June 17 - July 30, 2023
Open Gallery Hours: Thursday - Sunday, 12-5pm and by appointment
First Thursday Programming: July 6, 5-8pm
ABOUT THE PROGRAM
¿Qué moldea las identidades que asumimos?
¿Es posible abarcar a todos con una sola palabra?
Una Palabra de Lucha presenta una selección de trabajos por trece artistas de diferentes trayectorias, con una visión creativa desde la perspectiva de diáspora Latinoamericana en Estados Unidos. Partiendo de una invitación a revisar el trabajo de Neo Latino Collective, un colectivo de artistas visuales fundado en 2003 en la costa Este, con el objetivo de generar espacios de colaboración y creación para las voces Latinx, esta exposición reúne el trabajo de miembros del colectivo con el de artistas radicados en Oregón con la intención de cuestionar las diferentes maneras en que las etiquetas de identidad son entendidas o legitimadas.
Tomando como título una frase de Julio Cortázar en la entrevista Topografía de Una Mirada (1980), esta selección de obras confronta la idea de identidad Latinoamericana. La lucha por la tierra y la conservación de los biomas, la búsqueda de conexión cultural y ancestral, la creación de espacios de celebración, la resistencia al impacto del imperialismo y la colonización son temas recurrentes en el trabajo de los artistas que participan en esta muestra.
Una Palabra de Lucha yuxtapone los intentos fallidos de una artista aprendiendo Maya Yucateco en Northeast Portland, con las exploraciones formales de otra artista que usa los materiales que descartamos todos los días, con una juguetona celebración del amor con guirnaldas artesanales mexicanas, con una exploración colectiva de la soledad, con un comentario sobre la trivialización de la violencia con armas de fuego, junto a imágenes de íconos culturales como la Comandanta Ramona, del Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, o personajes como Juan Pablo II, que han moldeado la memoria y los ideales de diferentes pueblos existiendo al sur de la frontera.
El impulso sistémico por clasificar y definir antes que comprender es un imperativo de la dinámica neoliberal, que simplifica y borra culturas y cosmovisiones propias de geografías y paisajes distintos pero vecinos en la geografía global. Esta exposición celebra las cualidades, contradicciones y preguntas de un grupo de artistas que se han desplazado de sus lugares de orígen, y con sus obras nos ayudan a subvertir la mirada del otro; proponiendo un diálogo sobre la imposibilidad de una idea de “latinidad”, y por qué la identidad es una palabra de lucha.
Una Palabra de Lucha is funded in part by the Regional Arts & Culture Council.
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What shapes the identities we assume?
Is it possible to encompass everyone with a single word?
Una Palabra de Lucha presents a selection of works by thirteen artists from diverse backgrounds, with a creative vision from the perspective of the Latin American diaspora in the United States. Based on an invitation to review the work of the Neo Latino Collective, composed of visual artists, founded in 2003 on the East Coast to generate spaces for collaboration and creation for Latinx voices. This exhibition brings together the work of members of the collective and Oregon-based artists to question the different ways in which identity labels are understood or legitimized.
Taking its title from a phrase by Julio Cortázar, in the interview Topografía de Una Mirada (1980), this selection of works confronts the idea of Latin American identity. The struggle for land, the conservation of biomes, the search for cultural and ancestral connection, the resistance to the impact of imperialism and colonization, and the creation of celebration spaces are recurring questions in the work of the artists participating in this exhibition.
Una Palabra de Lucha juxtaposes the failed attempts of an artist to learn Yucatec Mayan in Northeast Portland, with the formal explorations of another artist using the materials we discard every day, with a playful celebration of love with traditional Mexican garlands, with a collective exploration on loneliness, with a reflection on the trivialization of gun violence, along with images of cultural icons such as the Comandanta Ramona, of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, or characters like John Paul II, who have shaped the memory and the ideals of different peoples existing south of the border.
The systemic drive to classify and define rather than empathize and understand is an imperative of neoliberal dynamics that simplifies and erases cultures and cosmovisions of different but neighboring geographies and landscapes in the global geography. This exhibition celebrates the qualities, contradictions, and questions of a group of artists who have moved from their places of origin and, through their work, help us subvert the otherizing gaze, proposing a dialogue on the impossibility of an idea of "latinidad," and why identity is a fighting word.
