Happy July! I’ve always associated July with pool parties, BBQ cookouts, fireworks, and of course the American flag. With Independence day rapidly approaching, I can’t help but have our fraught political climate on my mind. National identity is often associated with place so this month, I want to highlight the theme of land. What does land mean to us? To Americans? To our local artists and community members? What does it mean to care for our land? What about climate change? This July, challenge your idea of land with these insightful exhibitions. 

Lots of events are happening in Portland this month. Start off by reimagining your idea of fire for PICA’s fire-based exhibition titled, Who by Fire. ArtReach Gallery features Bob Procter who highlights the complexities of climate change with his beautiful layered encaustic paintings. Discover how water has been used as symbolism for queerness throughout history with Adams and Ollman. In Joseph, Oregon, witness how nature remains strong against the approaching climate change with a blend of beautiful watercolors and lyrical prose. Scalehouse in Bend features a mirrored floor that invites viewers to consider how identity is shaped by place, perception, and history. 

Who by Fire
Ray Anthony Barrett 
July 12- August 9
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA)
15 NE Hancock St, Portland, OR 97212

Fire was once the most fundamental resource for human survival. Now in the twenty-first century, people are completely disconnected from fire’s role in the natural world. Colonialism is at least partially responsible for this amnesia; Black and Indigenous peoples’ fire practices have been continually erased. Who by Fire by Los Angeles-based artist Ray Anthony Barrett, returns to fire through a decolonial lens. Barrett employed field studies of the American landscapes and repurposed reclaimed materials to create a communal food and dining area dedicated to fire-based cooking. This exhibition combines fine art, functional design, craft, community engagement of living, eating, storytelling, spirituality, and dancing to challenge society’s view on fire and land. 

Portal Glyph
Ka’ila Farrell-Smith
July 3- August 2 
Russo Lee Gallery
805 NW 21st Ave, Portland, OR 97210

Portal Glyph by Ka’ila Farrell-Smith depicts vibrant and hopeful alternate realities based in ancestral memory and earth’s material history. This exhibition features nine paintings and two monoprint series created by abstraction using petroglyphic and rare earth symbolism. Farrell-Smith utilizes and names found stencils after the periodic elements from the Umatilla Reservation to create portals to challenge the colonial temporality. Her work obscures the line between past and future, advocating for racial imagining and reciprocity for land. Farrell-Smith presents beautiful mountain contours and shimmering metallics that emerge from the landscape and asks the viewer to step into these portals to see, listen, wonder, and reimagine what land might look like. 

Collective Visions
Group Show
July 3- August 2
Gallery 114 
1100 NW Glisan Street, Portland, OR. 97209

Sponsor

Gallery 114’s annual member exhibition is back this month showing off the wide range of talent and artistic creativity of their valued members. This year’s offering, Collective Visions, creates the opportunity for viewers to immerse themselves in the collective energy, talent, and artistic innovation of Gallery 114 members. Each featured artist’s voice and specialties are reflected in this exhibition and speak to the larger creative narrative and community. Discover intriguing works ranging from Jon Gottshall’s photographs to Sally Finch’s mixed media assemblages and many more

Our Precious World 
Bob Procter
June 4- August 3 
ArtReach Gallery 
1126 SW Park Avenue, Portland, OR, 97205

Land and the elements that sustain us air, fire, and water are the foundation to Bob Procter’s encaustic and oil paintings in Our Precious World. Procter’s oil paintings focus on the lands of the Pacific Northwest and his encaustic paintings bring attention to the complexities of the climate crisis. Informed by his practice of Chinese calligraphy, Procter uses concepts of space and brushwork to create layered compositions full of rich texture. This intuitive and slow approach speaks to the artist’s intimate and deep connection with the natural world. 

In-Between Touch
Marina Grize 
June 20- August 2
Adams and Ollman 
418 NW 8th Ave, Portland, OR 97209

In-Between Touch is a solo exhibition by Marina Grize that features reclaimed photographs of women in and around water from lesbian cinema. Water has been an established metaphor for queerness and Grize highlights this long-standing tradition throughout film and literature. Grize records and archives stills of women in water in lesbian films, creating her photographs from dye diffusion transfer print methods with expired film. Grize takes her subjects from their narrative contexts and reclaims these moments as personal traces of desire by having the images closely cropped, with the figures turned away from the camera and out of focus. By remaining unavailable to the viewer, the figures link complexity and presence to the complexities of queerness. These photographs upend the medium’s typical expectations of surveillance and desire, replacing them with intimacy and care. 

