On June 6, 2024, 2022 Impact Partner the King School Museum of Contemporary Art hosted their final program for this school year – an artist talk with Intisar Abioto, their Spring 2024 artist in residence, and an exhibition opening for her project, “The Hold: Land & Water Stewards of Pacific Northwest Turtle Island.” This event capped a remarkable year focused on artists featured in the Black Artsts of Oregon exhibition on display at Portland Art Museum earlier this year, which Intisar also curated.
Founder and co-director Lisa Jarrett kicked off the program by asking the students why they studied art. Students eagerly offered a broad range of reasons: to see things that people love doing; to see art in a long line of history; for your emotions or enjoyment; to experience art; and to be inspired to do it yourself. All of these reasons and more are present in how they support students in exploring, creating, and curating art at their school.
Throughout the year, artists in residence engage in programs alongside the students to explore a broad range of topics through the artists’ practice(s) and create original work that culminates in an exhibition and artist talk. The program also has two dedicated classrooms in King School, one of which is the site of ongoing mentorship sessions between King students and undergraduate students enrolled in the recurring “KSMoCA: Museum in a School” class as part of the Portland State University Art and Social Practice Program.
In her recent talk, Intisar presented her photography series highlighting Black and Indigenous stewards of the land – a powerful series of images depicting often untold or overlooked stories of people and their relationships to place. As a part of her residency, she created a new set of photographs that included a portrait of Ms. Ruby, the beloved food and nutrition steward at King School, and documentation of two workshops with a kindergarten class, where students tasted herbs and created drawings of their favorites on t-shirts.
During her talk, Intisar offered that her project was another vision of our collective relationship and a prompt to take better care of each other by taking care of the land. “Do you think the land remembers us?” was one of the questions Intisar posed to King Elementary students last week, to murmurs and shouts of “yes!”
This question and spirit of the project feel like a core part of KSMoCA at large – an initiative that is committed to making students active, engaged authors, curators, and interpreters of art; stewards in their own right of meaning, curiosity, place, self, and community. The building of King Elementary remembers its students. The walls sing, alive with their collaborations, evident in this museum-in-a-school’s (extensive and growing) permanent collection and rotating exhibitions, activating the school’s hallways and exteriors. The works on display are the legacy of their being asked not just to learn, but also to dream, reflect on their favorite parts of themselves, look up at the sky, and imagine themselves in the shoes of activists and ancestors. The joy and power in their work is palpable.
As summer break is right around the corner, programming will be on pause until the fall, but you can still enjoy much of their work online – their amazing catalogs are available online as PDF downloads and for sale in print for your personal bookshelves. Student works are available as collectible prints in their online shop; as well as online archives of photos from programs and audio from their podcast project.
