The Museum of Socially Engaged Art (MuSEA) is an experimental museum in Tucker set within an occupied house. MuSEA examines the role of museums in contemporary culture, bringing community-shaped programming to metro Atlanta and joining the effort to enrich Atlanta’s socially-engaged art community. MuSEA elevates conversations around art, activism, community engagement, and education at the neighborhood scale. It is interested in what a museum can mean to the people who live beside it with an emphasis on supporting and collaborating with local, national, and international artists working in the field of social practice.

MuSEA comprises exhibitions, a lending library, a gift shop, and a performative lecture series.

As an initial engagement, neighbors in Tucker were invited to share snacks and thoughts on contemporary art and the neighborhood. Topics around gentrification, safety, and avant garde art came up in the conversations. An exhibition of drawings and prints in response to these conversations along with MuSEA’s library was on view at Echo Contemporary in 2023.

MuSEA is supported by Idea Capital.

Black Birth Matters is a project by Felecia Graham and Roshani Thakore. They have been working together on projects since early 2020 including a Tenant Portrait Series and a reading of a Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. They began their artist residency at Orchards of 82nd in September 2020.

Roshani learned about Felecia’s passion as a doula and they talked about how the services for Black mothers and families are inadequate in Southeast Portland. They both wanted to center the Black experience in birth work because it is constantly overshadowed.

Felecia started interviewing fellow birth workers about their experiences and Roshani did more research about the history of doulas in the African-American community. They took all of that research and made this 28-page publication printed at nun studios. They want Black parents, families, and birth workers to be able to live with dignity, respect and support.

Black Birth Matters is free to all Black parents-to-be, birth workers, and families. For everyone else, the publication is available for a sliding scale donation starting at $5. All of the funds will go to Felecia’s work as a birth worker.

If you’d like a copy of Black Birth Matters, click here!

The racialized experience is embedded within the constructs of the United States. As a newcomer to Portland, I use my artistic practice to excavate the city’s intentional exclusionary policies and practices and center the histories which have been omitted. These works are from the communities of color living and with histories in East Portland, a site which is one of the most culturally diverse census tracts in Oregon, a home to many recent immigrants, and a neighborhood vulnerable to displacement due to gentrification.

Part of Portland State University’s Arlene Schnitzer Visual Arts Prize. More information can be found here.

This publication examines the support systems created by artists and organizers BECAUSE of the systems that continually fail us. Made at the height of the global pandemic of 2020, some light comes in the form of an inverted rainbow packet mailed to each recipient to pause, reflect, and examine the shades of support in our current art ecosystems.

some light was produced by nůn studios: an emerging print co-operative and affordable print resource in NE Portland. nůn creates artist books and community organizing curriculum for global solidarity movements, centering BIPOC womxn, femmes, GNC and non-binary folks.

You can receive a printed version with sliding scale funds that will go towards the cost of production as well as support nůn studios. Just complete this form. You can also download a PDF of the publication here.

The Orchards of 82nd Art Plan, Living Culture: Past, Present, and Future is a zine as an alternative form to standard public art planning documents. This work prioritizes the complex but unique living culture that is usually imagined by outside administrators and typically tokenized. Voices and ideas of community members are intentionally woven into this project. Ideas include exhibitions of neighborhood history, a community generated archive, an artist-in-residence fellowship, community dinners, murals, cooking and more. A PDF of the Art Plan can be downloaded here.

The East Portland Art+Justice Lab acts as a platform that amplifies the knowledge and resources available in areas of resilience, linguistic, ethnic, and cultural diversity, and resourcefulness directly by the people themselves.

The Lab focuses on creating and keeping cultural memories and the social fabric of the neighborhood intact through experimental art-making activities, discussions, and more.

Through the Saturday Open Art Lab Studio Hour tenants of Orchards of 82nd can come hang out and make some art. Since many of the tenants were new to the area and to each other, we created a Tenant Portrait Series using self-portraits of tenants personalities and backgrounds to display in the gallery lobby of O82. Since the stay-at-home order went into place in March 2020, we decided to continue the Tenant Portrait Series online in an interview format. The first portrait is with Felecia, the mother of Zahmi, who is a birth and postpartum doula. She just received a SE Uplift Grant for her Black Birth Matters Project. During the stay-at-home orders, she has lost work but has been sewing masks and teaming up with her community for an online storytime for kids.

