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): Claudia McNellis, “Not a Collage”, 2023, acrylic on paper, 11×14”; Grace Pendergrass, “Succulent”, 2023, glazed ceramic body, 2x 5.5 x 1-1.75”; Mehdi Gassi, “The Thinking”, 2024, screenprint and gold leaves on paper, 12×12”; Adriel Maneely, “Something Witchy”, 2023, alcohol marker, ink, and colored pencil on paper, 18×24.5”; Alicia Seale, “Self Help”, 2024, silkscreen 10×12”; JoJo Ruby, “Salted Butt”, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 24×36”; Fatimah Hobaish, “Vimto”, 2023, ceramic, 5x2x2.5”; Goldie Goldberg, “Lloyd Center”, 2023, digital photography, 14”x20”; Kymberleigh Olivas, “His Smile”, 2024, acrylic paint on canvas board, 16”x20”.}

Making Our Mark

Recent artwork by ˿����Ƶ Students

• Exhibition locations & dates:

  • Paragon Gallery – May 8 – June 1
  • Helzer Gallery – May 13 – June 7
  • North View Gallery – May 20 – June 13

• Awards reception and conversations with jurors

  • Paragon Gallery – May 29, 4-7 pm
  • Helzer Gallery – May 30, 5-7 pm
  • North View Gallery – June 8, 12-2 pm

The ˿����Ƶ Art Galleries are pleased to present our 4th Annual District-Wide Art Student Exhibition — Making Our Mark: PCC Art Student Exhibition 23|24. This year students who took art classes at all four of our college campuses, at our centers and in our remote classrooms were invited to submit their art and participate in our collective exploration of what it means to make your mark.

Students were asked to select a PCC gallery, then each gallery worked with a juror, who chose the student work to be displayed in that gallery. Guest juror Michelle Ross, selected art for the Helzer Gallery, Sarah Farahat selected art for the Paragon Gallery and Taravat Talepasand selected art for the North View Gallery. Each gallery will also host a reception featuring a conversation with their juror and awards announcements.

Making Our Mark provides a platform for reflecting on what it means to make a mark, in graphite, in clay, in oil, in metal, in pixels and all of the other materials PCC students employ. By bringing the varied marks we make into dialogue with each other, Making Our Mark, also considers the impact PCC art students can have through the art they make and the way they show up to support each other. To honor all students who made art in PCC art classes this year, our 4th annual college-wide Art Student Exhibition invites us to celebrate the diversity of voices that have come together to make their marks.

This year you can visit the exhibition in-person at three of our PCC art galleries then join us for one or all of the awards receptions and conversations with our jurors on Wednesday, May 29 at 4pm with Sarah Farahat in the Paragon Gallery, Thursday, May 30 at 5pm with Michelle Ross in the Helzer Gallery and Saturday, June 8 at 12:00 pm with Taravat Talepasand in the North View Gallery.

About the guest jurors

Helzer Gallery | Bio for Michelle Ross

Michelle Ross is an Associate Professor and Interim Department Head of Painting at Willamette University’s Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA). Her formal and abstract painting, as well as digital collages, have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally, including the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston (Boston, Massachusetts), The Art Gym at Marylhurst University (Marylhurst, OR), Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR) and Rome International University (Rome, Italy). Her work resides in several collections, including the Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), Rhode Island School of Design Special Collections (Providence, RI) and the Four Seasons Hotel (Abu Dhabi, UAE), among others. In 2012, Ross was named as a Hallie Ford Fellow in the Visual Arts. She is represented by Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, Oregon.

Paragon Gallery | Bio for Sarah Farahat

Sarah Farahat is a transdisciplinary Egyptian American* cultural worker, abolitionist, and educator dreaming of a more collective future for all beings. She holds a B.A. in Psychology from Occidental College, a B.F.A. in Intermedia Studies from PNCA and an M.F.A. from California College of the Arts. She trained in auricular acupuncture at the historic Lincoln Recovery Center in the Bronx and on the coattails of the Arab “spring” she participated in Beirut’s Homeworkspace program. She teaches art at local colleges, for kids in her community, is a member of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative and co-founder of the SWANA Rose Culture and Community Center. For the past sixteen years Farahat has monitored the body within the socio-political landscape in the US and abroad-intervening with works exploring grief, connection, assimilation, storytelling and engagement. Participating in grassroots struggles inform her work. She finds joy in reading speculative fiction, talking with plants, cooking, and dj-ing.��

Her work lives in protests, archives, public and digital spaces and is in the permanent collections of the Arab American National Museum, JustSeeds Collective, the Charles Voorhies Library, The Palestine Poster Project and The Center for the Study of Political Graphics.�� She is featured in publications including Art Forum, The Oregonian, L’Orient Le Jour, & The Daily Star. As a nomadic child of diaspora, Farahat plants portals through taste, smell, and sound while continually attempting to live in reciprocity with the land wherever she creates home.��

*she grapples with an appropriate way to name her location amidst the ongoing legacies of harm to land and people by colonialist projects

North View Gallery | Bio for

Taravat Talepasand (she/her) is an artist, activist, and educator whose labor-intensive interdisciplinary painting practice questions normative cultural behaviors within contemporary power imbalances. As an Iranian-American woman, Talepasand explores the cultural taboos that reflect on gender apartheid and political authority as her approach to subversive joy.����

Taravat Talepasand has exhibited nationally and internationally and is in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, de Young Museum, Yerba Buena Center of the Arts, Tufts University, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, and the Orange County Museum of Art. Exhibitions included In the Fields of Empty Days: The Intersection of Past and Present in Iranian Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, طراوت | TARAVAT at the Yerba Buena Center of the Arts and Macalester College in Minnesota, 2018 Bay Area Now 8 exhibition at the Yerba Buena Center of the Arts, the 2010 California Biennial, and was the recipient of the 2010 Richard Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship at the San Francisco Art Institute. She is a featured artist in Different Sames: New Perspectives in Contemporary Iranian Art, edited by Hossein Amirsadeghi and the Documentary Pearls on The Ocean Floor by Robert Adanto. Taravat was the Department Chair of Painting at the San Francisco Art Institute and currently lives in Oregon and is the Assistant Professor of Art Practice and Director of Studio MFA at Portland State University Schnitzer School of Art + Art History + Design. Taravat received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2001 and MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2006.

About the PCC art galleries

˿����Ƶ is home to four art galleries: the Helzer Gallery, the North View Gallery, the Paragon Arts Gallery, and the Southeast Gallery, each located on one of our four comprehensive campuses 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).

Clockwise from top to bottom, left to right: Chris Hiebert, “Realm”, 2022, DSLR camera, Photoshop, 16 x 20″; Constance Colter, “Sunburn Fever”, 2022, oil on canvas, 24 x 30″; Nikki Edwards, “Odontophobia”, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 24 x 36″; Grace Dunbar, “Untitled”, 2023, Mokuhanga woodblock print, 8.5 x 6.5″; Kenya Sanabria, “The Entanglement”, 2022, oil on canvas, 18 x 24″; Jasmine Pfafman, “Poseidon”, 2023, ceramic, 9 x 11 x 6″; Sidney Novak, “Dementions”, 2023, acrylic paint and sculpting clay on canvas, 20 x 16″

Where Are We Now – PCC Art Student Exhibition 22/23

• Exhibition dates:��May 18 – June 15, 2023.
• Gallery hours: Monday – Friday, 8am-4pm, Saturdays by appointment
• Evening hours: Thursday, May 18, and Wednesday, May 31 until 7pm

• Awards reception and conversation with juror Yaelle Amir: Saturday, June 10, 12:30-1:30pm

Where Are We Now, ˿����Ƶ’s 3rd Annual college-wide art student exhibition represents the community’s first opportunity to see new student art made across the PCC District in person, in one of ˿����Ƶ’s four art galleries.

The exhibition provides an opportunity for the college and our communities to reflect on what we have experienced and collaborated on this past year, while also considering where and how we want to move together into the future.

Where Are We Now, is an opportunity to check in, take stock and remain present amidst the complexities and challenges we all continue to face. To honor all of the students who have been making art in PCC classes this past year, our 3rd annual college-wide Art Student Exhibition invites us to consider where we are now and where we see ourselves going from here.

About the guest juror

Yaelle S. Amir is a and based in Portland, OR. Her and curatorial projects focus primarily on artists whose practices supplement the initiatives of existing social movements—rendering themes within those struggles in ways that both interrogate and promote these issues to a wider audience. She has curated exhibitions at Artists Space (NY), CUE Art Foundation (NY), The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (NY), Franklin Street Works (CT), HOLDING Contemporary (OR), ISE Cultural Foundation (NY), Marginal Utility (PA), Melanie Flood Projects (OR), Oregon Contemporary (OR) among other institutions. She has held curatorial and research appointments at art institutions including the International Center of Photography (NY), the Museum of Modern Art (NY), Newspace Center for Photography, NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, and the University of Oregon’s Center for Art Research. She presently teaches curatorial studies and professional practices at Lewis & Clark College.

