Support for Oregon Art Beat is provided by... and OPB members and viewers like you.

[ ♪♪♪ ] WOMAN: This feeling that I feel when I'm out here, I want to bring that into my practice.

WOMAN: The brushstroke and the energy, that's this abundance of energy that I sense when I'm outside.

WOMAN: I think that there's nothing as valuable or mysterious as the things that are easy to see on our planet.

[ ♪♪♪ ] WOMAN: It's interesting, looking at these again after being away from them for a while.

Being able to look at one of these and then go, "What is going on in her head, what is she thinking?"

I think all of us have told a lie here or there, even if you would qualify it as this white lie, so I knew for these works, I wanted it to evoke what I was going through at the time, the sadness and the anger and the frustration in recounting generational curses and just like, "Why isn't my mother like this or my father like this, why are they this way?

You know, why am I this way?"

For me, it comes down to grace and being able to give that to family members.

So being able to paint these pieces opened that up for me, and then I could move forward.

My name is Sadé DuBoise.

I am an Oregon artist and painter.

Hey.

Hey there.

Thank you.

Thank you.

See you later.

Bye.

I move throughout my life and studio practice in a very methodical but free way.

I think of everything that comes to me as this, like, beautiful evolution of life.

It's an amazing time to be here.

[ laughs ] And to, like, be alive and... And to create.

[ ♪♪♪ ] I'm self-taught.

And that feels really weird as an artist.

It's really interesting, being a student at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.

It was something that I wanted to do for the development of it, and I'm learning so much.

My professor, he's like, "Okay, this is how you set up.

Like, as an artist, you want your palette to be wherever your dominant hand is that you're using.

You're going to look at your model, you're gonna have your canvas right here."

And those were things that I didn't do in my practice before then.

You know, I'd be reaching over to my palette and then paint.

I see art as something that can be very hard to obtain.

We see, you know, a Kerry James Marshall sell for over a million dollars, and it feels unattainable.

And so I wanted to flip that on its head and create a lot of work that was within a budget that would work for different households.

And so I created a series of work where I create these 4-by-6 pieces of my style and put a lot of detail and work into these, and then I sell them for a hundred bucks.

I grew up in a single-parent household with my mom and three younger sisters.

I'm the oldest.

Growing up, like, my mom saw my desire to copy every single thing that I did as a kid.

My father would always do doodles and sketches and stuff.

He was in the Navy, but when he would come visit, we always looked at his work that he would do, and I was so enthralled with that.

And I was just like, "Oh, man, I want to be just like my dad."

I remember being at Albina Head Start, and everything that I saw, I would sketch.

And through that, my mom saw it and was just like, "Wow, okay," like, "Let's keep this up."

She put me in a whole bunch of different programs.

Like Caldera was a big one for me that I stayed in until my last year in high school.

Caldera's in Sisters, Oregon.

Gets inner-city youth out of the city and into nature.

And you're just in this space that's so healing and so thriving and beautiful.

And that really motivated my work, too, just being this little Black girl in this wide-open, natural space and feeling so comfortable and confident.

None of my family had gone to college, so I didn't know what to do, my mom didn't know what to do.

I decided, okay, I'm going to go to Oregon State University.

I submitted two applications: one to their engineering department, one to their art program, and then with engineering, I got a full ride.

And so I picked the practical choice.

I did engineering.

My family had been so close, and while my mom was working, I picked up a lot of the slack in the house.

So my sisters revered me almost as a mother figure for them.

And so that was really a big thing for my family, like, leaving.

It was almost this feeling of, like, abandonment.

So I dropped out, because I had a lot of mental health issues, too, at the time.

Like, how am I going to disconnect from my family unit, you know, and go off and do what I want?

[ ♪♪♪ ] 2017, it was the first time that I had, like, separated from my mother's household and went off on my own.

I was doing a lot of running at the time and hiking and just getting away outdoors.

And all of that became really focal to, like, my meditative and just practice of self-care.

It reminded me a lot of my childhood, a lot of going to Caldera.

Then I was like, wow, like this feeling that I feel when I'm out here, I want to bring that into my practice.