In Form
Denise Krueger & Jennifer Kapnek 
July 3- 26
Sidestreet Arts 
140 SE 28th Ave, Portland, OR 97214

Love for nature and botanical themes are the forefront of Sidestreet Arts’ latest exhibition, In Form. This exhibition features two artists, Jennifer Kapnek and Denise Krueger. Kapnek is a Portland based painter who creates botanical paintings that exceed two dimensions with sculptural branches that extend off the canvas. The 3D elements are seamlessly incorporated alongside the carefully rendered paintings of leaves. Together, these 2D and 3D elements create an engaging and impressive composition of nature’s most beautiful branches. Denise Krueger, self-proclaimed “podmaker,” is a Portland ceramicist who makes sculptural “pods.” These pods are heavily inspired by the sea and resemble an item that could’ve been warped by the ocean or washed up on the shore. Aptly named after the ocean ecosystem, these pods take on fun titles such as, Juicy Abalone Pod, and Turquoise Sea Bloop Pod.

Sponsor

Refugia of the Blue Mountains 
Robin Coen and Marina Richie 
June 13- July 28
Josephy Center for Arts and Culture
403 Main St, Joseph, OR 97846

Refugia of the Blue Mountains, is a collaborative project by poet Marina Richie and watercolor painter Robin Coen. The paintings and lyrical prose poems celebrate the landscapes of the Blue Mountains with Richie’s poems inspired by Coen’s watercolors. Particularly celebrated here is the way that the Oregonian mountain range functions as a safe space where wildlife remains abundant even amidst the looming threat of climate change. Biodiversity, resilience, and the relationship between nature and art are the center of this exhibit.

FishBone Harp
Molly Lecko Herro, Phoebe Mol, Re Pinter 
June 27- August 2
Multnomah Arts Center 
7688 SW Capitol Hwy, Portland, OR 97219

After recently forming a collective based on mutual admiration, artists Molly Lecko Herro, Phoebe Mol, and Re Pinter present FishBone Harp, a cartoon-styled group exhibition. Each artist has a signature style and in the works in this exhibition, each approaches the theme of cartoons differently. Herro works on paper with graphite or ink, fueled with the passion for drawing from a young age. Mol works with various mediums to soften the borders between memory, relationship and dreams. Pinter explores existentialism and “optimistic nihilism” with charcoal on vintage typewriter paper. Also on display at the Multnomah Arts Center are colorful ceramic creations made by Gesine Krätzner. 

This Land
Ben Busswell
July 11- August 30 
Scalehouse Gallery
550 NW Franklin Ave STE 138, Bend, OR 97703

Identity and how it is shaped by place, perception, and historical context is the centerpiece of Ben Busswell’s show at Scalehouse Gallery called, This Land. Buswell takes inspiration from Fernando Pessoa’s idea that viewing one’s reflection is simultaneously troubling and unnatural. This idea of the unnatural mirror is reflected in Buswell’s mirrored floor installation that physically refuses to show the viewer their own reflection. The absence of the viewer’s reflection creates a question for the audience, how do our environments and the systems we exist and operate in influence our identity? Photographic works that reconstruct state data points of violence rates, income levels, and federal funding into an understandable visual language are also shown alongside the mirrored installation.

AVE: Sacred Images of Mary 
July 1- 31
Mount Angel Abbey
1 Abbey Drive, Saint Benedict, Oregon 97373

Sponsor

AVE: Sacred Images of Mary combines tradition and the contemporary with an exhibition of original egg tempera icons created by iconographers trained in the Byzantine tradition. Created and curated by the Classical Iconography Institute, this exhibition features the theological and artistic aesthetics of the classical icons through a modern lens. With a strong emphasis on Mary,  the most painted woman in history, discover how sacred images serve a simultaneous cause as works of both theological and religious worship and documentation and of transcendent beauty.