021, preserved the panels covering the Apple store in downtown Portland. The Apple store panels began as a mural by Emma Berger and grew to hold many other responses, including calls to action from community members participating in the 2020 uprising and memorials to many of the Black lives that have been lost in Portland.��

Detail of the Apple Store mural, Portland Oregon, 2020. Photograph from the Don’t Shoot Portland archives. (Photo: Mika Martinez)

Throughout history, humans have sought ways to communicate outside official, institutional channels, marking their existence, crying for change or provoking action on public walls around the world. New York City in the 1970s provides one striking example of young artists refusing to be silent and instead writing on walls and subway cars, making their experiences visible to the wider city. Many of these early writers saw their role as reclaiming the streets from corporate advertisers, who spread their messages around the city without any input or agreement from residents. Graffiti amplified their voices and shared them with the entire city.

Mural by Wes Gama in Rio de Janeiro, 2022. (Photo: ).

In the twenty-first century, global city streets have continued to serve as important platforms where some graffiti artists challenge established norms, express the need for social change and make art accessible to a wider audience that may not visit a traditional museum or art gallery. In this exhibition, viewers will be able to view reproductions of the 2020 murals in Downtown Portland and consider that public response to oppression alongside the archives of graffiti from Rio de Janeiro and New Orleans, collected by Nascimento and Frehner. Viewers will also be encouraged to add to a growing archive of Portland graffiti, which will be accessible in the gallery for the duration of the exhibition.

Graffiti has the potential to make the streets a place of reflection and contemplation in ways that corporate advertisements cannot. What can we learn by exploring graffiti made by artists in cities like Rio de Janeiro and juxtaposing their work with graffiti made by local artists and activists in Portland? What can we learn from conservation projects focused on preserving graffiti history? Can looking closely at writing on the streets in Brazil and US cities like New Orleans and Portland help us to consider how the global and the domestic are in constant interaction with each other and how both are deeply shaped by Western powers? What is the role of graffiti in initiating public dialogue at the local and global level, around issues of race and inequality? What is the role of graffiti as a tool for social change?��

In the News:

Mural by B Mike, Morrah See, Miya and Astrid in New Orleans, 2023. (Photo: ).

About the Researchers:

Don’t Shoot Portland is an arts and education organization that promotes social justice and civic participation. Our year-round programming allows us to advocate for community members facing racism and discrimination by providing legal representation and direct advocacy. Since our inception in 2016, Don’t Shoot Portland has hosted its own dialogues, community forums and workshops focusing on history, archiving and social culture. The art proponent of our work acts as a communicative tool to facilitate discussions about race in America while providing educational assets to those most affected by discrimination in public policy.

Photo of Dr. Lorena Nascimento by Ju Hahn. www.juhahn.com

Dr. Lorena Nascimento is an educator working with geospatial technologies, environmental social governance, and data empowerment. She enjoys working on projects about Afrofuturism and data storytelling applied to environmental justice. In recent years, Lorena has been merging her technical skills with artwork through artificial intelligence, data collection, cartography, and design concepts. Graffiti as Resistance is a dream come true, as it combines Black culture, education, and art. Find her at @loribirth

Photo of Cherise Frehner by Ju Hahn. www.juhahn.com

Cherise Frehner is an educator and advisor at ˿����Ƶ. As an artist, she handbuilds pottery at the St. Johns Clay Collective and creates collage art in her home studio. Her fascination with graffiti, especially pieces of revolt and denouncement, began in the 2010 with the Arab Spring uprising. She is endlessly inspired and appreciative of the courage of graffiteiro/es. Find her at @sextafeira.ceramica

Apple Store mural prints on view in the North View Gallery during Graffiti as Resistance, 2025. Photograph by Maria Inocencio.

Apple Store mural prints, along with a projection of Breonna Taylor showing the actual size of the murals on view in the North View Gallery during Graffiti as Resistance, 2025. Photograph by Maria Inocencio.

Gallery view of Graffiti as Resistance exhibition. Title wall painted by Maya Austin. Photograph by Maria Inocencio.