So as everybody might know, I am not a literary artist.
I am based in the visual arts community.
I work currently in Portland, Oregon
for Portland State University in the School of Art and Design.
And my practice is a combination of studio
based work around identity and the politics of difference,
and also socially engaged work that is more about engaging
with a larger public.
So what I'd like to share tonight
for just a few minutes, what's scrolling behind
you are some images from my studio based practice.
This is a piece called How Many Licks,
and I can't remember which thousands, which sub number
goes along with it.
But this is sculpture and installation based work,
and it's a series of about 156 lollipops
that-- they're actual candy that are
filled with little balls of my own hair.
And so this would be an installation presented
in a gallery and kind of, oh, you know, postmodern
grids, things of that nature.
And so these are some of the ideas
that I'm thinking about in terms of my work in physical terms.
But a lot of the questions that have arisen for me
during thinking its presence and over the past three years--
four years now, working with Prageeta,
and now my fellow board members, which
has been absolutely fabulous, are
how do we engage a larger public in the ideas
that we are interested in exploring,
and how do we create agency for generations coming behind us?
And so the project I'd like-- this is so awkward.
Sorry, is it me?
I feel like I have to hold it but I don't.
How's that?
Is that all right?
OK, OK.
Sorry.
So what I thought I would do today is just talk to you
a little bit about a project I've been working on--
it's so small on the screen--
with a colleague of mine at Portland State
University, Harrell Fletcher.
And this project is called KSMoCA,
it's the King School Museum of Contemporary Art,
and it is a contemporary art museum
that we have founded that lives inside a functioning pre-K 8
public school in northeast Portland.
I thought that I would share a little bit
about the ideas behind the project
and maybe show a few images, just to give you
a sense of how these ideas fit in with so many other things
that have been relevant for us during thinking its presence,
and the kind of agency we're trying to foster in our youth
communities because they really are the ones that we're trying
to create and hold these spaces for, I feel.
Working in academia, there certainly
is a population of students that I foster and facilitate
projects with regularly.
But in terms of my own work and my own goals,
creating this sense of agency and having
impact in a community that lasts longer than an art exhibition
that you walk into and walk out of and perhaps contemplate,
it has grown increasingly meaningful for me.
So working in socially engaged arts practices
and social practice specifically has really
started to make a lot more sense for me.
So very simply, I have some slides--
I'm going to try to toggle back and forth
between a lot of things because I don't have much time here
tonight--
that frame some of the questions.
And this is-- how do-- am I in presentation mode?
No?
What does this look like?
Not right.
The questions that frame this project
goes something like this.
Where does real art happen?
Whose histories inform our knowledge in our practice?
How are identities related to and impacted by the work
that we do?
What is the value of making mistakes?
And who gets to be an artist?
So at KSMoCA, we have about this many programs,
I don't know how many there are anymore--
[LAUGH]
--that we've initiated to essentially have
this functioning museum run side by side.
So my colleague Harrell often refers to P.S. 1,
we're all familiar with P.S. 1 in New York, right?
A museum that exists in what was a school.
We're not trying to use the shell of the school,
we're trying to function inside the school simultaneously
and in tandem with the school.
And the kids at our museum are our curators, they are docents,
they are artists, they are copywriters,
they are advisory board members, they are workshop developers,
they take on the roles that the adults typically take on
in the art world, and they try to give some exposure
to the children about what these roles right are--
what these roles are.
So in a sense, to demystify what the art
world is in some senses.
And that comes very much out of my education practice,
my teaching at the college level,
I encounter more students than I could
imagine telling you about that have no idea what a curator is.
They don't know what preparator is.
They don't know what a gallery director really does.
They sort of know about Van Gogh, and that's it, right?
And that's when they come to you saying, I want to be an artist.
And we're kind of looking at them saying, well,
what does that mean?
And so we begin at the beginning, well
what is art, right?
And so I'm just going to run through a few projects
here and maybe close with a little Instagram moment.
If you do want to follow us, you're invited to.
We're @KSMOCA on Instagram, K-S-M-O-C-A.
This is a project called Our Civil Rights Revisited,
and this is-- we try to partner with what's
happening in the schools for teachers,
but without trying to deliver their curriculum.
So we want a bridge between what's
happening in the classroom and how that might be
relevant to an arts practice.
Our Civil Rights Revisited was a series
of photographs in which the kids re-enacted images
from the Civil Rights movement that were both local, regional,
and national.
And so you're seeing the March on Selma
here on the left hand side.
And then at the opening reception,
one of our students giving a tour to another child
from the community who has come in,
explaining the relevance of this image to her
and what it was like to pose and sort of
try to re-enact and re-live this moment.
It's really kind of lovely, the docents, their favorite things
are their badges, interestingly.
When they come in, it's like they run to the table,
we have like a table set up so they can get their badges.
It says KSMoCA docent, and they write their name on it,
and then they will take you for a tour of their museum, which
incidentally, is also a tour of their school.
We've also executed projects by artists
like Stephanie Syjuco, who is based in Berkeley, I believe,
and this is called Not MoMA.
Not MoMA is a project that Stephanie developed
where students are invited to recreate works of art
from the Museum of Modern Art's online collection.
So it's an attempt to sort of close
the gap between what you can access physically
between your geography and what you can access I guess,
digitally, or what's the word that we use now?
I don't know the word anymore.
I [INAUDIBLE].
Virtually, that's the word.
Thank you, thank you.
Help me out whenever.
And so the work that the kids created,
you can sort of see on the left hand side of the screen.
It's actually better than the real thing.
Like, the Pollock is better than the real thing.
[LAUGH]
The Joseph Beuys.
I mean, there were so many amazing works.
The teachers all wanted to like steal them and take them home.
