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

Wall of flags from Rochelle Kulei Nielsen’s exhibition, What Your White Mama Didn’t Teach You About Indians, 2022. Photograph: Jordan VanSise.

Rochelle Kulei Nielsen – A New Alphabet

Rochelle Kulei Nielsen’s exhibition, What Your White Mama Didn’t Teach You About Indians (November 3 – December 14, 2022) engaged with the legacies of settler colonialism, recalling many hallmarks of early childhood education, a term often assumed to be beneficial or at least benign. Nielsen wrapped the gallery with chalkboards, penmanship lessons, and hovering children’s toys, creating a space for contemplating what we in the US have been taught about the Original Peoples of these lands and how much many of us still have to learn.

Installation view of “What Your White Mama Didn’t Teach You About Indians” in the North View Gallery. 2022. Photograph: Jordan VanSise.

Rochelle Kulei Nielsen, “I am not an Indian”, chalk and chalkboard paint on board, 4′ x 8′. Photograph: Jordan VanSise.

About the artist

Rochelle Kulei Nielsen is a member of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation. She has served the Native community for the past 22 years, working as the Native American Education Coordinator in the Vancouver, Evergreen, and Battleground School Districts. She also served as the coordinator of the 10th Anniversary of the Northwest Indian Storytellers Association (NISA) Festival and Workshops with the . She has taught at Marylhurst University and Portland State University, where she was affiliated faculty with the Indigenous Nations Studies Program, teaching a course on Indigenous Critique of Native American Art. Currently, Rochelle maintains an active studio practice and teaches in both the Art and Native American Studies programs at ˿����Ƶ.

Rochelle Kulei Nielsen, “A is for A.I.M.” digital print and drawing on cloth, 2021. Photograph: Jordan VanSise.

The first flag in this new alphabet honors the Occupation of Alcatraz Island that took place between November 20, 1969, and June 11, 1971. The occupation was organized by 78 Indigenous leaders and activists, including members of A.I.M. (the American Indian Movement) and Indians of All Nations. They demanded land back and the establishment of a Native American University. They organized quickly, electing a council, dividing up jobs, and forming a school on the island.

Everyone who arrived at Alcatraz (more than 3,000 people by the end) wrote their names, Tribal affiliations, and observations in an accounting ledger, which was recently scanned and is accessible online through the Autry Museum. This occupation that lasted for 19 months marks the first flag of Rochelle Kulei Nielsen’s alphabet. “A is for A.I.M.” proposes a new education that begins with Indigenous agency and strength.

.

Historical photographs from the Alcatraz occupation. Lower right: Cover of the accounting ledger in which over 3,000 people who arrived at Alcatraz wrote their names, Tribal affiliations, and observations. Source: The Autry Museum.

Rochelle Kulei Nielsen, “B is for Broken Treaties” digital print and drawing on cloth, 2021. Photograph: Jordan VanSise.

The second flag in Nielsen’s alphabet marks the day of November 3, 1972, when the Trail of Broken Treaties Caravan traveled to Washington DC, and occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) for six days. This group of more than 800 people, representing 300 Indigenous Nations also shared a 20 Point Position Paper demanding a more honest relationship with the US Government. They explained that in order for Indigenous communities to flourish, they needed improvements in health, housing, employment, and education that were self-determined. They also requested the protection of Indigenous religious freedom and their cultural integrity. While occupying the BIA offices, leaders found a vault full of tape recorders and cameras, and people began using them to interview each other and document the needs of the many Indigenous communities represented there.

Read the .

Read the full account of  published in Indian Country Today.

The occupation on the cover of the Ann Arbor Sun, December 2, 1972.

Rochelle Kulei Nielsen, “C is for Custard” digital print and drawing on cloth, 2021. Photograph: Jordan VanSise.

