Robin Corbo of Cicada Ink Studios

Wire Interview with Kari Norgaard

2011-01-25T21:51:00.000-08:00

Even as the science of global warming gets stronger, fewer Americans believe it’s real. In some ways, it’s nearly as jarring a disconnect as enduring disbelief in evolution or carbon dating. And according to Kari Marie Norgaard, a Whitman College sociologist who’s studied public attitudes towards climate science, we’re in denial.

“Our response to disturbing information is very complex. We negotiate it. We don’t just take it in and respond in a rational way,” said Norgaard.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change declared in 2007 that greenhouse gases had reached levels not seen in 650,000 years, and were rising rapidly as a result of people burning fossil fuel. Because these gases trap the sun’s heat, they would — depending on human energy habits — heat Earth by an average of between 1.5 and 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit by century’s end. Even a midrange rise would likely disrupt the planet’s climate, producing droughts and floods, acidified oceans, altered ecosystems and coastal cities drowned by rising seas.

“If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future,” said Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, when the report was released. “This is the defining moment.”

Studies published since then have only strengthened the IPCC’s predictions, or suggested they underestimate future warming. But as world leaders gather in Copenhagen to discuss how to avoid catastrophic climate change, barely half the U.S. public thinks carbon pollution could warm Earth. That’s 20 percent less than in 2007, and lower than at any point in the last 12 years. In a Pew Research Center poll, Americans ranked climate dead last out of 20 top issues, behind immigration and trade policy.

Wired.com talked to Norgaard about the divide between science and public opinion.

Wired.com: Why don’t people seem to care?

Kari Norgaard: On the one hand, there have been extremely well-organized, well-funded climate-skeptic campaigns. Those are backed by Exxon Mobil in particular, and the same PR firms who helped the tobacco industry (.pdf) deny the link between cancer and smoking are involved with magnifying doubt around climate change.

That’s extremely important, but my work has been in a different area. It’s been about people who believe in science, who aren’t out to question whether science has a place in society.

Wired.com: People who are coming at the issue in good faith, you mean. What’s their response?

Norgaard: Climate change is disturbing. It’s something we don’t want to think about. So what we do in our everyday lives is create a world where it’s not there, and keep it distant.

For relatively privileged people like myself, we don’t have to see the impact in everyday life. I can read about different flood regimes in Bangladesh, or people in the Maldives losing their islands to sea level rise, or highways in Alaska that are altered as permafrost changes. But that’s not my life. We have a vast capacity for this.

Wired.com: How is this bubble maintained?

Norgaard: In order to have a positive sense of self-identity and get through the day, we’re constantly being selective of what we think about and pay attention to. To create a sense of a good, safe world for ourselves, we screen out all kinds of information, from where food comes from to how our clothes our made. When we talk with our friends, we talk about something pleasant.

Wired.com: How does this translate into skepticism about climate change?

Norgaard: It’s a paradox. Awareness has increased. There’s been a lot more information available. This is much more in our face. And this is where the psychological defense mechanisms are relevant, especially when coupled with the fact that other people, as we’ve lately seen with the e-mail attacks, are systematically trying to create the sense that there’s doubt.

If I don’t want to believe that climate change is true, that my lifestyle and high carbon emissions are causing devastation, then it’s convenient to say that it doesn’t.

Wired.com: Is that what this comes down to — not wanting to confront our own roles?

Norgaard: I think so. And the reason is that we don’t have a clear sense of what we can do. Any community organizer knows that if you want people to respond to something, you need to tell them what to do, and make it seem do-able. Stanford University psychologist Jon Krosnick has studied this, and showed that people stop paying attention to climate change when they realize there’s no easy solution. People judge as serious only those problems for which actions can be taken.

Another factor is that we no longer have a sense of permanence. Another psychologist, Robert Lifton, wrote about what the existence of atomic bombs did to our psyche. There was a sense that the world could end at any moment.

Global warming is the same in that it threatens the survival of our species. Psychologists tell us that it’s very important to have a sense of the continuity of life. That’s why we invest in big monuments and want our work to stand after we die and have our family name go on.

That sense of continuity is being ruptured. But climate change has an added aspect that is very important. The scientists who built nuclear bombs felt guilt about what they did. Now the guilt is real for the broader public.

Wired.com: So we don’t want to believe climate change is happening, feel guilty that it is, and don’t know what to do about it? So we pretend it’s not a problem?

Norgaard: Yes, but I don’t want to make it seem crass. Sometimes people who are very empathetic are less likely to help in certain situations, because they’re so disturbed by it. The human capacity of empathy is really profound, and that’s part of our weakness. If we were more callous, then we’d approach it in a more straightforward way. It may be a weakness of our capacity as sentient beings to cope with this problem.

Image: Greenpea

Listening to the book Break Through

2011-01-09T10:26:00.000-08:00

Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility

Published in 2007

This is a book on CD written by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger that is a follow up to a self published essay titled “The Death of Environmentalism” that was released in 2004. The authors Shellenberger & Nordhaus argue that the mainstream environmental movement is ill equipped to face the massive global challenges of our day, in particular climate: for example, climate change, fuel economy standards, and the US auto industry's high health care and pension costs and underinvestment in research and development cannot be dealt with separately as if they were unrelated.

"The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World" - a call to framing issues under the umbrella of sustainability without using the term - is meant to shake up all who are working on issues such as water quality or climate change and have fewer accomplishments to show than they would want.

The follow up book Break Through is described by its authors as: “What the new ecological crises demand is not that we constrain human power but unleash it. Overcoming global warming demands not pollution control but rather a new kind of economic development. We cannot tear down the old energy economy before building the new one. The invention of the Internet and microchips, the creation of the space program, the birth of the European Union - those breakthroughs were only made possible by big and bold investments in the future."

"The era of small thinking is over, the authors claim. We must go beyond small-bore environmentalism and interest-group liberalism to create a politics focused as much on uncommon greatness as the common good."

"Break Through offers more than policy prescriptions and demands more than casual consideration. With its challenge to conventional environmentalist, conservative, and progressive thought, and its proposal for a politics of possibility, Break Through will influence the political debate for years to come."

While listening to the first of 8 disks, I found the book to offer views of the environmental movement that I’d not considered. A movement that was essentially founded in the 1960’s frustrates the authors. During this time photographs from space were taken showing Earth as a small and isolated part of the Universe, a notion sharply contrasting the human perspective of it being everything and everywhere in our lives. Photographs of environmental calamity, such as the Cuyahoga River catching on fire in Ohio made front page of Time magazine and fostered a notion that environmental awareness and action are fostered in information dissemination through images.

The authors argue that this form of actions is relatively impotent, and what will spurn environmental change is human society having their material needs met, and after such affluence then their ability to work towards innovative environmental technologies will be what brings on a new era of sustainability.

