‘Black, Black History Month’ pop-up museum showcases artists and organizations in historic Portland building

The “Black, Black History Month” pop-up museum in Portland’s Old Town district has three floors of exhibits featuring history, photography, paintings, film and music. And the Horizon Enterprise Building that serves as the temporary museum is itself a kind of exhibit, as its owners want to turn it into a community space to serve and support BIPOC artists and organizations. Tory Campbell is the interim director of culture at the 1803 Fund, which is supporting the building’s transition - and the organizations represented in the museum. Taishona Carpenter is the board president of Don’t Shoot PDX, which runs The BLACK Gallery and was one of the curators of the pop-up museum. We talk with them about the mission and vision of their organizations and how that’s reflected in the exhibits.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. The “Black, Black History Month” pop-up museum opened in Portland’s Old Town district this week. It has history, photography, paintings, film, music. The Horizon Enterprise building that’s hosting the temporary museum is itself a kind of exhibit. The owners who bought the space in 2021 wanted to turn it into a community space for BIPOC artists and organizations.

Tory Campbell is the interim director of culture at the 1803 Fund, which is supporting both this building’s transition and the organizations represented in the museum. Taishona Carpenter is the board president of Don’t Shoot PDX. She runs the BLACK Gallery and was one of the curators of this month’s pop-up museum. They both join me now. It’s great to have both of you on the show.

Tory Campbell: Good to be here.

Taishona Carpenter: Yeah, thank you, Dave.

Miller: Tory, first – how has this first week gone?

Campbell: First week has been amazing. I would say one thing that stood out to me this past weekend is seeing that we had a panel conversation with a lot of former musicians from funk and jazz bands, who are now in their 70s and 80s, come through and talk. And to see them watch as they walked through the museum, seeing their images from when they were young on the walls and hearing, “Wow. Boy, I used to look good back then.” [Laughter] It was just incredibly special, coupled with a number of exhibits we have that are featuring contemporary artists that are in their 20s. Just seeing that multi-generational moment is really special.

Miller: Taishona, what about you? What stood out to you in terms of what you’ve heard from people over the last week?

Carpenter: Similar to what Tory said, it’s just seeing the reactions in people’s faces, especially on the first floor. The way that the museum exhibit is presented, everyone is kind of looking up and also in awe. So lots of smiles, lots of intent gazes as they’re taking in the historical context that’s actually hanging from the walls. As Tory mentioned, the “Wall to Wall Soul” exhibit, just really beautiful historical moments that are captured. And I think it’s nice for them to be able to reflect, and feel honored and recognized for their achievements.

Then on the second floor, there’s more contemporary photography. So we’re kind of bridging the past into the future and providing space for inspiration for all of that as well.

Miller: I want to give folks more of a sense for what they can see and hear there as we go. But Tory, just stepping back, how did this exhibit come to be?

Campbell: Yeah, it started with a desire from the 1803 Fund, part of our focus in terms of supporting and rooting the Black communities, investing into our culture, that kind of the tapestry of things that connect us. And we thought this would be a great way to both invest in convening many partners. So we have 11 partners. It happened within three months, so it was a crazy quick sprint. We said this is something that we want to do, obviously, in the midst of Black History Month to celebrate our resilience and our joy, particularly Portland’s Black history.

Miller: It’s been a little while since we actually talked about the 1803 Fund. Can you just remind folks what it is?

Campbell: The 1803 Fund is the largest kind of Black fund in the nation and probably even globally. Our commitment is locally supporting the prosperity of the Black community through both investments and also some of the work of the grant programming, starting and rooting in Albina and expanding out.

Miller: Taishona, as I mentioned, you’re the board president of Don’t Shoot PDX and the director of the BLACK Gallery. Why did you want to collaborate on this exhibit?

Carpenter: So, in my partnership with this museum and with 1803 Fund, as of now, my role is more as an independent contractor, an event producer. It’s called Compose Yourself magazine, and I run that company as event organizing, event space, and also being able to curate different installations and exhibits. So for me, it was perfect because obviously with the BLACK Gallery, I’m very passionate about art. I’m very passionate about being able to platform underrepresented communities and creatives.

So when I was approached as a potential partner in this, I was very excited and this is probably the largest scale event that I’ve been able to co-produce, with Michelle Comer, who’s with Vida En Color. She brought me on. It’s been really great to work with the 1803 Fund. And I think we’ve done something really great together. It kind of brings all of my passions together. Also, I was able to not only work with 1803′s partners, but I’m able to bring in my own exhibit, which is featuring the work of Isaka Shamsud-Din, a long-time Oregon artist. [It’s] just great to be able to show his legacy and put it up on the walls for people to recognize and be astonished by.