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Diana Cuartas is a Colombian artist living in Portland, OR since 2019. Her work incorporates visual research, popular culture analysis and collaborative learning processes in publications, workshops, parties, or curatorial projects as a framework to investigate the relationships formed between a place and those who inhabit it.
Marcelo Fontana is an artist, curator, and organizer from São Paulo, Brazil, based in Portland. Fontana’s research focuses on understanding the relationship between people and photography and how the massive production of images affects and influences our world. As an organizer, his goal is to create meaningful connections between communities developing culture forward projects.
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ABOUT THE EXHIBITING ARTISTS
Nelson Alvarez was born in Havana in 1966. He immigrated from Cuba in 1996, and he established himself in New York City in 2003. He is a full time artist, art educator and curator. Nelson’s studio is located in Woodlawn Heights, a vibrant artist Community in The Bronx, NY. His works have been exhibited nationwide and still have an important presence in the Tristate area. He has a Bachelors Degree in Fine Arts from Kean University (“Cum Laude”) and earned his MFA in painting at Lehman College, CUNY in New York.
Born in Ecuador in 1955 and raised in the U.S., Hugo Xavier Bastidas received his BA from Rutgers University in 1979, was awarded a Robert Smithson Scholarship to attend the Brooklyn Museum School of Art Program in sculpture from 1979 to 1980, and completed his MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York, in 1986.
An internationally recognized painter, Bastidas has been represented since 1994 by the Nohra Haime Gallery in New York City. He has received numerous awards and scholarships during the past four decades. Bastidas has exhibited throughout the U.S., as well as in Europe, South America, the Middle East, and Asia, and is a Fulbright fellow and an associate professor of art. His artwork consists of black-and-white paintings whose timely subject matter is driven by his deep concern for the human condition, globalization, and its effect on the well-being of our planet.
Colombian-American sculptor Olga Mercedes Bautista has been awarded several certificates of appreciation from the mayors of Newark, Jersey City and Perth Amboy. She worked for the city of Perth Amboy as a Founder-Director of the Perth Amboy Gallery,as a curator of art exhibitions, organizer of the Festival of the Andes and art shows in the city for which she was in charge in securing grants. After receiving a Master in Fine Arts Education from Kean University,she became an art teacher at the Perth Amboy High School.Bautista has hold this position for the past 22 years.Bautista holds a Studio Art,with a specialization in Fine Arts Master degree from New Jersey City University.
New Jersey based mixed media artist, Michael Barreto cites that growing up on the Jersey Shore, a bustling suburbia known for its deep connection to music, as the birth of his interest in creating. He fell in love with the raw energy, lyrics, and DIY-ethos of punk music leaving him eager to create with whatever he had at his disposal.
Barreto honed in on his artistic practice at Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania where he received a Bachelor’s in Studio Art with a concentration in sculpture and continued on to pursue his MFA from New Jersey City University.
The work Barreto creates often utilizes a potent combination of found-objects/materials and language (through the use of text). His work aims to showcase his view of the collective human experience.
Monica S. Camin is an Argentine-born, New Jersey, Portland, and Texas-based artist. She examine her roots as the daughter of German Jews who escaped the worst years of the holocaust and found refuge in Argentina. The questions she explores in much of her work straddle the experiences of being brought up as the daughter of immigrants in Latin America and the experiences of personal immigration and identity in her adulthood as she emigrated to Israel and then the United States.
While the catalysts for the movement between countries differ vastly, the commonality that ensues is that the culture and communities that so strongly shape our identity and understanding of the world in which we live are uprooted, causing us to seek out and reinvent the stories that make us whole. She sifts through her ancestral stories in order to connect to those roots that have been torn from their origins and to remember, and pass on the stories of a living history whose survivors are aging.