The authors use the Cuyahoga River fire as an example. They state that the occurrence of a 25-minute fire in 1969 sparked a national reaction to the ill effects of river pollution. However, the river had been catching on fire for decades prior to 1969, and causing much more damage, personal injury, and death. The authors state the reason why the fire of 1969 played the national role that it did was that the country was in a state of affluence unique to generation following World War II. In the past when the river caught on fire the local population was more invested in building a sewer system to diminish cholera then reacting to a flammable rivers. The photograph Time Magazine used to illustrated the fire was actually taken in 1952, because the 1969 fire was put out before anyone documented it.

I realize that as an artist I have an invested belief that images can cause cultural awareness and change to bring us to a new era of sustainability. This book challenges this notion.

Passage I found significant in Danse Macabre

2011-01-06T23:44:00.001-08:00

These are passages from Stephen King's book Danse Macabre that pertain to my research.

Danse Macabre is a film and literary critique of the horror genre from 1950 (and before) to 1980

Danse Macabre by Stephen King

Page 132

So, if I’m going to keep this discussion in order, I’ll keep coming back to the concept of value-of art, of social merit. If horror movies have redeeming social merit, it is because of that ability to form liaisons between the real and unreal-to provide subtexts. And because of their mass appeal, these subtext are often culture-wide.

Page 144-5

The horror film as political polemic, then.

We’ve mentioned a couple films of this stripe already [Earth vs. Flying Saucers, Invasion of the Body Snatchers] both from the fifties. All the best films of this political type seem to come from that period-although we may be coming full circle again…

If movies are the dreams of the mass culture-one film critic, in fact, has called watching a movie “dreaming with one’s eyes open”-and if horror movies are the nightmares of the mass culture, then many of these fifties horrors express America’s coming-to-terms with the possibility of nuclear annihilation over political differences.

Page 147

The Thing is the first movie of the fifties to offer us the scientist in the role of the Appeaser, that creature who for reasons either craven or misguided, would open the gates to the Garden of Eden and let all the evils fly in (as opposed, let us say, to those Mad Labs proprietors of the thirties, who were more than willing to open Pandora’s Box and let all the evils fly out-a major distinction, although the end results are the same). That scientists should be so constantly vilified in the techno-horror films of the fifties-a decade that was apparently dedicated to the idea of turning out a whole marching corps of men and women in white lab coats-is perhaps not so surprising when we remember that it was science which opened those same gates so that the atomic bomb could be brought into Eden-first by itself and then trundled on missile carriers. The average Jane or Joe on the street during those spooky eight or nine years that followed the surrender of Japan had extremely schizoid feelings about science and scientists-recognizing the need for them and at the same time loathing the things they had let in forever. On the one hand, there was their pal, that net little all-around guy, Reddy Kilowatt; on the other hand, before getting into the first reel of The Thing down at your local theater, you could watch newsreel footage as an Army mockup of a town JUST LIKE YOURS was vaporized in a nuclear furnace.

Page 154

In Them! it is nuclear testing at White Sands that has produced the giant ants; the Cold War has spawned dat ole binary debbil Colossus…

Page 159

Similarly, it is difficult to remember in any gut way the fears that came with those boom years of atomic technology twenty-five years ago. The technology itself was strictly Appollonian; as Apollonian was nice-guy Larry Talbot, who “said his prayers at night.” The atom was not split by a gibbering Colin Clive or Boris Karloff in some Eastern European Mad Lab; it was done by a lot of guys at Oak Ridge and White Sands who wore tweed jackets and smoked Luckies, guys who worried about dandruff and psoriasis and whether or not they could afford a new car and how to get rid of the goddamn crabgrass on the lawn. Splitting the atom, producing fission, opening that door on a new world that the old scientist speaks of at the end of Them! (“We have opened a door on an unimaginable power,” the old scientists says gloomily, “and there will be no closing it now.”) These things were accomplished on a business-as-usual basis.

People understood this and could live with it )fifties science books extolled the wonderful world the Friendly Atom would produce, a world refueled by nice safe nuclear reactors, and grammar school kids got free comic books produced by the power companies), but they suspected and heard the hairy, simian face on the other side of the coin as well: they feared that the atom might be, for a number of reasons both technological and political, essentially uncontrollable. These feelings of deep unease came out in movies such as The Beginning of the End, Them! Tarantula, The Incredible Shrinking Man, The H-Men, and Four D man.

Page 170

We see horror and humor exist side by side….playing off one another

Page 172

Previous to now, we have been discussing horror movies with subtexts which try to link real (if sometimes free-floating) anxieties to the nightmare fears of the horror films. But now, with this invocation from “Hansel and Grettel” that most cautionary of nursery tales, let us put out even this dim light of rationality and discuss a few of those films whose effects go considerably deeper, past the rational and into those fears which seem universal.

Page 255

This is the opening to the book The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.

“No living organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.

Page 318

It’s worth noting that in The Shrinking Man we’re back to the old radioactive blues again, and to the idea that horror fiction helps us to externalize in symbolic form whatever is really troubling us….Matheson is doing more in The Shrinking Man than having radioactive nightmares; the title of Matheson’s novel along suggests bad dreams of a more Freudian nature. Concerning The Body Snatchers, we’ll remember Richard Gid Powers saying that Miles Bennell’s victory over pods is a direct result of Miles’s resistance against depersonalization, his fierce individualism, and his defense of more traditional American Values. These same things can be said about the Matheson novel, with one important variation. It seems tome that while Powers is right in Suggesting the The Body Snatchers is in large part about the depersonalization, even the annihilation of the free personality in our society, The Shrinking Man is a story about the free personality’s loss of power and growing impotency in a world increasingly controlled by machines, red tape, and a balance of terror where future wars are planned with one eye always cocked toward an “acceptable kill ratio.”

Reading List for my MFA Thesis Paper

2011-01-06T23:16:00.000-08:00

These are the books I gathered together that are the basis of my literary research for my MFA Thesis.

Title:

Danse Macabre by Stephen King

The End of Nature by Bill McKibben

Conversations Before the End of Time by Suzi Gablik

A Century of Stop Motion Animation by Ray Harryhausen

I Was a Cold War Monster; Horror Films, Eroticism and the Cold War Imagination

by Cyndy Hendershot

Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950's by Mark Jancovich

Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Coldwar American Science Fiction and the Roots of Postmodernism, 1946-1964 by M. Keith Booker

Paranoia, the Bomb and 1950's Science Fiction Films by Cyndy Hendershot

Rats by Robert Sullivan

Trickster Lives: Culture and Myth in American Fiction by Jeanne Campbell Reesman

Unsuspecting Souls: The Disappearance of the Human Being by Barry Sanders

20,000 Leagues Under The Sea by Jules Vern

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Third Installation for MFA Show: Mock Diorama

2010-11-22T15:39:00.000-08:00

The third installation I want to have in my MFA thesis show is the mock diorama I created and exhibited earlier in the year. I will have the painted canvas mural stretched on the exhibition frame I used during Open Engagement last year. There will be hay, dried grasses, and various props used to give the appearance of a museum diorama representing the African Savannah. The costumes will be hung from a fashion rack. The masks will be hung on the wall from wooden plaques cut to look like mounts for hunting trophies. This will reference the hunting and poaching of these animals by people.