So then my work kept portraits but then has moved to predominantly landscape backgrounds.

"Black Muses" started off as a love letter to Black women.

I did this call, and I had so many women reach out to me.

And basically the premise of the project was to paint women in their favorite natural spaces, places where Black women and femmes felt safe and loved.

I'm hoping that through "Black Muses," women will be able to see themselves in this grand way.

Something about seeing yourself in a painting feels so concrete and so big.

MAN: So here's our original, and this is the first round of proofs.

So we want it to be close, but it's probably not going to be exact.

Yeah, this is awesome.

SADÉ: After George Floyd had been murdered, I said, "Okay, I'm going to paint my own posters in resistance to this act that always happens.

Everyone's always so shocked, like, "Oh, how did this happen?"

No, it always happens.

And that was my way of healing through this trauma.

That is why I'm giving a free poster to every person here today, because we see it as a form of healing in our community.

Change is needed, and it's gonna come, and we're gonna make sure that it comes.

OFFICER [ over loudspeaker ]: Disperse from the area now.

Move east.

Disperse from the area.

This is an unlawful assembly.

After I did my resistance works and was involved in different protests, I found out about the grant for the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art.

They were looking for 20 different Black artists, and I applied and I got it, and it was just like, okay, I get to create this resistance work and further my practice as a grantee.

[ ♪♪♪ ] I want to take this composition and I want to focus on the mothers, the woman experience when a son passes out of police brutality.

And so this is a collective mourning between different women of this Black man.

This is my husband in the piece, and then my mother-in-law.

I stood in the gap, and I think that's very symbolic of you don't know when this stuff's going to happen.

So at first I didn't like that I was in the piece, and then as I thought about it, I was like, no, like, this is beautiful because it's not just mothers that are impacted.

There's daughters, there's partners, there's sisters.

And so that's what it symbolized for me.

I do my work and I'm authentic to the work that I'm doing.

I'm doing what I know I should be doing.

And when you're, like, in that combination, things just come easy.

Like, things open up.

And as long as you're, like, ready to take it and grasp it, because that's how I view it, then do it.

Look at you!

[ laughing ] Oh, it's so wonderful!

It's beautiful.

Thank you for showing folks who you are.

That's who you are.

Thank you.

[ laughs ] It's crazy how fast it's grown, and I think about that a lot sometimes.

But it's beautiful.

[ ♪♪♪ ] [ boat horn blows ] [ ♪♪♪ ] WOMAN: The word "abundance" has a big role in my life, because I like to think in abundance.

I don't like to think in scarcity.

I believe that what you think about, you bring about.

The brush stroke and the energy, that's this abundance of energy that I sense when I'm outside.

My way of expressing that in a painting is through movement with brush strokes.

My studio is out here kind of on the edge of town in North Portland.

The river, the industry, the animals, all of it impacts what I'm doing inside the studio.

I had had this conversation with a friend about abundance.

The next day, I'm coming over the St. Johns Bridge, and there's this enormous orange boat.

It was just visually outstanding.

The name of the ship was Abundance.

It was from France.

And I came home, I took a bunch of pictures and painted the barge.

These ships are coming from all over the place.

They are bringing things in, they're taking things out.

The river is the lifeline.

[ boat horn blowing ] Being out here, so close to the river, you don't hear the sounds that I hear out here when you're in inner Portland.

That's a different audio experience.

[ bird cawing ] Four years ago, I started using my phone to record all the different sounds: the owls, the crows, the foghorns, the ship horns, everything that was unique to this area, so that I could use that at some point in one of my installations, and I eventually did.

[ frog croaking, boat horn blowing ] [ rain pattering ] So the way that I sort of visually see it is the St. Johns Bridge out here is sort of the portal, the entrance and exit into Portland.

[ ♪♪♪ ] I feel like the Rood Family Pavilion is the bookend to this, because there's not a lot of large boats that are going to go past that.

The Rood Family Pavilion is owned by OHSU, and it's in collaboration with the Ronald McDonald House.

My work there is on the seventh floor commons and the 10th and 11th floor.