This flag references a significant book from the Red Power Movement. Custer Died for Your Sins, written in 1969 by Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux). The book is a collection of essays that call for Indigenous sovereignty, rejecting political and social assimilation. Throughout the book, Deloria is critical of aid organizations, including churches, which Deloria argues do more harm than good. He is also critical of disciplines like anthropology, ultimately causing anthropologists to reconsider their approach to working with Indigenous communities. Finally, Deloria explores the importance of Indian humor in the book, and Nielsen leans into that humor on this flag by referring to US Army Officer General George Custer as Custard, a European dessert or pastry filling. Custer was central to brutal treaty violations, specifically the US campaign to steal the Black Hills from the Lakota Sioux. Deloria’s book explains Custer’s violent treatment of Indigenous people and argues that US citizens should examine what they have learned about Western Expansion and Indigenous Treaties, challenging us all to acknowledge the brutality of US history.

Book cover of the first edition of Vine Deloria Jr.’s “Custer Died For Your Sins”, 1969.

Rochelle Kulei Nielsen, “D is for Dawes Act” digital print and drawing on cloth, 2021. Photograph: Jordan VanSise.

The Dawes Act (or the General Allotment Act) of 1887, subdivided lands held by Native nations in an attempt to force capitalist concepts like “private property” on Native peoples. One significant result of this act is that between 1887 and 1934 Native Americans lost control of over 100 million acres of land. This loss of land and the fracturing of traditional leadership structures that resulted cause historians like Sandy Grande to cite the Dawes Act as one of the most destructive US policies for Native Americans in history.

This flag also centers a broadside advertisement from the US Secretary of the Interior and the Commissioner of Indian Affairs offering “Indian Land For Sale” in 1911. The full-page ad explains how much land was sold the prior year in 1910 and explains that about 350,000 acres will be offered for sale in 1911, including land in Siletz, Roseburg, Pendelton, and the Klamath Agency of Oregon, along with sites across the western states. The man in the photograph is Padani-Kokipa-Sni (Not Afraid of Pawnee) of the Yankton Indian Nation.

Fisher, Walter L, et al. Indian land for sale: get a home of your own, easy payments. Perfect title. Possession within thirty days. Fine lands in the West. United States. Publisher not identified, 1911. Source: .

Rochelle Kulei Nielsen, “E is for Erase” digital print and drawing on cloth, 2021. Photograph: Jordan VanSise.

This flag honors two photographs of a young boy named Thomas Moore Keesick from the Muscowpetung Saulteaux First Nation. This photographic pair shows Keesick upon admission to the Regina Indian Industrial School in 1897 when he was 8 years old, and after school, leaders forced him to remove the clothing and long hair that connected him to his community. Images like this portrait pair serve as heartbreaking reminders of the history that Nielsen explains was not taught to most US citizens, by their family or by the education system. As Indigenous scholar Sandy Grande asserts, indoctrination through education was a vital component of the theft of Indigenous land, resources, and labor. Kulei Nielsen’s exhibition exposes the impact that settler schooling, in all of its forms, had on young people, while also considering the many ways that settler colonialism remains an oppressive force today.

Two photographs of Thomas Moore Keesick, published in the Canada Sessional Papers, No.14, Volume XXXI, No. 11 (1897), a Department of Indian Affairs Report for the year ending at June 30, 1896. Photograph: Naomi Angel.

Rochelle Kulei Nielsen, “F is for First Nations” digital print and drawing on cloth, 2021. Photograph: Jordan VanSise.

Rochelle Kulei Nielsen, “G is for Genocide” digital print and drawing on cloth, 2021. Photograph: Jordan VanSise.

Rochelle Kulei Nielsen, “H is for Haskell Babies” digital print and drawing on cloth, 2021. Photograph: Jordan VanSise.This flag features a photograph of a group of Native American children at the Haskell Institute, taken between 1884 and 1889. The Haskell Institute was an Indian Boarding School established in Lawrence, Kansas in 1884. The boarding school was traumatic for Native children and their families. Students were required to stay at Haskell for four years without contact with family and tribes, to sever the connection to tribal traditions and customs. During the early years, the school was run like the military, requiring students to wear uniforms and march everywhere.