Audience members will be invited to dress up as these characters and act out various scenarios comprised of predators and prey. There will be photographs exhibited close by of past participants interacting with the installation. I will have empty portfolio books left out with an artist statement than any pictures taken in the show of participation with the objects, can be texted or e-mailed to me. I will print them out on a daily basis and exhibit the pictures as part of the gallery show in these empty books. I am researching ways to have a printer included on site for people to instantly print out and display photographs. This will include pictures of people manipulating the squid and wearing the fish masks.

Dead Fish in my MFA Thesis Show

2010-11-22T15:02:00.000-08:00

The second installation will have some cross over with the squid. I want to make a series of masks created to look like dead fish. The fish heads will be variations of different endangered fish of Oregon, such as chub, suckers, and different kinds of trout. I will create costumes that go along with these fish heads.

They will be wearable plastic bags with fish skeletons on them. When I find fish washed up on shore they typically have bones that are picked clean but a fair about of meat and skin on their heads. When the mask and bags are worn together they will give a similar appearance. When the bag-skeleton-costumes are worn by people they will reference plastic pollution in water as well as body bags.

I will exhibit these with photographs taken

of people wearing the costumes. I envision people dressed up in the masks and bags, laying in shallow water, like fish that have died in rivers. The masks will be made available for viewers to wear in the gallery. I will also invite them to wear the masks while manipulating the giant squid.

I will also create a video of people wearing the fish masks while dancing and "puppeting" the squid sculpture in shallow water in the ocean. This will be projected in the Autzen gallery during my MFA show.

Squid Installation idea for my MFA Thesis Show

2010-11-22T14:44:00.000-08:00

The malleable squid sculpture that I proposed for the RACC PDX Building installation will be created regardless of my acceptance and installed in my MFA show. Part of the striking aesthetic of the squid is that it is very large and it is out of place, in a gallery instead of the ocean or an aquarium. Many of the monster movies I am intrigued with are films with regular animals that are blown up into a massive scale and are outside of their natural placement in nature, such as It Came From Beneath the Sea, Them!, Tarantula, Black Scorpion, and Attack of the Giant Leeches. My giant squid will beckon audience participation by having limbs that can be contorted into various positions, hence the composition of the creature is based on participation.

To further explore the idea of monster as out of place creature, I will have photographs of the squid taken from around town exhibited along with the squid. Some ideas I have are the squid wrapped around the statue of Abraham Lincoln in the South Park Blocks, and the Squid on the Max out in Gresham. Part of this also references the massive amount of squid found outside of the typical migration root due to the rising temperature in the ocean and lack of oxygen found in their typical deep-sea dwellings. When the squid are out of place, it sounds the alarm of climate change. By inviting participants to interact with the squid, it references the control and impact humans have on the creature. It also creates an interactive environment to hold an audience’s attention longer than if they were passive observers of the creature.

Influences on my MFA Thesis and Show

2010-11-22T13:58:00.001-08:00

Last year my MFA Candace proposal was center around using art as a facilitating device for conflict resolution. My interests, research, and experiences have diverged greatly from this topic since last spring. The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico broke my heart deeply shortly before the birth of my daughter this summer. Rivers contaminated beyond repair were front-page news from toxic spills in Eastern Europe as well. An intense grief at watching the onslaught of human created “unnatural disasters” was bizzarly juxtopozed with the excitement I held for the future in raising my kid. I am sporadically informed of environmental states of affairs, and when I am I tend to freak the fuck out. Earlier this year Barry Sanders came to speak as one of our guest lectures. I wanted to become more aware of his works and writings before having a studio visit with him. I read Green Zone: The Environmental Cost of Militarism. This was by far the most terrifying piece of literature I’ve ever read, and it charts out how in the pursuit of war we have flung the earth so much further into climate change we have little hope of ever stopping the resulting doom. One thing that struck me about Barry’s visit is what a happy man he is. He is funny, he is light hearted, and he has a large capacity to love, learn, and teach. He researches and reports on the most depressing topics I can possibly think of, and yet his smile is brighter than that of most people a third of his age.

Earlier this quarter I went to a lecture by Kari Norgaard. She is a Whitman College sociologist who has studied public attitudes towards climate science. She specializes in the areas of environmental justice and the sociology of emotions. The title of her lecture was imagining the Real: Climate Change, Denial and Everyday Life. A synopsis of the lecture is: Climate scientist may have identified global warming as the most important issue of our time, but it has taken over 20 years for the problem to penetrate the public discourse in even the most superficial manner. Most sociological explanations for public "apathy" emphasize lack of information, incorrect mental models or lack of concern. Norgaard analyzes the collective denial and resistance to disturbing information that actually inhibits action.

I am absolutely guilty of every point she made of why people lack the motivation to take action against climate change and environmental catastrophe. I realized that my “it’s too much I can deal with this valve” shuts off the way it did when I read Barry Sander’s Green Zone. However, when environmental issues inform my art, I gain a kind of simultaneous distance and closeness that permits me to learn, understand, and comprehend ecological issues in a different way. I want to learn more, as it is informing my art. The freak out valve doesn’t seem to shut off so quickly. Perhaps I can take in the grueling information and still have a joy that is comparable to that of which I saw with Barry Sanders. After all, the research Barry did was specifically for his book, and then was used for his pedagogy. He used his art of writing as a medium to understand and convey topics that are too much for most of us to wrap our heads around.

I am using my interest in image making and object fabrication as a way of participating with social ecological conversation that is the utmost important one of my generations. However, the work that will result in this will be filtered through my experience, humor, playfulness, symbols, myths, and interests. The result is a playground of crazy animal characters that are the actors and objects in which I want to cast in my story of what is happening in this world. I have been researching 1950’s B movies, which have used a similar tacit. In the movie THEM! A movie responds to the social fears of the atomic age by creating a film about giant ants that eat people. Makes sense to me.

Questions for the audience for the Q & A portion of the November 22 presentation

2010-11-22T12:12:00.000-08:00

Can you understand the themes shared between the three projects that I’m proposing for my MFA Show?

Does audience participation contribute to the substance of the work, or is it more of a side garnish?

What artists, books, or films would you recommend I look into as research?

Fall finall presentation 11 22

2010-11-22T08:14:00.001-08:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Fall finall presentation 11 22

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Notes from Fall 2010 PPT Review presentation

2010-11-22T08:09:00.000-08:00

Slide 1. Robin Corbo Fall 2010 Review

Slide 2. This is an image of the Portland Building space where the Regional Arts and Culture Council curates site specific installations that are available to professional and student artist. I turned in a proposed installation for 2011.