They kept saying, can I have that painting?
We're like no, it's part of a permanent collection
in a museum,
[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]
Right?
And that-- so it's like really trying
to elevate this work that the kids are thinking about
and doing, and making it real and relevant.
This is Eliazar on the left, presenting his Gustaf Klimt.
It was really phenomenal.
And this is on the right hand side,
you can see them working on their Pollock on the floor
here.
This is just the cafeteria.
It was really kind of fantastic.
And the wall labels at KSMoCA all privilege
the voice of the children.
So whatever they said about the work when they were making
it is what we put up for you to read.
And eye level is their eye level.
So when you come as an adult, you're down here.
And they-- and you have to squat, and they present to you.
So it's really geared toward thinking
about things like that.
We also have a robust artist in residence program
and we're in our second year.
This program is about four years strong now,
and our second year, we started this artist
in residence program.
And we were able to host artists this past year like Carson
Ellis and Hank Meloy, Chitra Ganesh,
thank you, Prageeta Sharma.
Also Laylah Ali.
And we're looking forward to many really diverse, beautiful
group of artists again this year.
Carson and Hank-- Hank was nine at the time that he did this
project, but Hank is autistic, and Carson and Hank worked
together to create a book of illustrations in which Hank
described--
it's called Introduction to Galactic Alienology.
And that is Hank's title, and that is the best title
of anything ever.
Hank described the aliens that he imagined
and Carson illustrated to them.
You may be familiar with the children's book named
Wildwoods, called Wildwoods.
Carson, her work is really lovely.
And so this work that you see, this
is Hank and Carson on the left hand side, yeah.
And on the right hand side are the aliens
that the children imagined following a similar process.
So in workshop with Carson, she had them do things
like you blindfold one student, one student describes,
another student draws, and they came up
with their own creatures.
And then we projected them onto the wall as a giant mural.
Carson also had opportunity to work with our college students,
and that's kind of an amazing opportunity as well.
We host a partnership class in-- at the King School every week.
So it's just what some of it looks like.
Some docenting.
The docents often have activities
that they will draw for you, so you usually
come home with a portrait or an alien of your own.
Chitra Ganesh did an amazing project
with us called Everyday Superheroes,
and invited the children to imagine people
in their everyday lives as they would exist as a superhero.
And we produce little zines for each artist
to help every child in the school
learn about the artist's work, so 400 copies of this zine.
Laylah Ali came in and did a project called not
self-portraits with the kids, and she
was one of the most wonderful artists to host.
She was so great with them.
Taught them to be brave and not scared of their drawing,
at the fifth grade level, that's really interesting,
and here are a couple of portraits
from a couple of docents who are also
brothers in the same class, it was really quite adorable.
We had Hank Willis Thomas last year
as well come and give a lecture and hosted his project
The Truth Booth, which is a collective--
a project from the Cause Collective,
of which he is a part.
But we also had Jamison do the introduction.
And Jamison would be better than me and any of us up here.
He said, I have tons of public speaking experience,
where's my lectern?
[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]
This was in the practice, like the dry run.
And you know, he's presenting to his peers, but also
the large and general public.
And so we're thinking about kids as community partners
and activists.
We're thinking about teaching them artistic
processes they might not ever have exposure to.
We're thinking about getting them access to kids in museum--
or getting them access to artists
the caliber of which they would typically encounter only
at a place like MoMA, or the Portland Art
Museum, or the Missoula Art Museum, or SAM, or DAM, or BAM,
or any of them, right?
But instead, they have their own space,
and these are students that don't typically
have an opportunity to get out to these places.
This year for our inaugural year,
and I will be done in just a moment here,
we hosted our first international art fair
at KSMocA as part of a large city-wide art celebration
called Converge 45.
And we've been selected to present that work again
next year with a significant budget.
And we did a build out in the cafeteria of an art fair
modeled exactly after an international art fair,
and took the kids on a summer program to the Seattle Art Fair
so that they could experience that, get trained by about 25
different galleries and organizations in the area,
and host an art fair of epic proportions
in which they were buying, selling, hawking, wheeling,
dealing, it was amazing.
This is one of our students and some work
that he and one of his friends made at the last minute
and decided he wanted to put up for sale outside of the KSMoCA
booth.
Sold every drawing, had people down in the corner
looking through the back stock, you know,
and it's like what else do you have?
I mean, they really took it on and made it their own.
We had a kids panel where we have here Roya Amirsoleymani
and Kristan Kennedy, who are two folks from the Portland
Institute of Contemporary Art interviewing the kids
and fielding questions with them.
The kids, incidentally by the way,
made every banner, everything you see that says KSMoCA,
these are hand-painted, hand-drawn banners.
And this is just what the fair kind of looked like.
So it's bringing different people
into the community that typically would never
encounter a school--
MLK Junior School, as you might imagine,
exists at the intersection of MLK Junior Boulevard,
which as we all know, is code, and--
for a very specific place in every city,
I'm working on another interesting project
around that-- where the resources are understandably
slim, but the ability for other people to see these students
is often somehow rendered impossible.
And so this is a way to get visibility,
but also to give them agency.
And what I like to talk about is that this agency really
isn't about becoming an artist per se,
or a writer per se, or a curator per se, but the idea
that you could be empowered to understand
a field and its intricacies as a child
so that when you encounter options as an adult,
you don't feel like it's something you're left out of,
or a world that you are not allowed to be in,
which is a sentiment that happens so often,
and that many of us in this room can relate to.
So that's a little bit of what I have been up to lately.
It has been an absolute honor to serve on this board this year
and to continue to participate with thinking its presence.
I hope you like your bags because I made them just
for you.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]
And without further ado, I'd like to introduce Farid.
Thank you.