Monica has been exhibiting her work across the globe since the late 70s, with solo exhibitions spanning New York City, New Jersey, Florida, and Buenos Aires, and residencies in Buenos Aires in 2015 and San Miguel de Allende, MX in 2000. In 2011, she completed and published a full-color 125 page bilingual memoir titled Mi niñez fue tan pintoresca/My childhood was so colorful. In 2016,she curated her first museum exhibition Neo-Latino: Critical Mass at the Monmouth Museum, NJ.
Camin is a member of the Neo-Latino collective, a group of artists dedicated to promoting the contemporary Latino experience in the United States; and is a founding Board Member of Stelo Arts, a non-profit art space in Portland, Oregon committed to process-based exploration. She is an active member of the Latin American Women Artists of Houston (LAWAH) and the National Association of Women Artists (NAWA).
Patricia Vázquez Gómez (she/her) works and lives between the ancient Tenochtitlán and the unceded and occupied lands of the Chinook, Clackamas, Multnomah and other Indigenous peoples. Her art practice investigates the social functions of art, the intersections between aesthetics, ethics and politics and the expansion of community based art practices. She uses a variety of media to carry out her research: painting, printmaking, video, exhibitions, music and socially engaged art projects. The purpose and methodologies of her work are deeply informed by her experiences working in the immigrant rights and other social justice movements. Her work has taken life at the Portland Art Museum, the Reece Museum, the Paragon Gallery, the Houston Art League, and the Linnfield Gallery, but also in other spaces as apartments complexes, neighborhoods, community based organizations and schools. She is the recipient of the 2013 Arlene Schnitzer Visual Arts Prize and has received support from the Ford Foundation, Regional Arts and Culture Council (RACC), the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA, the Oregon Community Foundation, METRO and the National Endowment for the Arts. Patricia teaches at the undergraduate and graduate levels at Portland State University. Her work can be explored at https://www.patriciavazquez.art/
Heldáy de la Cruz (pronounced "el-dye") is an artist and community organizer. Through illustration and design, his work explores the identities that are lost and found within both the queer and Indigenous diaspora. These, alongside his undocumented status, are at the very core of his community work.
Heldáy's artwork and story has been shared in Milk X Magazine (Hong Kong), The Huffington Post, AIGA Portland, She Shreds Magazine, Ecotrust, Street Roots, East Oregonian, The Oregonian, ACLU of Oregon, Design Week Portland, Brand New Podcast, Social Justice League Podcast, Talking with Ghosts Podcast, Homebase Gallery, CultureStrike, the Define American Film Festival, and the U-FLi Center at Brown University. He also founded and co-leads a collective called UndocuPDX that provides resources, education, and news for the undocumented community.
In 1969, Christie Devereaux moved to Italy. While in Italy, she worked as an industrial designer and graphic artist. In addition, she was commissioned to paint portraits and commemorative paintings. Her most noted portrait is of Padre Pio, which is in a permanent collection in the Museum of Padre Pio, Pietrelcina, Italy.
In 1980, she returned to the New York. She has continuously participated in numerous invitational gallery and museum exhibits. Her work has been on exhibit at the Lever House, the Prince George Gallery, and the Pen and Brush Gallery all in NYC, Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, NY, and in New Jersey at the Morris Museum, Morristown, and Monmouth Museum, Lincroft. Her most recent solo shows include the Treasure Room Gallery at the Interchurch Center in New York, NY (2012), the Adler Gallery at Port Washington Public Library, Port Washington, NY (2013), the National Association of Women Artists Gallery, New York, NY (2015), and the William V. Musto Museum, in Union City, NJ (2021).
Laura Camila Medina (1995) is an interdisciplinary artist born in Bogotá, Colombia and raised in Orlando, FL. Her work has been exhibited at the Center for Contemporary Art & Culture, Fuller Rosen Gallery, Wieden + Kennedy, the Portland Art Museum, Nationale, and with the Nat Turner Project. She was awarded the Studio Fellowship at Yale’s CCAM, Individual Artist Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission, New Media Fellowship at Open Signal, Artist in Residence at the Living School of Art, ACRE Residency, and the Centrum Emerging Artist Residency. Alongside Angela Saenz, she is part of Maracuya con Leche, a collaborative project that encourages artists to participate in creative exchange with their community. Together they were the IPRC Artists & Writers in Residence in 2020 and were invited to the Caldera Artist Residency in 2022. Medina is represented by Nationale in Portland, OR. She earned her BFA at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and is currently a Painting & Printmaking MFA candidate at Yale University.