Slide 3. My proposed project was to create a giant squid sculpture that would have opposable tentacles that were accessible for viewers to manipulate.

Slide 4. I created a quick sculpture of a squid from a muslin blanket, newspaper, and paint. This was done in part to help illustrate my idea of the RACC PDX building proposal during my studio visit with Clare Rojas.

Slide 5. Clare suggested that I create a squid that could be used in a stop motion animation to show the RACC panel different positions that the squid sculpture could be manipulated into. I created this from wire mesh, aluminum armature wire, cloth, paper mache, newspaper, glue, paint, and bubble wrap.

Slide 6. A big inspiration for the squid sculpture was to create a piece of art that was accessible to children. There is a day care center in the PDX Building close to the installation site and I like the idea of having an installation that the kids could play with.

Slide 7. I have been researching large mobile sculptures and puppets. Here is an image from Hear of the Beast, a group in Minneapolis who create giant puppets.

Slide 8. Three years ago I went to the Museum of Natural History to view an exhibit of fantasy creatures and their origins. The Kraken sculpture was and remains a favorite of mine. I grew up in Washington DC and would frequent the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. The dioramas and large-scale models played a big role in my fascination of animal replicas of all sizes and historical genres.

Slide 9. This is a picture of Head On by Cai Guo-Qiang. The wolves look so real, you'd think they were sad products of road kill and a hard-working taxidermist; instead, they were handcrafted in a no less meticulous fashion they are fabricated from painted sheepskins and stuffed with hay and metal wires, with plastic lending contour to their faces and marbles for eyes. "Seen from afar, the leaping wolf pack forms an arc full of force and power, their fierce courage and spirit of warrior camaraderie seemingly serving as a reminder to people: humanity is easily blinded by a kind of collective mentality and action, and is destined to repeat such error to an almost unbelievable degree."

Slide 10. One of my literary references during this quarter has been 20, 000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Slide 11. Another reference has been Moby Dick.

Slide 12. I have always had a great interest in beautiful shapes and images rendered from anatomy, physiology, and scientific illustration. In my investigation into creating art environments and situations where the viewer can interact with contrived notions of the natural world I will be incorporating aesthetics of dead fish.

Slide 13. In most of my projects I reference animals that are located globally, in this project I’m interested in regional fish.

Slide 14. When finding dead fish on the beach or in rivers they usually have skeletons picked clean, but with a fair about of skin and meat on the skulls. I will create dead fish head masks that reference fish that are threatened or endangered in Oregon like suckers, chub, and various kinds of trout.

Slide 15. The costume to go along with the mask will be a large plastic bag with a fish skeleton drawn or painted on it. This will reference plastic in our rivers as well as dead people in body bags.

Slide 16. Alicia Escott is an artist, of whom I’ve been influenced by, with her series of drawings of animals on plastic bags with undertones of environmental and social issues.

Slide 17. Any project with trout masks must tip their hat to one of the greatest album covers of all time, Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica

Slide 18. A project I intend to develop further is my mock diorama installation I made last year.

Slide 19. Ideas I was working with for this project last spring included taxidermy, relationships between predators and their prey, and people masquerading as animals in a land far away. These very animals are reeling from the encroachment of humans in their natural habitats.

Slide 20. I intend to install this installation in my MFA Show. Here is a detail of the painted mural of the savannah that is part of the Mock Diorama exhibit.

Slide 21. When viewing museum dioramas of animals, both predators and their prey, the fact that the animals are there in the first place stem from the fact that humans hunted them. As a way of referencing this point in my project the masks that I will uses will be exhibited on a wall mounted wooden plaques meant to look like mounts for hunting trophies. This is an example of the kind trophy I want to emulate.

Slide 22. Example of how this would look with my work.

Slide 23. An artist whose work includes predators and how humans impact them negatively is Roger Peet, a member of the Just Seeds Collective, who will be one of our lecturing artists next quarter.

Slide 24. This is a picture of him working with Pete Yahnke on a large linocut print that is a responsive piece of art to a large print created by the Tari Padi art collective in Indonesia addressing the dangers of mining and piping Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG).

Slide 25. The top image is the print from Tari Padi, the bottom is the print created by the three artists of just seeds. This project involved Amy Harwood from BARK, in creating resistance from the LNG Pipeline to go through and demolish parts of the MT Hood National Forest, as well as private farmland. I was on a friend’s farm when Amy, Pete, and other artists and organizers checked out the land and heard from the farmers how destructive it would be to have the pipeline installed in their region. After the Just Seeds Print was completed I had the opportunity to assist in the printing of it on large sheets of linen in Roger Peet’s studio.

Slide 26. In my own art practice I like to use undertones of ecology and social politics and display them through playful and often whimsical imagery. After working with Roger and Amy I became interested in how art could be used in directly communicating environmental and political content.

Slide 27. Over a month ago I started to plan a mural for BARK with Amy and am now currently in the process of writing grants to fund raise the project.

Slide 28. In the book Danse Macabre, by Stephen King, he wrote; “If movies are the dreams of the mass-culture-one film critic, in fact, has called watching a movie “dreaming with one’s eyes open’-and if horror movie are the nightmares of the mass culture, then many of these fifties horrors express America’s coming-to-terms with the possibility of nuclear annihilation over political differences.” I’m interested in applying this idea to art. I believe that we are at a tipping point ecologically that the ideas and imagery that appear in my work are from “dreaming with my eyes open, embarking on the nightmare of massive extinction and contamination.” It is not my mission to create work that clearly articulates an environmental manifesto, or breaks down the science of climatology. In the work I’m creating for my MFA show I’m interested in the dream and nightmare-scape itself.

Stencil Rough for Mural Design

2010-01-09T22:40:00.000-08:00

Evolution of the Rooster into the Pheonix

2010-01-09T22:34:00.000-08:00

Fire Pheonix Project

2010-01-09T22:30:00.000-08:00

Lecture Portrait Project

2010-01-09T22:18:00.000-08:00

Lecture Notes from James Yood

2010-01-09T22:14:00.001-08:00

Lecture Notes from Laurel Nakadate

2010-01-09T22:07:00.000-08:00

Lecture Notes from Kenneth Goldsmith

2010-01-09T22:03:00.000-08:00

Lecture Notes from Joural of Aesthetics and Protest

2010-01-09T21:59:00.000-08:00

Notes from the Joseph Park Lecture

2010-01-09T21:42:00.000-08:00

My Notes from Mel Zeigler

2010-01-09T20:16:00.000-08:00

Notes from Leonie Guyer

2010-01-09T20:06:00.000-08:00

Lecture Notes and Portrait Project

2010-01-09T19:56:00.000-08:00

For all the artists that lecture at PSU, I take art notes and draw their portrait.

October Art Spark Hosted by Portland Mural Defense 2009

2009-10-31T13:53:00.000-07:00

The Regional Arts & Culture Council is the event coordinator for Art Spark, a monthly mingling of artists of all sort to meet, discuss, blather, applaud & plot the growth of the Arts in Portland.