Group of Native American children at Haskell Institute, Lawrence, Kansas. One of the children, is holding a sign “Haskell Babies”. Photograph taken between 1880 and 1889. Source: Kansas Historical Society.

Rochelle Kulei Nielsen, “I is for the Indian Religious Act” digital print and drawing on cloth, 2021. Photograph: Jordan VanSise.

This flag features a photograph of residential school children in a typical dormitory, taken in 1950 at the Bishop Horden Memorial School. The Bishop Horden boarding school was a residential school in the Indigenous Cree community of Moose Factory, Ontario Canada. In this school and many others, Indigenous children were forced to pray at the foot of their mattresses prior to being permitted to sleep, in this photograph, they are watched by a Catholic Nun acting as disciplinarian and enforcer. Forced conversion to Christianity was one of many ways that the religious freedoms of Indigenous peoples were denied by settler governments.

In the United States, Native American religious practices have been historically prohibited by federal laws and policies. For example, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 that resulted in the forced relocation of hundreds of Native nations from their land also impacted Indigenous religious freedom. Not only were Native peoples forcibly assimilated into agricultural settler societies far away from their original lands, but the relocations left them without access to the sacred sites where they had traditionally practiced their beliefs. In fact, many Indigenous spiritual ceremonies are impossible to practice without access to a specific site because place is an important component of Indigenous spiritualities. Indigenous people have also been banned from using sacred ceremonial items that were restricted under US law. Finally, the indoctrination that took place at Indian Boarding Schools furthered the infringement upon Indigenous religious freedom.

In 1978, US Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which acknowledged that the US government had denied Indigenous people their First Amendment right to the “free exercise” of religion.

Photograph of residential school children in a typical dormitory, taken in 1950 at the Bishop Horden Memorial School. Source: CNS photo/Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre, Handout via Reuters.

Rochelle Kulei Nielsen, “J is for Jim Crow Indian Style” digital print and drawing on cloth, 2021. Photograph: Jordan VanSise.

Rochelle Kulei Nielsen, “K is for Kill the Indian” digital print and drawing on cloth, 2021. Photograph: Jordan VanSise.

A photograph of a group of students in cadet uniforms at the Omaha Nation at Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania is contained by the stars of the US flag that hovers over this Shoshone flag. The photograph was taken shortly after 1879 when the U.S. government launched a policy of forcibly removing Native children from their families and tribal communities and placing them in residential boarding schools far from their homelands and cultural contracts. These militaristic schools expressly forbid children from contacting relatives and forced the adoption of Christianity, the English language, and Euro-American customs, values, and practices.

The goal of the boarding schools is the complete eradication of Native identity, culture, and values and the adoption of White / Euro-American, Christian, and heteropatriarchal values. Capt. Richard H. Pratt established the primary model for all off-reservation boarding schools with the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. Pratt’s motto was “Kill the Indian, save the man,” and this encompassed eradicating any signs of Native life and practices, including cutting the hair and braids of Indian children, forbidding Indian languages or customs, forcing Christianity and Christian dogma and practices, and forbidding hugging, even among siblings.

Children were required to wear militaristic-style uniforms and adopt new English-language names and surnames. In many of the boarding schools, children were severely punished or tortured if caught violating any of the cultural rules and, in some cases, murdered. Parents who refused to send their children were imprisoned. By 1880, there were more than 7,000 Indian children enrolled in federally supported missionary-run boarding schools.

(From the introduction to the special issue of the Journal of American Indian Education, “Native American Boarding School Stories” by K. Tsianina Lomawaima 2018)

Photograph of a group of students in cadet uniforms at the Omaha Nation at Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, c.1880. Source: Bettmann Archive.

Rochelle Kulei Nielsen, “L is for Looking Unto Jesus” digital print and drawing on cloth, 2021. Photograph: Jordan VanSise.

The students in a penmanship class at the Red Deer Indian Industrial School are honored on this flag. They were photographed sometime between 1914 and 1919, more than thirty years after the Indian Affairs Commissioner J.D.C. Atkins banned Native languages in schools. After 1887, all mission and government-run schools on reservations were required to provide English-only instruction.

