Artist Talk: Sharita Towne at Portland Art Museum

As part of the Portland Art Museum's Artist Talks series, faculty member Sharita Towne will give a talk on May 16, 2019 at 6pm. Tickets are required and may be acquired here.

Artist Talks is a monthly public program series that invites Portland-based artists from a range of disciplines to talk about one work of art from the Portland Art Museum’s permanent collection.

Towne has recently been awarded a prestigious Creative Capital Award for the Black Life Experiential Research Project, a think tank Towne founded in 2017 with Lisa K. Bates that "gives language, shape, and form to Black imagination." The project has also been supported by the Regional Arts and Culture Council. Earlier this year the two made the exhibition HERE//Humboldt that "centers the voices of black artists and community members located in the rapidly gentrifying, and historically black neighborhood of North/Northeast Portland."

Towne's research-based transdisciplinary practice focuses on, in the artist's words, "creating interdisciplinary community art projects that engage local and global Black geographies, histories, and possibilities."

She is the co-founder of URe:AD Press (United Re:Public of the African Diaspora),The Black Life Experiential Research Group, and is one-fourth of the post-colonial conceptual karaoke band Weird Allan Kaprow. URe:AD Press is an ongoing collaborative print and media project for Afro-diasporic audiences, that produces video installations, screenprinted ephemera, and self published books of Afro-diasporic inquiry. The Black Life Experiential Research Group is an interdisciplinary collaborative for inquiry and activism at the intersection of art, urban planning, and radical geography. Weird Allan Kaprow creates participatory projects built around appropriating pop melodies and creating new lyrics and music videos that critique institutional and art historical complicity in promoting recolonial worldviews.