Art Spark was born out of the Creative Capacity Initiative; a conversation to address making creativity and innovation a stronger regional value by assessing our region’s strengths and weaknesses, framing problems and brainstorming solutions.

Portland Mural Defense and Friends hosted October's Art Spark at Zaytoons! There was a running slide show, showcasing 100+ murals from around Portland, with all the muralists in attendance.

The first pic above is a shot of the crowd. The second is of Robin Dunitz. She is a mural historian and author who moved to Portland, OR a few years ago. She co wrote with James Prigoff Street Gallery: Guide to over 1000 Los Angeles Murals, and Walls of Heritage, Walls of Pride: African American Murals. Both with Prigoff and on her own she has published mural postcard books for works specific to California, The Los Angeles region, and New England. At the Art Spark event she had a book release party for her newest book, Portland Walls. I was very
honored to have the Women Making History Mural in Portland featured in it.

The third picture is of Joanne Oleksiak and Joe Cotter. They are two of the most amazing art activists I've ever had the pleasure to meet. They are some of the founding members Portland Mural Defense. Portland Mural Defense is a not-for-profit civic association dedicated to providing information about legal activity in support of public art and murals.

The Hulk's Last Day 2009

2009-10-31T13:05:00.000-07:00

The Incredible Hulks last day was a very sad one.
I'd really fallen in love with this bird, and had never really experienced killing something I've loved before. I guess that's a good thing, huh?
It was Sunday, October 25th. I had gotten up early that morning to work on drawing in my studio. I had made plans to draw for a while, kill the Hulk, and then my wife Katie and I were going to drive the body down to Boring, Oregon to take the rooster to an affordable taxidermist. His operation is called Buck and Bull Taxidermy. Classy.
They expected the rooster at 3:30 pm.
Everything started to go as planned. When it was about 1:00 pm I went outside and coaxed the hulk out of his coop. For being the most cuddly of all the chickens he is by far the hardest to catch.
As soon I got him in my arms I started bawling. I thought I was mentally prepared to kill the hulk, but when the time came I was a flood with tears.
I had watching chicken slaughters that do not involve beheading on YouTube.
The one I wanted to emulate I found to be surprisingly gentle. The fellow in the video says hello to his mother and family (in Spanish) and then proceeds to lower the hens head down to the ground, letting all the blood rush to the head and hence pacifying the bird.
Then he laid a pipe over her neck, and pulled up on the body. There was a soft "pop", a little wing flapping, and the hen was dead.
This seemed the best way to go, as I didn't think I could kill a bird with my bare hands.
Katie took a few final pics of me holding the Hulk, and then I turned him upside down to let the blood start rushing to his head. After a while I lay his head down on the ground and laid an old broom handle across his neck. By then our roommate Susan had come home and was on the back porch watching the production and lending moral support.
I stepped on the broom handle to apply pressure to the neck of the rooster. He let out the most horrible gurgle and started to flap his wings violently. It occurred to me that this isn't the way it happened on YouTube. I figured I hadn't pulled up on the body hard enough to break the neck. So I pulled harder. Too hard.
For anyone who attempts to kill their own beloved chicken I have an important word of warning, their heads come off a lot easier than you may anticipate.
While the Hulk's head was still attached by his esophagus, the feathers, skin, and spine had completely detached from the body.
All sorrow dedicated to loss of my dear pet was now replaced by a panic that I had completely fucked up the very body I was planning on spending $240.00 to get taxidermied.
All the taxidermy information I had found online stated do NOT separate the head of a kill before sending it of to be prepared. Fuck.
With shaky hands and bloody shoes I called up Joe, the taxidermist in Boring, OR.
"Huh, Joe? Yeah, hi. I have a little problem."
I told him that during the slaughter I had accidentally beheaded the bird, and asked if there was any way he could still perform the taxidermy.
"Why didn't you just club him over the head?"
"Next time," I assured him.
"Well, that'll cost an extra couple of bucks now that I gotta sew the head back on."
Joe was kind and lacked any judgement for my botched execution. He asked for an extra $20.00 for the post mortem plastic surgery that was now required. I told him I felt that was more than fair.
I spent the next hour arranging the Hulk and photographing him still life set ups. Katie and Susan helped me experiment with different compositions I could use has visual references for paints. I took a lot of pics of just the Hulk since he would not be resting with the winter quash in my studio for the next few weeks.

The Beginning of Still Life with Rooster 2009

2009-10-24T13:57:00.000-07:00

I had a studio visit from Horia Bobia, Erik Geshchke, Pat Boas, and visiting artist Joseph Park. A unanimous theme in my critiques was that I need to work on creating a sense of atmospheric perspective, depth, consistency with a light source, and color values. Even though I had a lot of excitement towards starting a new design for a mural, it has become very apparent that at this stage I really need to work on my fundamentals. It's a little hard for me to let go of my attachment to the fire and water mural, but I know that this is the time that I really need to let myself practice the art steps and rules I seem to have skipped in my education prior to coming to PSU. In the meantime, my rooster The Incredible Hulk has started cock-a-doodle-dooing his heart out. Up until now he has been quite as a hen. Well it seems the little man just went through a puberty sorts and is letting the whole world know that he's grown a pair. Sadly, there is a strict 'no rooster in the city limits' regulation in Portland. Plus, we have neighbors who would be all to glad to call the city on us for a violation of this regulation. Hard to blame them when the Hulk is singing is lungs out at the crack of dawn. After checking with friends and family with land out in the sticks, we have come to the conclusion that there is no foster care out there for a loud cock. We've had this situation before, and the previous rooster was slaughtered and frozen for a future dinner. The Hulk just seems far to beautiful to end up in the stew pot. What I have decided to do is have him taxidermied, so I can use him as an art study for years to come. Before he gets sent out to be stuffed, I will use his freshly killed body in a still life inspired by Luis Melendez, Circle of Jan Weenix, and Edward Ladell. Example of their still lifes are featured above. It was recommended that I practice my drawing and painting from life. By adding the Hulk to the still life I can continue my bird studies and work from a contrived set up for a while. Perhaps this can indeed prepare me in the future for the fire and water mural. By then I hope to be much better at creating space and depth. Until then it's back to the drawing board for me, and the killing block for the Hulk.

Painting of the Incredible Hulk 2009

2009-10-24T13:54:00.001-07:00

Here is a painted study I did of the Incredible Hulk from one of the photographs mentioned earlier.

Photo shoot with the Incredible Hulk 2009

2009-10-24T13:38:00.000-07:00

To do research for my fire and water mural I started to study the shape and feather patterns of my rooster named (by an eight year old) The Incredible Hulk. His beautiful red and yellow feather seemed like an ideal model for a fire bird. I took many pictures of him, in various poses, to capture a sense of a phoenix in motion. I began painting and drawing the hulk in various positions.