Nielsen’s installation considered the many cultural practices and languages, including the artist’s own Shoshone language, that US colonizers tried unsuccessfully to erase. She further exposed the violence of public education by creating a space for viewers to reenact the experience of her mother, who after being caught speaking Shoshone in school, was forced to write “I’m not an Indian” on the chalkboard multiple times. What does it feel like to be forced to deny an important part of one’s identity, multiple times and in front of peers? What does it feel like to be told that who you are is wrong? Nielsen asked viewers to consider the relationship between schooling and settler violence. Why was it so important for the oppressors that Indigenous nations stop using their own languages? In what overt and covert ways does education today still uphold white heteronormative capitalist patriarchy? What happens when significant parts of US history are no longer hidden but are openly and honestly discussed?

Photograph of a penmanship class at the Red Deer Indian Industrial School, in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada, c.1914 or 1919. Source: United Church of Canada Archives.

Rochelle Kulei Nielsen, “M is for Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women” digital print and drawing on cloth, 2021. Photograph: Jordan VanSise.

Rochelle Kulei Nielsen, “N is for No DAPL” digital print and drawing on cloth, 2021. Photograph: Jordan VanSise.

Rochelle Kulei Nielsen, “O is for Oil” digital print and drawing on cloth, 2021. Photograph: Jordan VanSise.

Rochelle Kulei Nielsen, “P is for Protectors of the Land” digital print and drawing on cloth, 2021. Photograph: Jordan VanSise.

Rochelle Kulei Nielsen, “Q is for Blood Quantum” digital print and drawing on cloth, 2021. Photograph: Jordan VanSise.

Rochelle Kulei Nielsen, “R is for Reservations” digital print and drawing on cloth, 2021. Photograph: Jordan VanSise.

Rochelle Kulei Nielsen, “S is for Survive” digital print and drawing on cloth, 2021. Photograph: Jordan VanSise.

Rochelle Kulei Nielsen, “T is for Trail of Tears” digital print and drawing on cloth, 2021. Photograph: Jordan VanSise.

Rochelle Kulei Nielsen, “U is for Untoke” digital print and drawing on cloth, 2021. Photograph: Jordan VanSise.

Rochelle Kulei Nielsen, “V is for Voting” digital print and drawing on cloth, 2021. Photograph: Jordan VanSise.

Rochelle Kulei Nielsen, “W is for the Indian Child Welfare Act” digital print and drawing on cloth, 2021. Photograph: Jordan VanSise.

Studio photograph of four girls who are dressed with fully beaded yokes, moccasins and leggings in the style characteristic of Lakota and Cheyenne beadwork of the early reservation period. South Dakota, c.1890. Source: Vincent Mercaldo Collection.

Rochelle Kulei Nielsen, “X” digital print and drawing on cloth, 2021. Photograph: Jordan VanSise.

Rochelle Kulei Nielsen, “Y is for Y-DNA” digital print and drawing on cloth, 2021. Photograph: Jordan VanSise.

Rochelle Kulei Nielsen, “Z is for Zimee” digital print and drawing on cloth, 2021. Photograph: Jordan VanSise.

Selected bibliography

Grande, Sandy (Quechua). Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought, 10th Anniversary Edition. Rowman & Littlefield. 2015.

Lomawaima, K. Tsianina (Mvskoke/Creek Nation of Eastern Oklahoma). “Native American Boarding School Stories” special issue of the Journal of American Indian Education. 2018.

Reed, Britt (Choctaw). “Indian Child Welfare Act: Historical and Legal Context”, The Last Real Indians. August 16, 2015.

van Thater-Braan, Rose (Tuscarora-Cherokee). “The Six Directions: A Pattern for Understanding Native American Educational Values, Diversity and the Need for Cognitive Pluralism.” SECME Summer Institute plenary session. July 10, 2001.