Humor in prison may be a coping mechanism, but at the Columbia River Correctional Institution (CRCI), it’s not only that. Since January 2018 the incarcerated comedians inhabiting CRCI have been shaping a space to learn, model, experiment and expand the creative practice of comedy within the prison system. This container within the prison explores the nuances of humor allowing for discussion, experimentation, trust building, accountability, collaboration and creating work together. Through this process, the CRCI Comedy School becomes an alternative culture within the normalized state of incarceration.  

The project came about as an extension from the volunteer work done by self-selected members of the Portland State University Art and Social Practice MFA program beginning in 2016. As a co-founder and the Director of the School , I collaborate with a team of artists, volunteers, and incarcerated and outside guest comedians to create a platform to explore stand-up, improv, and sketch comedy within the context of a minimum-security men’s prison in Northeast Portland. Portland comics, Marcus Coleman, Katie Nguyen, Milan Patel, Alex Falcone, Kate Murphy, and Mohanad Elsheiky have led classes sharing their creative stand-up practice and their experience in the local scene. Betse Green has led classes on improv techniques and Jason Rouse has led the class through developing a comedic sketch in one class period. The School has also hosted masterclasses by Fred Armisen and Hari Kondabolu in stand-up and sketch comedy.

Using this toolbox, the incarcerated comedians give voice to observations of human behavior, social codes, and power inside the walls. For example, in the first comedy show, LIVE from CRCI!, one of the incarcerated comedians, Jesse, performed a piece called “Out of Control” referring to the acts of wearing an untucked shirt or sharing food inside as being wild and disobedient. Also, writer and incarcerated comedian, Ben, performed a bit about the handshake codes by different groups on the inside from the perspective of a germaphobe.

During this time, the School has co-produced three comedy shows on the inside allowing the incarcerated comedians to share their work to their friends and family, their peers on the inside, the correctional officers and administration, and to outside guests. These shows have been celebrated by the prisoners along with the correctional officers and the administration. This process has had the effect of shifting the relationships between the incarcerated comedians and administration officials. Creative shifts are also occurring internally with the incarcerated comedians as their personal perspectives are being well-received through their work and their performances.

By developing this space to allow humor to be explored and formalized within the prison system, the CRCI Comedy School hopes to continue to provide the opportunity to creatively question and challenge the experience of incarceration directly by those who experience it on the inside.

For the 2018 Creative Placemaking Project Grant organized by the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO), I proposed an Artist Residency in Portland’s Jade District, a Neighborhood Prosperity Initiative area designated by the City of Portland, centered around Southeast 82nd Avenue and Division Street. This area is one of the most diverse census tracts in the State of Oregon, and is home to many recent immigrants. It is also a neighborhood that is vulnerable to displacement due to gentrification.

Since 2014, APANO has supported over twenty artists connected to Southeast 82nd and Southeast Division Street to highlight the needs, hopes, and concerns of community members who are facing a rapidly changing neighborhood. Past works include a film by Joe X. Jiang  highlighting the Canton Grill, a 70-plus year old family business that is an icon in the Jade District, posters and zines by Sabina Haque and Madison High youth that address the East/West disparities in Portland, and more. To keep these stories within the social landscape of the community I reinstalled a number of these works within the neighborhood sites. In an effort to create connectivity with these works and stories, I collaborated with a local cartographer, Sachi Arakawa, to create a walking path highlighting these sites called 82nd+Beyond: A Living Archive. For broader accessibility, the map was printed into a physical form, translated into English, Vietnamese, and Chinese, and debuted in the summer at the Jade International Night Market. The maps are free to the public and distributed at neighborhood sites. In September, Sachi and I co-led a public walk activating the map and the neighborhood sites with conversations and local histories told by the artists and community members.