Fire and Water Installation 2008

2009-10-24T13:18:00.000-07:00

The mural I was excited to create next was based on the elements of fire and water. I wanted to create imagery associated with these two elements. The characters depicted would be base on myths from around the world. Creatures such a sea serpent, mermaid, and other leviathan like characters would inhabit the water world. I would design it to intertwined with a fiery realm. The flames would be be home to a large phoenix like bird, and perhaps include fire breathing dragons. I'd also mix in natural elements, such as different kinds of fish for water and moths for fire. I wanted introduce a mixture of different mediums, such as cast relief sculpture, ceramics, and mosaic. This was the grand scheme cooking in my brain for my first year in the MFA program at PSU. I played around with these ideas in an installation I did at the Launch Pad Gallery show Transcending States in December of 2008.

Torantsin Renace by Colette Crutcher

2009-10-16T00:01:00.000-07:00

I am absolutely in love with this mural by the artist Colette Crutcher titled Torantisn Renace. It is located in the Castro neighborhood in San Francisco, CA and was painted in 1998. It really inspired me to enroll in an MFA program to have focused time to create a mural of my own creation, rather than one fueled by community imagination. I want to learn and implement mixed media in my murals, including relief sculpture, glazed ceramic tile, and mosaic.

Finished MIKE PROGRAM Mural 2009

2009-10-15T23:44:00.000-07:00

Here are pictures of the finished MIKE Program Mural. It's 100 ft long, and near impossible to capture in one full photograph, especially with the series of trees planted in front of it. The pictures here, from top to bottom, represent the mural in it's entirety from left to right. In addition to a solid crew of interns, we had over 5 dozen volunteers working on painting this 2,000 square ft mural painted in the time span of two months.

Mural Crew for the MIKE PROGRAM MURAL 2009

2009-10-15T23:27:00.001-07:00

This is the amazing crew of interns I worked with during July and August of 2009 to paint the MIKE Program mural. This is an article written in the Oregonian that documents more of the details of the project:

MIKE Program mural in Northeast Portland a memorial with a message

By Anna Griffin, The Oregonian

August 28, 2009, 5:00PM

Bruce Ely/The Oregonian

The MIKE Program, founded in the name of the late Dr. Mike Hartnett, helped craft a message about healthy kidneys for the subject of a mural on an oft-tagged wall of a Northeast Portland dialysis clinic.

You're probably sick of mural stories. After all, there are a million murals in our painted city, with plenty of new ones on the way now that Portland leaders have seen the cultural light and loosened restrictions on what business owners can paint on their property.

More is better, as this tale illustrates.

At Dr. Michael Hartnett's funeral nine years ago, friends and former colleagues approached his wife to ask an important, if untimely, question: How are we going to honor Mike's memory?

Hartnett was a nephrologist at Legacy Good Samaritan Hospital & Medical Center and the Northwest Renal Clinic. He died of lymphoma at 58 after spending his career working to promote healthy lifestyles in the Pacific Northwest.

After some time grieving, his wife, Dr. Cheryl Neal, planned to create a "living memorial" to her husband: a nonprofit that would work to guard against chronic kidney disease, particularly in African American and Latino children from poor and broken homes.

Volunteers for the MIKE Program -- named after Hartnett but also short for Multicultural Integrated Kidney Education Program -- talk to school health classes about nutrition and exercise, take students on field trips to hospitals and dialysis clinics, and provide mentors and career guidance.

"You ask kids what their biggest health need is, and it's relationships," Neal said. "They don't have good health role models."

The DSI NE Portland Dialysis Clinic, at Northeast Seventh Avenue and Hancock Street, works with MIKE. Last year, clinic administrators approached the nonprofit with their own problem: Graffiti artists were repeatedly taking advantage of the clinic's big western wall, an expanse of white that was a magnet for gang-related tagging.

The Regional Arts and Culture Council, a nonprofit that shepherds public investment in the arts, hooked MIKE up with Robin Corbo, a muralist whose work includes the painting outside the Community Cycling Center on Alberta Street and one honoring women on Interstate Avenue.

She met with students at the Portland Occupational Industrialization Center, an alternative high school in North Portland, to brainstorm. Worksystems Inc. helped recruit interns and paid them minimum-wage salaries to do the painting alongside Corbo and volunteers.

The total cost: about $20,000 in public and private grants. The finished product: a 2,000-square-foot sunrise-to-sunset tour of all the ways young people can help protect their kidneys.

The characters bike, walk, sing, dance, snowboard on Mount Hood, practice karate and enjoy a picnic of healthy food. There's definite attitude: The sun, for example, sports sunglasses, a handlebar mustache, a goatee and the look of a guy in on the joke. The artists modeled many of the faces after students in the MIKE Program.

Everyone involved gets something: For the student interns, summer jobs and real-world experience. For the clinic and neighborhood, a splash of color and graffiti deterrent. For Neal, a memorial to her husband. For the rest of us, the mural, which will be dedicated at 4 p.m. Sunday, is a rainbow-hued reminder to take better care of our bodies.

"Mike would have loved it," Neal said.

First and Second draft of the MIKE PROGRAM Mural 2009

2009-10-15T23:08:00.001-07:00

During the winter of 2009 I began to work on the design for the MIKE Program mural with students from Rosemary Anderson High School/Portland Opportunities Industrialization Center (POIC). POIC reconnects alienated at-risk youth affected by poverty, family instability and homelessness; with high school education and work training programs underwritten by a "system of care" to provide the personal and emotional support necessary to engage in school and training to the age of stable maturity at 25. These students were actively engaged with the MIKE Program, whose mission is to empower youth to be ambassadors of health in service to their diverse communities through mentorship, partnership, and the promotion of healthy kidneys. The students brainstormed a list of things that they would want to include in a mural meant to promote healthy lifestyles. We discussed where the imagery would go, and how it would unfold through out the 100 ft long wall we were preparing to paint. I have shown here the first and second draft of the mural.

The Background for the MIKE Program Mural 2008

2009-10-15T22:29:00.000-07:00

In September of 2008, after the CCC Mural was restored, I received a call from Deborah Schwisow. She introduced herself as a volunteer for the Multicultural Integrated Kidney Education Program (MIKE Program). She had gotten my name from RACC and was interested in getting information on how to organize a mural. This is the background information she gave me that can be found on their website www.mikeprogram.org

Project Background

"On the corner of 7th and Hancock in Northeast Portland you will find a modest cinder block building, the home of DSI a dialysis clinic serving Portland's most fragile citizens. Its southern face presents a 100 foot long white wall tattooed with a variety of dismal spray paint tags, pictures, and obscenities. For many years now the clinic staff has had to repaint the wall frequently to preserve the cleanliness, care, and professionalism that you can always find within the building's walls. Patients, family members, staff, and passers-by see a daily battle waged between the clinic staff and the "art work" found outside. Layer upon layer of mismatched shades of paint covering the week’s graffiti create a patchwork quilt effect. This is not a new sight in Portland; the city spends approximately $2 million dollars a year on graffiti abatement.

