The Portland Art Museum welcomes a dynamic, artist-led experiment that will transform the fourth floor of the Jubitz Center for Modern and Contemporary Art through December 2018. We.Construct.Marvels.Between.Monuments. is a series of five exhibitions developed in partnership with artists and art collectives that will activate the gallery with visual art, performance, screenings, and discussions. Organized by visiting artistic director Libby Werbel, the programming invites a range of emerging and established voices to ask questions about how the Museum can become more artist-centered and inclusive in its practices and become more critically engaged with a broader array of emerging and established artists in the region. We.Construct.Marvels.Between.Monuments. is a unique collaboration between the Museum’s curatorial and education departments with support provided by Sara Krajewski, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Grace Kook-Anderson, Curator of Northwest Art, and Stephanie Parrish, Associate Director of Education.
As part of this initiative, BETWEEN. highlights artists working within the queer and trans diaspora, and the unique voices coming from between or beyond the binary. This exhibition aims to queer the curatorial process, taking into account current visibility politics and presenting the work of LGBTQIA2S+ artists in ways that challenge normative art world conventions. Chris E. Vargas and The Museum of Trans Hirstory & Art (MOTHA) presents the fourth installment of his ongoing project Transhirstory in 99 Objects: Transvideo Store, a selection of contemporary short art films made by trans (or trans-adjacent) artists to examine a variety of ways trans stories and experiences have been represented on screen, both from outside and within their community. Accompanying these media works will be a visual art exhibition of work by artists selected through a dialogue-based research and sourcing process that touched a wide network of queer artists and writers with the intention to broaden curatorial authorship and directly serve the community whose historically significant cultural contributions have driven the arts and shaped contemporary thought. The exhibiting artists explore narratives of identity ranging from personal observation and portraiture to performative spaces of transformation and fantasy. BETWEEN. aims to foreground narratives that exist within, around, under and/or in opposition to the patriarchal hierarchy present in art institutions.
Featuring artwork from Vaginal Davis, MOTHA, Zanele Muholi, Christina Quarles, Jordan Reznick, Jacolby Satterwhite, and Vivek Shraya
Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects: Transvideo Store featuring films by: Malic Amalya, eduardo restrepo castaño, Erica Cho, Cary Cronenwett, Zackary Drucker & Rhys Ernst, Xena Ellison, Reina Gossett, Josef Kraska, Sierra Tucker