Diego Morales-Portillo (* 1992, Ciudad de Guatemala) is a multidisciplinary artist and graphic designer living and working in Portland, OR. Morales-Portillo graduated as a bachelor in artistic drawing at the National School of Fine Arts of Guatemala in 2010, in 2015 he received a Bachelor's degree in Graphic Design and Advertising with a Cum Laude degree from the Universidad del Istmo, in 2019 he received the degree of Master's MFA in Visual Studies at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, OR. Diego has presented his work in Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Italy, North Korea, Spain and the United States in exhibitions such as the 18th Asian Art Biennial of Bangladesh, 2017 Pacific Standard Time LA/LA; Mapping Narratives: New Prints 2021/Winter at the International Print Center in NY (2021); auction and exhibition of Latin American art Juannio 2013, 2016, 2017, 2020. His work is in public collections such as Neo-Murales of the Rozas Botran Foundation and Imago Mundi of Luciano Benneton in Italy and Portable Works collection of the Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC) in Portland, Oregon. Diego has been awarded residencies such as Open Studio Residency at Haystack Mountain, The Studios at MASS MoCA, Caldera Art residency in Sisters and Leland Iron Works at Oregon City, both in Oregon.
Lisette Morel is a NJ based Dominican- American artist, mother, educator and occasional curator born in NYC. She embraces an untamed nomadic ritualistic practice. The process is an organic intuitive extension of her body which helps her navigate our transient existence, question, and challenge set systematic boundaries.
Morel has collaborated with her daughters, friends and neighbors engaging in happenings throughout daily routines, blurring art and life. Some of the performances have been recurring endurance collaborations, titled, “Run to Your Friend Until You Can’t Anymore” with performance artist, Ayana Evans. Where they run to one another for 2-3 hours celebrating and exploiting the strength and vulnerability of their friendship.
Ms. Morel has also created her own performative pieces where she utilizes found objects to mark with like in “Raw Forms Forum” curated by artist Dominique Duroseau, Newark Museum, Newark NJ, Morel marked with an automotive tire rolling it and dipping it in house paint.
Awards and residencies include the First Sustainable Arts Fellow Residency, Gallery Aferro, Newark, NJ, 2016. and the Artist in Residence at Soho20 Chelsea Gallery, NY in 2012. She was also invited to participate in the Aljira Emerge10 Program and at El Museo del Barrio Fifth Biennial: The (S) Files. She is a recipient of the prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant. Lisette Morel received her Master in Fine Arts at the Tyler School of Art, Temple University and her Bachelor of Arts at Rutgers University.
Júlia Sodré is a Brazilian artist and writer based in Portland, Oregon. Her work is confessional and driven by how trauma, family, and neurodiversity impact her interpersonal relationships. Sodré obsessively investigates her identity as a chronically lonely individual as she attempts to comprehend what it means to perpetually mourn the wasted potential for human connection.
In the past couple of years, Sodré has focused on how intergenerational trauma is permeated by culture and religion while also exploring the contemporary individual’s compulsion to confess. Within this range of ideas, the artist explores how to best navigate the fine line between privacy and self-censorship. Such subjects have been explored through multiple media, including video, cyanotype, collage, paper-making, and web-based projects.
Júlia Sodré holds a BA in Visual Arts from the University of Brasília and is graduating in the Spring of 2023 from the MFA in Contemporary Art program at Portland State University.
Manu Torres is an artist based in Portland, Oregon. His floral arrangements often involve a dialogue between the artificial and the natural, incorporating paper, fabric, paint, and feathers to imitate and exaggerate natural beauty in a hyperreal way. His work has been featured in Elle Decore magazine, who said, "Manu's exotic floral cocktails express the fullness of the Baroque style with a modern touch.“ He was also named by Domino magazine as 1 of the 4 new floral designers to follow. His solo exhibition at Russo Lee Gallery was an ArtForum Critic's Pick. His most recent show was at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City.