Miller: It’s been a little while since we actually had him on to talk about his art and he has a not small room of paintings in the corner when you walk in. Can you describe some of the work there and why you wanted to feature him?

Carpenter: Oh, absolutely. So we have about 10 pieces by Isaka, as part of the “Black, Black History Month” museum. They all range from archival drafts of the “Jump Town” mural, which is featuring Albina’s Musicians Union. So that’s a really historical piece. We also have “Zulu Dawn,” which is a rare paper piece. Literally pulled from his archives, his studio that he’s been able to occupy for quite some time, a lot of those works have been created, starting in the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s. So the collection that’s on display spans from the ‘60s to the 2000s.

Miller: There’s almost like a zine-like poster when you first walk in that’s quite funny. Can you describe that one?

Carpenter:Yeah. It’s called “Affordable Fine Art.” And it’s more of a commentary style, where it was an advertisement for Isaka that he drew. I think it’s literally just ink on paper and it’s two people talking about, “Hey, you got to purchase this guy’s art. Did you know that you can get some really fine art by Isaka?” And at the time he was going by Isaac. So having this timeline of his work, you see how he’s mentioning himself. So the signatures have changed and his names changed. It’s just a really funny commentary piece and we’re really glad we actually were able to reunite him with that piece. It had been lost for a while. A friend of ours, Derek Franklin, was the art director at Converge 45, and has long been a supporter of our work at Don’t Shoot PDX and the BLACK Gallery. He was a professor at Marylhurst University and he found it in his desk. When he arrived, it was still kind of in disarray. That was one of the pieces that he found, and he was able to frame it and present it to Isaka – so reunited.

Miller: In the center of the first floor museum space right now, there’s, I don’t know, a dozen or so pretty big hanging posters made by the group Oregon Black Pioneers. Can you give us a sense just for the stories or the lives that are highlighted in those posters?

Carpenter: Absolutely. And they’re both double sided. So I guess you could say there’s about 24 different Oregon Black pioneers that are on display. It’s a wealth of information, being able to work without organization and share it with the public. So there’s been a lot of feedback. People like Nellie Matthews or Penelope Franklin, some of the first people that were able to actually graduate from University of Oregon. People like Beatrice Cannady, who was a strong advocate for the publication that she created. She made waves as a civic leader as well and was a very outspoken civil rights activist, in particular about the movie, “Birth of a Nation,” which at the time, a lot of people were using that film to dehumanize Black people. And not just her, but a lot of people, through their stories in the museum, you see how they really are empowered, despite what they’ve been going through and despite coming to a state that has very cruel [and] some of the worst exclusion laws in the history of our nation. So very inspiring stories, and being able to just recognize that and carry that with us is important.

Miller: Tory, I’m curious what you’ve been reflecting on as you’ve spent time with those photos of some of the earliest Black Oregonians? And I say Oregonians … I mean, a lot of this is even well pre-statehood. What’s it like for you just to be among those stories and those photographs?

Campbell: Yeah, I think it gives you a sense of continuity, being a part of something obviously that’s much bigger than yourself, being connected to history that is oftentimes overlooked and buried. So the the museum creates this moment and a critical kind of space for all of us to interact with these stories, to see ourselves and those individuals, to understand the resiliency by which they had to live, and also what does that mean for us today? So it’s very empowering. It’s in many ways renewing, I would say, as you walk through the space. And of course a ton of “Aha” because you’re just like, I didn’t even know this existed. I know these individuals were a part of our shared history in Oregon.

Miller: One thing I was struck by as I was reading those stories and seeing census records is what we’re able to know and piece together, and then the gaps in the knowledge – partly because this happened a long time ago and and partly because of institutional racism or people living on the margins of society. Taishona, I’m just wondering how you think about that as a curator of what we can know and what we can’t know?

Carpenter: That is such a heavy topic because as an archivist as well, I see it all the time in my own research when I’m going through special collections or state archives … Even the FBI vault has been a vault of information because they obviously had the resources, the means and the determination to profile and surveil a lot of our communities. So it’s interesting what’s there and then noticing the gap of, OK, this is a 120-page document, but pages 30 through 65 are missing. Is that by the individual omission or was it part of a larger picture where people made sure that that information was not going to be available? Even when I do get archives and I do FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests, so that I can gain the information I’m looking for, a lot of it is redacted.