Our dream is to create another type of quilt, a vibrant mural made of paint and a mosaic of tile on not just a wall but a structure that serves as a haven, providing life to end-stage renal disease patients. Our design will tell a story of health and vitality, prolonging and perhaps preventing the need to cross the threshold to the inside. It will instill a sense of pride for those that live in the community. Using this unique canvas and partnerships with several business organizations, youth organizations, and artists we will inspire our young to stay healthy, tap into their creativity, and empower them to be front runners in making positive changes in our beautiful city, and in their lives.

Our goal is to create a ripple effect. Those involved give back to their communities. They inspire their families and friends in the importance of overall health, drawing attention to healthy kidneys at the same time demonstrating community involvement, and pride while spreading positive change throughout Portland."

CCC Mural Restoration Project 2008

2009-10-15T21:09:00.000-07:00

It is a sad fact that from time to time a bicyclist will be hit by a car. Because of this all to often tragedy there was a sort of twisted irony behind an automobile accident that knocked out a sizable portion of the Community Cycling Center Mural. In December of 2007 a driver in four runner truck lost control while backing into a parking space in front of the mural. Jonathan Maus wrote about it on the BikePortland.org blog Truck slams into wall of Community Cycling Center

Posted by Jonathan Maus (Editor-in-Chief) on December 9th, 2007 at 9:24 pm

"[At around 3:30 on Saturday afternoon, a Toyota FourRunner backed into the wall of the Community Cycling Center (CCC) on NE 17 Avenue (at Alberta).

Several employees were working at the time (getting ready for the Holiday Bike Drive this morning), but thankfully, none of them were in the office at the time of impact and no one was hurt.

Here are more photos of the damage:

The driver of the truck (he lives in the building and he was insured) was trying to park when he somehow managed to jump the sidewalk and smash into the wall. The truck slammed into the building’s gas line (the building was evacuated and the main line was shut off immediately) and now the building is without heat.

Only a long crack and a shattered gas meter is visible from the exterior, but inside it’s a different story. The impact splintered studs in the wall, exposing drywall and insulation and sending office furniture tumbling.l"

Due to extensive damage from the impact, the CCC had to replace about 100 square feet of wall that the mural was painted on.

Due to the grant we received from the Regional Arts and Culture Council the mural is legally property of the City of Portland. RACC worked with me to successfully receive a settlement from the driver's car insurance that allowed me to rehire some of the original staff artists as well as some new artists to repaint the section of mural that was lost. Thanks to their excellent work we were able to restore the CCC mural to it's original condition during the summer of 2008.

The Women's Building MaestraPeace Mural in San Francisco

2009-10-15T20:42:00.000-07:00

While I was working on the Women Making History in Portland Mural many people commented on their love for a mural painted on the Women's Building in San Francisco, CA. This mural is titled Maestra peace. When I looked up information on it's website I read: The mural was painted in 1994 by Juana Alicia, Miranda Bergman, Edythe Boone, Susan Kelk Cervantes, Meera Desai, Yvonne Littleton and Irene Perez, and many helpers.Covering two exterior walls, Maestrapeace is as educational as it is inspirational and serves as a visual testament to the courageous contributions of women through time and around the world. The design of the mural is the end result of a year and a half of brainstorming and planning by a broad range of community organizations and individuals.

The theme has many messages: the healing power of women's wisdom over time, the contributions of women throughout history, and the making of history by women from all corners of the earth.

Opening Ceremony for the Women's History Mural 2007

2009-10-15T20:20:00.000-07:00

The opening ceremony for the Women Making History in Portland Mural was one of the best days of my life. It happened on a clear and sunny afternoon on October 27th, 2007. Over 200 people assembled to celebrate the completion of the mural and to honor the women it represented. As an artist who had spent months drawing and painting their portraits, it truly felt to me as though the art had come alive and was mingling amongst the crowd. The Cambodian American Community of Oregon was one of the organizations that nominated women for the mural. Their men's group cooked a feast for the crowd in honor of their beloved nominees. The director of the Oregon Office of Affirmative Action, Peggy Ross, was the first of a long line up of speakers. She presented a congratulatory letter from Governor Ted Kulongoski. Afterward many of the women showcased in the mural spoke to the crowd telling their life stories and the events they participated that secured their place in Portland history. Some of the daughters of women who were unable to participate in celebration spoke on behalf of their mothers painted on the wall.

Women Making History in Portland Mural 2007

2009-10-03T23:17:00.000-07:00

After the CCC Mural I wanted to create a public art project where the imagery was voted on by the communities of whom I was trying to represent. I organized this project with In Other Words Women's Books and Resources. We put a call out to different
non profits and community leaders to nominate women current and historical significance in Portland. This mural was funded by another RACC Public Arts grant. I hired another crew of mural staff artists and over saw the contributions of another 5 dozen voluneteers. The mural was painted in 9 weeks and completed in October of 2007.

Here is the list of women who were selected and who are represented in the Women Making History in Portland Mural:

These are women who have made and are making history in Portland, OR. As their lives and careers continue their stories will grow. All information listed here was current as of the completion of the mural in October 2007. From the row from left to right:

Antoinette Edwards has provided over twenty five years of community organizing and leadership, policy development, service provision and advocacy for children and families of North and Northeast Portland.

Peggy Nagae was the lead attorney in Yasui v. United States, which re-opened Mr. Yasui’s Supreme Court Case for violating the curfew imposed upon Japanese Americans during World War II. Principal of Peggy Nagae Consulting, Nagae founded her firm in 1988. She specializes in organizational change and cultural competency, communication and conflict resolution.

Willie Mae Hart continues her great-grandmother Sarah Reid Moseley’s legacy of building a foundation to end hate. Hart was one of the founders of Portland’s first African American owned taxi cab company, participated in sit-ins to protest segragation, was a life skills trainer volunteer for the Oregon WICS program and one of the first African American nurse at the Kaiser Permanente in Portland.

Susan Emmons is the Executive Director for Northwest Pilot Project, which is Portland’s primary agency for serving low-income seniors living in Portland’s downtown core, and the leading housing advocacy group in the city.

Anne Berblinger had been the Oregon representative for the U.S. Economic Development Administration from July of l983 until she retired in spring of 2007. She continues to serve on the Oregon State University Sea Grant Advisory Committee and the Board of Portland State University’s Institute for Portland Metropolitan Studies. Berblinger and her husband Rene began farming Gales Meadows Organic Farm in 1999, where she is depicted in the mural.

Chirece Olugbala, Terenie Faison, and Courtney Jones make up the administration for Sisters In Action for Power, an inter-generational, multi-racial, community-based organization that works with low income women and girls of color. All three women are graduates of from the Sisters in Action advanced leadership program. Painted behind them in the mural represents a single protest that was part of four years of organizing to prevail Tri-Met into establishing a discount student bus pass for students living in the Portland school district.

