Doors open 6:30 p.m., event starts 7 p.m.
*Online tickets are sold out – please email us at tomorrow@pamcut.org to be added to a waitlist. We will likely have standby tickets available the day of the show.*
FREE Event thanks to generous support provided by Art Bridges Foundation’s Access for All program.

This screening brings together short films by eight Black artists and filmmakers connected to Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. Curated by Intisar Abioto, this event is in conjunction with the Black Artists of Oregon exhibition at the Portland Art Museum. This event is supported by Black Art/ists Gathering, a Black arts family reunion and community-in-residence program founded by Abioto in 2022.

After the presentation there will be time to grab a drink, mingle, and discuss the work with presenting artists. Artists include: Rob Lewis, Elijah Hasan, Sika Stanton, ariella tai, Vaughn Kimmons, Albina Mural Project, elijah jamal asani, Kalimah Abioto, and Zubriri (more commonly known as Princess Bouton).

 

PROGRAM:

Invocation by Rob Lewis | Run Time: 4min.

An opening prayer, playing the ancestors into the space, inviting them to participate in the creative process. An investigation of a spiritual lineage and connection to an identity that was systematically severed at the root. An exploration of the lingering vibrations and interior rhythms that remain. ✨🕊
Starring: Braxton Cook | Director/DP: Nik Popp | First AC: Aidan Silvis | Wardrobe/Styling: Jordan Jackson | Executive Producer: dpm projects | Words/Photography: Amiri Rose | Creative Direction: Rob Lewis

 

Tossou by Sika Stanton | 2023. Run Time: 3 min. 

The veil between the living and the dead is thinning. An aging woman is visited by an anthropomorphic bird (Azétor) and the spirits of her deceased children in a dream before joining them in the ancestral world.
Writer: Melisande McLaughlin | Directors: Melisande McLaughlin, Sika Stanton | Producers: Uloaku Anyiam-Osigwe, Sika Stanton, Melisande McLaughlin | Cast: Alpha Richards, Casseus Limes, Jolie Kanama, Carter Jones-Figures

 

Albina Murals from Center for the Moving Image Film Collection, Portland State University Special Collections & University Archives | 1978. Run Time: 13 min. 
Under the direction of the project’s documentarian, Darryl Clegg, “Albina Murals” highlights the year-long collaboration among seven local artists of color working to craft a community monument to African American history and includes scenes from the project’s public dedication on February 10, 1978. The artists include Isaac (now Isaka) Shamsud-Din (mural painter/project director), Charles Tatum (sculptor/project assistant director), Henry Frison (mural painter), Chonita Henderson Smith (mural painter), Jenny Harada Allen (mural painter), and Larry Scott (assistant mural painter).  The mural panels hung from 1978 to 1983 on the exterior walls of the Albina Human Resource Center in the heart of North Portland’s Albina neighborhood.
Featuring artists Isaka Shamsud-Din, Charles Tatum, Henry Frison, Chonita Henderson Smith, Jenny Harada Allen, and Larry Scott. Filmmakers: Christopher Bangs, Richard Caplan, Lan Fendors, Gary Eppelsheimer, and Donna Schatz. Original color Super 8 film preserved and digitally transferred with the generous support of the National Film Preservation Foundation.  

 

Hues of Resistance by Elijah Hasan | Run Time: 10 min.

Artists Christine Miller, Mo Fee, and Isaka Shamsud-Din speak about their inspirations and experiences as artists living in Portland, Oregon. Directed by Elijah Hasan. Sponsored by Multnomah County Library, and Regional Arts and Culture Council.

 

Black Legend: Black Artists at the Capitol by Elijah Hasan | Run Time – 05:00

In 2019 ten Oregon-based Black artists gathered for an improvisational performance at the Oregon State Capitol as a part of Intisar Abioto’s Black Legend, Black, Oregon Art in the Governor’s office solo exhibition. Artists included were Bobby Fouther, Arietta Ward, Farnell Newton, David Ornette Cherry, Amenta Abioto, Vaughn Kimmons, Sean-Hobbs Waters, Charlie Brown III, and Intisar Abioto.