So, there’s always going to be that element, I think, to history and archives. But it’s even more important to represent those stories as you can and just bridging the gaps. Luckily we’ve got the internet and we have a lot of people sharing their stories, archiving their own family histories and making them available. Actually, one of the most interesting interactions I’ve had in the gallery or the museum is, just last week, there was an older white gentleman that was taking in something on the second floor – so not even where the historical exhibit is. And we started talking. He said that he had been going through his genealogy record and that he actually traced his family back to the 1600s from England. They immigrated and they came to Virginia. So I’m like, “oh, I’ve tried to trace my family history and it’s very difficult, obviously, as a Black American to find those exact origins.” But he literally offered to send me – and he did, and I just checked my email – an entire drive folder of all of these bills of sale for slaves that his family owned. And he said, “I want you to be able to use this however you’d like to,” because I started talking about my art practice, which is utilizing research to create these large-scale art installations. And he was like, “I would love to be a part of it if you want this horrible stuff.” And, I do.

So he actually kept his word and he sent it to me just the other day. I haven’t had the time to go through it yet, but things like that just keep the journey for more information worth it because there’s a lot of gaps. But we, as people, can fill them in. It’s our shared American history at the end of the day.

Miller: Tory, I meant to ask this earlier, but I just got focused on all this other amazing stuff. What do you mean by “Black, Black History Month”?

Campbell: Yeah, I think there’s two things we talk about when we say “Black, Black History.” I think the first is that our history is every day and just in February, we doubled down. Just also in our nomenclature conversation, it’s like a double emphasis. So it’s one thing to say, you can run, but it’s another thing when I can say you can run, run. I think it’s just this double emphasis of brilliance, like doing something really well. So for us, this is a “Black, Black History Month.”

Miller: What is the idea behind this building? I mean, what are the hopes and dreams for it?

Campbell: Yeah, I would say, Adewale and Cyrus, and Creative Homies, for them, they’re Black developers, young Black developers. And they really want to see this building not only become a community space but activated for creatives. Oftentimes, you see creatives will come to some of our larger institutions and companies, do well for themselves, want to spin out and start their own business. But because there aren’t spaces, particularly for Black and BIPOC creatives, that is not only just accommodating but has a lot of the tools, they will move elsewhere and out of state. So they really want to retain all of that talent and also create spaces for folks to come and do work, do exceptional work. That’s really their hope.

Miller: How does that fit into the 1803 Fund’s mission?

Campbell: Yeah, I would say it fits in, in that part of the goal of our investment is to create place, is to create places of permanence for us – that’s both from community gathering spaces, to living, to housing and also commerce. So kind of the economic development push. And I think for these gentlemen, we really want to be behind them to see their work really elevated. They’ve struggled, as you know. Perhaps you may not be aware, like the story of their beginnings has been one of kind of fits and starts of finding funding. So us even having the venue in this way, is elevating the visibility of what they want to intend the building to be. We hope that it creates some kind of economic drivers for them.

Miller: Taishona, we’re talking some about history, or about, in the case of Isaka, a painter who’s been around for decades now in Portland, or musicians who performed in the ‘60s and ‘70s. But you also have much younger photographers who are featured. How did you decide about which young artists to include?

Carpenter: This was more of a plug and play for me where 1803 Fund, and particularly Juma Sei, had brought in Alisa Wilbon. She’s an amazing curator here in Portland. So she already had this vision for the exhibit and the photographers that she wanted to feature. And she’s a photographer herself as well. But she wanted to use this exhibit, which is called “For the Record” to uplift their individual stories, and some of their images and their journeys to getting there. Being able to coordinate to make her dream and her visual come to life, that was more of my role there and just supporting making it happen.

Miller: Tory, what are some other cultural investments at the fund that you are excited about right now, going forward?

Campbell: Yeah, I think some of the things that we really are excited about is we recently invested in “For the Future,” into 11 organizations that are doing culturally significant work, as well as space-building. And that’s a cohort that will do life together for the next five years, both working on transformative programming and opportunities to build stronger connections, cohesion within community, but also helping those organizations grow.

We want to be committed to a lot of the long-standing events and experiences that make up the Black community. So Juneteenth, Good in the Hood … there’s so many things that we know people are doing that is brilliant, that’s special, but oftentimes done on a shoestring budget, that we wanna come behind and amplify through our our investment to see that they really are able to not only reach the full breadth of our community but also grow.

Carpenter: And hopefully, Don’t Shoot PDX can be included in that.

Campbell: Facts.

Miller: It’s good to get on the record. [Laughter] Tory and Taishona, thanks so much.

Campbell: Thank you for having us.

Carpenter: Thank you, Dave.

Miller: Tory Campbell is the interim director of culture at the 1803 Fund. Taishona Carpenter is one of the curators of this “Black, Black History” exhibit that you can see that’s up right now. You can find it in Portland’s Old Town district. She’s also the director of the BLACK Gallery and the board president of Don’t Shoot PDX.

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