NYC Stands with Standing Rock Collective. 2016. “#StandingRockSyllabus.” .

Avantika Bawa, Charged Voids, scaffolding of varying colors and dimensions, site-specific installation in the North View Gallery, PCC Sylvania, 2022 (Photograph: Mario Gallucci)

In Charged Voids, Avantika Bawa employs the staging and support structures used in the construction process to consider what is already constructed in new ways. Bawa spent a month in residence at the North View Gallery, on the PCC Sylvania campus, installing a new iteration of her Scaffold Series in response to the architecture. The gallery occupies one of the original 1968 Brutalist buildings at Sylvania, furthering the exploration Bawa began with A Brutal Affair, a series of drawings and prints inspired by the monumental rawness of Brutalist structures around the world, including in her hometown New Delhi. This exhibition merges these series for the first time.

Historical photograph of the walkways on the PCC Sylvania Campus. 1968-1970. (Collection of the PCC Library)

Brutalism’s simplified, modular shapes and raw concrete form the core of the Sylvania campus. Concrete walkways surround and connect the original Sylvania buildings functioning as the pedestrian and communal spaces described as “charged voids” by UK architects Alison and Peter Smithson. In fact, one of these concrete walkways borders the North View Gallery. Most classrooms in the early buildings were once visible through large windows from these exterior walkways (now many of the windows are frosted). In keeping with the principles of openness and transparency important to the first college president, Amo DeBernardis, floor to ceiling windows span both ends of the North View, allowing maximum visibility into the gallery. While the north facing windows reduce the barrier between interior and exterior, Avantika further dematerializes that boundary by placing a scaffold outside and painting the same salmon pink as a scaffold on the inside, near the emergency exit.

Avantika Bawa, Charged Voids, detail of scaffolding outside on the walkway, site-specific installation in the North View Gallery, PCC Sylvania, 2022 (Photograph: Mario Gallucci)

Remarkably, that emergency exit was once a gallery entrance. Students with classes on the north side of the building could visit the gallery with ease. People gave directions that required walking through the gallery on the way to a class or meeting. Eventually, to secure the gallery against theft, the north exit door was alarmed, closing that path through the building. Bawa decided to reopen the path for this exhibition, turning off the alarm and encouraging viewers to spend time in the charged void outside the gallery walls. The alarm is challenging to disarm and has been infrequently tripped during the installation of the show. The alarm may even sound while you are reading this essay, charging the installation with memories of how people once moved through the space.

Avantika herself charges the gallery with the complicated, abstract forms created by the scaffolds. Angled crossbars echo the diagonal lines of the gridded gallery skylight. The horizontal lines of the scaffolds reinforce; and the vertical lines salute the concrete ceiling beams of the massive Brutalist building. And yet, Bawa’s color palette infuses the space with playfulness and delight. The scaffolding radiates, casting complicated shadows, along with a teal green veil on the west wall and subtle hints of hot pink and electric green on the east. If you look long enough, afterimages add an extra layer of complementary color to this elaborate composition.

Avantika Bawa, Charged Voids, detail of pink and green scaffolds, site-specific installation in the North View Gallery, PCC Sylvania, 2022 (Photograph: Mario Gallucci)

The vibrant hues Bawa introduces to the white-walled gallery are drawn from her interest in color theory. They also reference the brilliant colors of traditional Indian saris. This connection proposes a dialogue between the machine-made industrial material of the scaffold and the intimate process of hand-dying and sewing women’s clothing in India. Both materials are constructed and deconstructed often during their lifespan. A sari starts as a long piece of fabric that is carefully folded multiple times to fit a woman’s body, then unfolded when disrobing. Scaffolds start as modular pieces, but they too are assembled for use, then dismantled and reassembled again. The fact that each scaffold in this installation was hand-painted during Bawa’s residency charges the voids even further with the labor of the human hand.