About the PCC art galleries

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

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).

William Holt, “,” Winter 2022, Blendr, Tinkercad, Mozilla Hubs, Mozilla Spoke

The End is Extremely Fucking Nigh was created as a reponse to building an abstract world in Spoke. My idea was to start the piece off in a Garden of Eden type of paradise and make it so that as you move through it you are experiencing the fall of man into sin (which ultimately primes them for the revelation). The beginning room is full of life and activity and after going through a narrow transitional hallway that represents the fall from grace, we are left in a barren wasteland. Even in a paradise, temptation looms and the fall is lurking around the corner – the End is Extremely Fucking Nigh. To view the entire project, click on the link in the title.

Torri Rubi, “,” Fall 2021, digital video, 1:44 minutes

This video collage is a collection of digital collages and self portraits made throughout the course that focus on the themes of gender, race and identity; specifically representation of non-white, non-binary, queer and non- eurocentric beauty standards. To view the entire video, click on the link in the title.

Seth Gordon, “,” Winter 2022, 8-bit pixel art Bitsy game, It’s an exploration game, so it’ll take as long as you’d like to play it.

This is a game made with the program Bitsy. The game explores an apartment building in a dystopian cyberpunk future. The player can choose whether or not to help their neighbors. To play the game click the link in the title. Use WASD or arrow keys to interact.

William Holt, “” Winter 2022, Bitsy, Itch.IO, About 10 minutes to play through

DADDY’S HOME! is an exploration of child abuse through the lens of a point and click browser game. Made in the Bitsy engine, DADDY’S HOME! is meant to be a disorienting visual narrative about a young boy who is searching for his real dad. Modern day music combines with Renaissance painting to create a kind of digital collage experience that distills the whirlwhind of emotions that are ineffable to a child growing up experiencing physical, mental, sexual and/or emotional abuse. To view this browser game, click the link in the title.

Nicholas Prince, “Frogs and Butterflies,” Winter 2022, interactive narrative, 112 x 112 pixels

This is a visual narrative game using a browser game creator for a 4D art class. The prompt was to create some sort of narrative told through interacting with pixels in some way, and I opted to go for a simple approach, using only black and white pixelated characters and fragmenting away the room over the course of the story to show the progression of time.

Lee Holoubek, “,” Winter 2022, digital comic, 14031 x 9921px

This was my final for ART 217, a digital 8 page comic titled “Conehead”. It explores themes of social transition and the loneliness within that. To view a PDF of the entire comic, click the link in the title.

Xiao Zhou, “Cyber Nautilus,” digital drawing, 13 x 20″

This design came from my mindless sketch then I drew it on a PC.

Seanna Von Ins, “Cake House,” Spring 2022, digital drawing with Photoshop, 1517 x 1171 px

This drawing was made for an Axonometric Drawing assignment. For this assignment I used my Wacom Tablet and Adobe Photoshop on my computer. I started out with isometric graph paper and sketched out the outline of the drawing. The goal was to build everything off of the grid. After I was done with the black outline I colored it in, making sure to get all of the shadows.

James Seufert, “The Cosmic Bull of Taurus,” Winter 2022, digital drawing, 8160 x 6720 px

This drawing was created in Clip Studio using standard drawing tools only; pencils and pens. The assignment was wide open for us to create a “Creature Feature” and I chose my mother’s Zodiac sign.

Kandi Selix-Segers, “Anxiety,” Winter 2022, digital image (Procreate), 17.88 x 12.43″

Using the elements and principles of design that I learned in my art class, I created a drawing that was expressing feelings of an intense situation. The problem was expressed within the lines of the drawing and the rough lines were to give an intense feeling. Imperfect, but perfect in the expression of feelings and emotions. This drawing represents the struggles of someone who has a drug problem and the overwhelming thoughts of needing to help them knowing you can do nothing but wait. There’s an overwhelming feeling of helplessness when it comes to a loved one struggling with a life-changing addiction, but stepping aside and making it known you do not condone the behavior and want to give them nothing but supportive help.