Elizabeth Woody is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs in Oregon. She is an award winning artist, writer and story teller who has worked in various programs teaching workshops, mentoring, as a consultant and lectures throughout the country. She is the Director of the Indigenous Leadership Program at Ecotrust. Woody is shown in the mural by the petrolglyph She Who Watches.

K.D. Parman and Jeana Frazzini successfully challenged Oregon laws that denied Frazzini’s parental rights to their sons. A Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge ruled that the two Oregon statutes that give parental rights to married couples and their children unconstitutionally discriminated against Parman and Frazzini as same-sex parents. They are shown in the mural with their sons Emmett and Griffin .

Shafia M. Monroe is midwife and organizer. She founded and is Board President of the International Center for Traditional Childbearing. Her organized outreach efforts recruit and train women as midwives as a method of reducing infant mortality and to encourage women to consider birth and midwifery as a tool for empowerment. She is shown in the mural after just helping a mother give birth to a newborn infant.

Joy Farmer is an Oregon native. Since moving to Portland in the late 80’s Farmer has ridden more than 200,000 motorcycle miles. She is strong female figure in the Portland motorcycle community and an inspiration to other women who love to ride.

Vanessa Smith, Vatea Herman, Valeicia Hagadorn are the beloved daughters of Advanced M&D Sales Inc. owner Stanley Herman.

Bottom Row from left to right

Amina Anderson is the co-founder of the Black United Fund of Oregon. She was also a part of a small working group whose research and implementation efforts led to the formation of Albina Community Bank with assets now valued at more than 100 million.

Amara Pérez, long-time community organizer, is the Program Director of In Other Words Women’s Books & Resources. She is the founder of Sisters in Action for Power and a community group for gay women of color called Happy Ours.

Roeuk Chen, Melanie Lim, Chhunny Sok have been identified by the Cambodian American Community of Oregon, of which Lim is Vice President of, as strong community leaders. All three women are survivors of the Khmer Rouge Occupation in Cambodia which claimed the lives of millions from 1975-1979. These women have worked with in their community in Oregon and abroad to bring peace and healing. Painted behind them in the mural are women working in a Khmer Rouge labor camp. In the background is Angkor Wat, a temple that is the epitome of the high classical style of Khmer architecture and is renowned as one of the seven wonders of the worlds.

Lillian Pitt is one of the indigenous people of the Columbia River Gorge and is known as a great innovator within her tradition. As a visual artist she has chosen to work in clay using Asian techniques like raku and anagama in addition to working with a wide variety of materials. She is depicted in the mural with some of her many masks.

Vickie Chamberlain is the Board Chair of the Oregon Council for Hispanic Advancement and the Chief Executive Officer of Oregon Teacher Standards and Practices Commission. Chamberlain works to refocus the issues from the student to the educational institutions. She advocates the need that such institutions must create an equitable learning environment for all students by creating culturally inclusive classrooms.

Clara Peoples is a community leader and organizer who along with many accomplishments is the woman credited with bringing the Juneteenth celebration to North Portland. Juneteenth is the oldest known celebration commemorating the ending of slavery in the United States. Peoples is shown in the mural with the Junteenth flag.

Gretchen Kafoury retired in 1999 from a 20 year career in elective office. She served as Portland City Commissioner (90-98), Multnomah County Commissioner (1985-1990) and Oregon State Representative (1977-1983). She is now the Coordinator of Internship Programs Urban & Public Affairs at PSU. She is shown in the mural reenacting a 1970’s protest demanding that City Club integrate women into their membership.

Sandra Ford was a member of the Black Panther Party in Portland and worked to establish the Fred Hampton Free Health Clinic, the Cleve Allen Dentist Clinic, and the Breakfast for School Children Program at Highland School. She is shown in the mural with her grandchild.

Primitive Urge Tattoo Mural 2007

2009-10-03T22:53:00.000-07:00

In the spring of 2007 I painted a 4 ft by 16 ft mural for a tattoo parlor named Primitive Urge L.L.C. This was the only exterior mural I have done by painting on boards in my studio and then installing them on the side of a building. The store was on the corner of NE 42nd Ave and NE Prescott st. Although it is now defunct, the owner Chad Birgy has recently opened up a new shop called 1928 tattoo on NE Alberta St. We are in the process of altering the wording in the mural and installing it at the new location. You can check them out at http://www.1928tattoo.com

The Community Cycling Center Mural 2006

2009-10-03T22:09:00.000-07:00

I approached the Community Cycling Center (CCC) on the corner of NE 17th Ave and NE Alberta St because I heard from a local muralist that the non profit was interested in putting a mural on their west facing wall. The executive director at the time told me if I drew up a design and wrote a successful grant, I could paint a mural on their building. The CCC requested the design represent "diverse children riding bikes in a safe and nonpolitical manner." I shuttered at the thought of bringing the world another multi-cultural-children-holding-hands-across-the- globe mural. The design I came up with was a costume parade on bikes and other pedal powered forms of locomotion. The CCC accepted it, and RACC awarded me with a $15,000.00 grant. I hired a team of staff artists and managed 5 dozen volunteers. Many in the neighborhood championed the mural as a creative and colorful addition to the Alberta Arts neighborhood. Some were critical of a white woman implementing a mural that depicted a racial utopia in a neighborhood the subject of on going gentrification. This made me reexamine my approach to designing community art.

How it all began

2009-10-03T20:53:00.000-07:00

My dad once told me that the author Don DeLillo would tell folks that he was a novelist well before he wrote his first book. That was sort of the way I identified myself as a muralist. If a painting was larger than 16 sq ft I would proudly display it as my newest mural. I noodled around with some large works painted on interior walls in high school, and even lent a hand to a simple solar system rendered in an under pass. But a wall the size of a building had yet to be graced by my personal artistic direction. In 2004 I entered a contest to repaint a mural in SE Portland, OR. At the time mural regulation was so restrictive it enacted a near moratorium on the practice of painted public art. Murals and billboards were regulated by the same sign code, and both required a $1,400.00 application process. Few artists were able or willing to spend so much on the application, one that didn't guarantee city acceptance of their purposed work. The little loop hole for artists such as myself was that a previous mural could be restored or repainted with out a pricey permit. This contest, hosted by Metro Mural, was the one shot I had to finally design and implement my first large scale mural. Although I made it to the final round, my design was not ultimately chosen. Shortly after my loss, I left Portland for a year to travel over seas. When I returned to Portland in the Spring of 2005 the mural laws had changed. Now it was possible to side step the city's sign code by applying for a mural permit and grant through the Regional Arts and Culture Council (RACC). I wrote my first grant proposal and submitted a portfolio I had painted for businesses run by friends. This included a painted propane tank for my friends at Gales Meadows Farm and a 5 ft x 9 ft painting for Mississippi Records.