Avantika Bawa, Charged Voids, detail of scaffolding in the gallery, site-specific installation in the North View Gallery, PCC Sylvania, 2022 (Photograph: Mario Gallucci)

Viewers are also invited to charge the gallery with their presence. Bawa’s work allows everyone to bring their own vision, understanding, and poetry to the space she creates. Charged Voids can be a purely formal experience. It can encourage meditation on the function of scaffolding, recalling the scaffolds used when the building was first constructed and currently in use on the renovation of the Health Technology building next door. What are the differences between those functional objects and the ones installed in the gallery? The scaffolds may evoke the framing of history and the scaffolding of knowledge that takes place in an institution of higher education. Bawa is herself a committed educator, teaching studio art and working on the gallery team at Washington State University in Vancouver. Finally, the scaffolding might draw our attention to the gallery itself and to how our bodies move through that space. Charged Voids engages viewers physically, proposing new ways of being in the gallery, lying on the floor to watch the diagonal crossbars echo the lines of the skylight, or climbing high to view the gallery from above.

Avantika Bawa, Charged Voids, detail of scaffolding looking into the gallery from outside, site-specific installation in the North View Gallery, PCC Sylvania, 2022 (Photograph: Mario Gallucci)

The Scaffold Series lives in the expanded field. We become more aware of our own human form as we move through Avantika’s space. This, along with the scaffold’s modularity and geometric abstraction, relates Bawa’s work to Minimalism and to early 20th-century modernists, particularly modernist designers who created immersive abstract interiors. While informed by a modernist aesthetic, Bawa is also interested in contradictions, in the fact that repetitive modularity is often full of irregularities. The scaffold has grid-like features, but the form is asymmetrical and made dynamic by diagonal lines that create intense visual rhythm in the ways Avantika has positioned them. Of course, modernist movements are rife with contradictions. Avant-garde groups had utopian ideals that were difficult, if not impossible to realize. For example, Bauhaus designers identified as egalitarian radicals yet upheld patriarchal inequities in the very structure of their design school.

Walkways on the PCC Sylvania Campus. Photograph from the PCC Library Archives. 1968-1970.

Brutalism, as a late modernist architectural style, also features abundant contradictions. The term took its name from the French béton brut, or raw concrete, demonstrating the honesty of buildings that don’t try to hide their materials or structure. Brutalism too was a hopeful, utopian style. Architects like the Smithsons designed buildings to address human social and communal needs, yet many decry Brutalist buildings as cold and impersonal, giving new meaning to the word brut. Brutalism began as a functional solution to rebuilding Europe after the devastation of World War II, but what is the role of brutalist buildings today in the context of the climate crisis? What is the role of Brutalist buildings described as alienating, at a time when human relationships and connection to our surroundings feel more important than ever? How can the thinkers, artists, and workers at ˿����Ƶ create spaces of belonging on a campus that feels designed to confuse and disconnect?

Avantika Bawa, Charged Voids, detail of scaffolding looking into the gallery from outside, site-specific installation in the North View Gallery, PCC Sylvania, 2022 (Photograph: Mario Gallucci)

In their book, The Charged Void, the Smithsons wrote about their attempt ‘to drag a rough poetry out of the confused and powerful forces which are at work in a mass production society.’ This attempt resonates with the everyday poetry that Bawa exposes in the functional form of the scaffold, a form that allows humans to reach new heights, that makes back-breaking labor possible, and that can frame and reframe spaces. What kind of poetry happens when these functional objects occupy the charged voids of Brutalism? How do they help us see the college campus and the gallery with new eyes? How do the scaffolds draw our attention to the history of the campus and to the present renovations the campus is undergoing? What will the future of the PCC Sylvania campus look like, and where will its historic Brutalist buildings fit into that future? At a time when many people are returning to ˿����Ƶ campuses for the first time since 2020, Bawa’s installation provides a scaffolding around which the college community can come together and engage in meaningful conversations about place and history.
Christine Weber, North View Gallery Director

Historical photograph of the PCC Sylvania campus under construction with scaffolds on the roof in 1968.

Photograph of the CT building under construction with a view into the North View Gallery. 1968.