 

Short Films by Zubriri (more commonly known as Princess Bouton)

Carnival Girl  | Run Time: 4 min.
denim quartz | 2018. Run Time: 3 min.
Bye B!tch | Run Time: 1 min.

This short series of dance films was created by dancer and filmmaker Princess Bouton in collaboration with friend and filmmaker Evan Banally Atwood. The first film, Denim Quartz, is the first collaboration the team have done together and the final film, with the working title “Bye B!tch”, marks the close of a decade long chapter for Princess as an Oregon resident. In short, this film series shows the growth of a beloved creator and community member who made this city her playground every opportunity she got. It also shows what a special part this city played in helping an ambitious and thrill-seeking artist to bloom into something new.

 

safehouse ii by ariella tai | 2019. Run Time: 12 min.

safehouse ii uses video, sound, and text to consider blackness, social (dis)order, refusal, and the compulsions to labor as they exist in relationship to care work.  Using Saidiya Hartman’s transformative work Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments to think through the absence of black stories, particularly the stories of black women and queer people, from the archive, this video seeks to speculate on a small alternate world in a system of institutionalized care built on carceral logics.  How do we conceive the daily work that goes into healing epigenetic and systemically reified trauma?  How do we build alternate systems, habitats, and ways of being from deep inside the belly of the beast? 

 

Feast of the Tide by Vaughn Kimmons  | Run Time: 4 min.

Feast of the Tide, a performance art short, combines audio from the artist’s grandmother Estelle’s sermons with scenes of the artist in “secular” situations, seeking to show a fuller portrait of both, a celebration of their multi-facets.

 

Waterina on Your Nightstand by Kalimah Abioto | Runtime: 2 min. 

Waterina, a water spirit, shares a little bit about herself and why it’s important to stay hydrated.

 

Waterina: Drink Up by Kalimah Abioto | Runtime: 3 min. 

Waterina tells it like it is and addresses the state of the environment.

 

,,, so thee lilac never wilt alone ,,, by elijah jamal asani | Runtime: 14min.

​​under every garden, lies a ritual. within this ritual, a blaq flora grieves for their long lost flower(s), as a desire to create forever blooms. “,,, so thee lilac never wilt alone ,,,” is an afro-surrealist accompaniment to the album “ephemerals’ forever(s)” by ẹ̀bà.

 

 

 

 

Intisar Abioto, Program Curator

Intisar Abioto is an explorer-artist working across photography, dance, and writing. Moving from the visionary and embodied root of Blackgirl Southern cross-temporal cross-modal storytelling ways, her works refer to the living breath/breadth of people of African descent against the expanse of their storied, geographic, and imaginative landscapes. Working in long-form projects that encompass the visual, folkloric, documentary, and performing arts, she has produced The People Could Fly Project, The Black Portlanders, and The Black. Co-created with her four artist sisters, The People Could Fly Project, was a 200,000-mile flying arts expedition exploring realities of flight and freedom within the African diasporic myth of the flying African and Virginia Hamilton’s award-winning book The People Could Fly. 

Abioto is the recipient of a 2018 Oregon Humanities Emerging Journalists Community Stories Fellowship for which she began an ongoing body of research on the history of artists of African descent in Oregon. She has performed and/or exhibited at Ori Gallery, Portland Art Museum, Duplex Gallery, Photographic Center Northwest, African American Museum in Philadelphia, Poetry Press Week, Design Week Portland, Spelman College, Powell’s City of Books, University of Oregon White Box Gallery, Portland State University, Reed College, and Zilkha Gallery among others. Selected for an Art in the Governor’s Office solo exhibition in 2019, she exhibited and performed with nine Oregon-based Black artists against the inner expanse of the Oregon State Capitol building in Salem, Oregon. Her publication Black Portlanders documents interviews with Black Portlanders alongside her photographs. She was a contributing photographer to MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora (2017) and her photographs illustrated the Urban League of Portland’s State of Black Oregon 2015. With the five women artists in her family, she is the co-founder of Studio Abioto, a multivalent creative arts studio. She lives in Portland, Oregon.