To expand the conversation around displacement and gentrification in greater Portland, I collaborated with local artists Donovan Smith and Sika Stanton to host a film screening of their 2017 film The Numbers. This East Portland debut of the film was presented at Canton Grill, the oldest standing structure in the area along with a community discussion on neighborhood identity. Local artists, community members, city agency representatives, anti-gentrification allies, urban planners and local advocacy organizations attended for food, art, and an honest discussion on neighborhood identity. The event closed with a performance by UniVerse, an artist and musician from East Portland who was featured in the film.

As an Artist­-in­-Residence at the family-owned Fijian-Indian restaurant, I have been collaborating with the owners Saleshni, Deon, and Deepak Sundar to elevate their story. I began interviewing the owners and learning of their experiences of being entrepreneurs in Portland. After over a decade in owning and operating coffee shops and sandwich shops, the Big Elephant Kitchen was their first business where they shared their own culture on their own terms. In summer 2018, I collaborated with the Sundars in developing and executing phase one of a mural for the exterior of their building. In this process, we chose paint colors and a design that reflected the Indian and Fijian cultures of their restaurant. In September 2018, the Big Elephant Kitchen was part of the Food Program curated by Spencer Byrne-Seres as part of the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s Time Based Arts Festival. For the publication produced by Sunday Painters Press, I interviewed Saleshni about our time together sharing stories about immigrant family life, patriarchal systems in South Asian and American cultures and other things. During the festival, I volunteered vending with the family, sharpening up my roti-making skills. The residency is in hiatus for the winter and will continue in 2019.

As part of the Arlene Schnitzer Visual Art Prize exhibition in the MK Gallery at Portland State University, I was invited by Lauren Moran to host a visioning workshop in October 2018 inspired by the work of Hari Kondabolu. In this iteration of the workshop, I asked individuals to imagine the acts of resistance and rebellion from now until the year 2042, when the U.S. population of white Americans will lose the majority status. Centering PoC voices and the idea that race is a social construct, workshop participants wrote about systemic oppression, an act of resistance they enacted, and what it took to act. We then imagined what power will look like in Portland in 2042 and considered the events that will occur from now until then. Participants then created fliers of these future acts of resistance that we posted in the gallery and to eventually add to the Radical Archives of 2042. Currently, I am working on creating more iterations of this workshop in East Portland in tandem with local artist Sarah Farahat’s interest in this speculative space.

I was invited by Subashini Ganesan to participate in Portland’s South Asian American Arts Festival. In the festival, I organized an exhibition by Chitra Ganesh and KSMoCA at PICA, facilitated a discussion with writer Pireeeni Sundaralingam at the Portland Art Museum, and created a new work for the exhibition, Reimagining Home at the Central Library.

Portland’s Inaugural South Asian American Arts Festival will be an all-ages, multi-cultural celebration that showcases and highlights South Asian arts and artists living and working in America.

Poets, musicians, storytellers, dancers, and multimedia artists will present performances, demonstrations, and workshops. The Festival will also host community conversations and panel discussions on topics of social justice, the immigrant life, cross-cultural community and friendship, and youth initiatives.

For the residency at Flushing Meadows Corona Park: What it’s Worth!, Queens Creative Solidarity (QCS) engaged with local artists and community organizations interested in equitable access to and preservation of the park. In 2016, I co-led two drop-in workshops to engage park-goers and have them design pages of a zine. Using a survey QCS created, the zine team interviewed workshop participants about their experiences and perspectives about the park and invited them to help design and produce the zine. Through drawings, text and poetry, participants shared how valuable the park is to them and how changes to accessing the park impact them. Responses include memories of a person’s first goal on the soccer field, another person feeling as if they were not worth it if they weren’t able to access this public park, another expressed fear that the land would be sold in the midst of gentrification, and another hoped it could become a place where everyone felt safe. At the QCS closing event, each participant received a digital and hard copy of the zine, and QCS has published additional copies to give to Queens community organizations to use and distribute. Images include workshops hosted in the park and at the Queens Museum, the cover and pages of the zine created by community members.