We have had family members that have had to use the Ronald McDonald House at points in our life, and so it felt like a little bit I could pay back some of that.

I always wanted to feel like I was in a really good place when I came into the studio to do that work, because I wanted really good energy.

People that are in those circumstances, they need something to feel good.

[ ♪♪♪ ] One of my latest exhibits is the state flowers of the United States, and that is in Concourse B at the Portland Airport.

There's 50 paintings of each state flower of the United States of America.

I had received a small packet of wildflowers as a gift, and I had just tossed them out in the garden, and the first one that popped was the California poppy.

I just did this painting, and I liked it so much, I thought, "Oh, maybe I'll do Oregon grape next."

It was this little incident that inspired this domino effect.

We have millions of travelers a year, tens of millions, and the work has been so widely well received because it's so interactive and something that all peoples from all places can relate to.

And even if they're not from the United States, there's a bouquet of all of us there, and I want to feel like we're welcoming to all these people that are traveling.

I'm currently working on a new body of work that's animal-centric.

I started with doing a bunch of little individual animals, just to start getting into the feel of what I wanted to do with them, and then I started to put them all into this bigger painting, sort of a Noah's ark type of situation because of the barges and the ships out there on the river that I see all the time, so I just wanted to -- I just wanted to bring them into one vessel.

I'm really bringing the animals into being in the spotlight right now.

[ ♪♪♪ ] So there's this interaction between the industry and nature, and as I'm watching it, I'm wanting to know how we respect that, how we respect the industry -- we need it -- and how we respect the animals.

We are on their territory.

We moved into this area.

We moved into where the animals are.

But of course you just want to see everything to continue to flourish and live together.

That's the ultimate goal.

[ blows ] [ ♪♪♪ ] I can't help picking things up.

It's like you see things on the ground, and they're so beautiful.

I have enormous collections in my house of all the stuff I gather.

So I just started pressing leaves.

Like, look at the edge on this.

If you look at, like, the vein detail on it, it's just so gorgeous.

Even the imperfections of them, the holes in them.

Look at this one.

Picked it up for the holes.

The stuff that insects have bitten and eaten, it just makes it even better.

If you just look at a cedar bough lying on a sidewalk, it just looks like a cedar bough, but if you start to really, really look closely at it, it's like all of these little almost caterpillar-like structures, and that's what I like to do, is look at things really closely, because there's just like a universe in each little thing that you look at.

Someday, I'd like to buy a microscope.

My name is Carolyn Garcia, and I'm an artist.

I grew up in Cheyenne, Wyoming, surrounded by prairie.

It smelled like sage.

So I was able to just experience that landscape, and it just gives you an appreciation of nature and of quiet.

It's important to me to remember that feeling and try to be aware of things.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Illustration's always been a big part of my work.

I would describe it as very fairy-tale-like.

And most of the time, everything's just made up out of my head.

There's always a story, you know.

It's steeped in narrative.

This is about my love of ground cherries.

The title is "Empress of the Husk."

In fall, the papery pods that the fruit is in falls off, so all that's left is this beautiful skeletal husk.

And I've always thought it looked like a castle, so I just wanted to have a little creature on the inside, and I wanted her to be royal in a way, but a child.

You know, she's empress of the husk.

There are these little filaments.

It's like they're little highlights.

If you're looking at it in sunlight, it's otherworldly.

You know, working at this size, it's like you can get involved in this really intimate way and get really lost in it.

It's fun.

Each side of my family, I think, had, you know, a lot of influence on what I do in different ways.

My mom's side of the family, my grandma Carolyn, who I was named after, was a wonderful writer.

And my grandpa O'Neill, her husband, he was a concert flautist and a painter and a writer.

My dad's side of the family, the Garcias and Archuletas, are very artistic in practical arts.

They hunted, they fished, and everything was made by hand.

Also the storytelling on that side of the family, elaborate storytelling.

My tía, Maclovia, she was famous for her remedios.

Like if you were sick in any way, she had a tincture for you, and they were incredibly effective.

And everything in her house was cozy and comforting.

She had a little stove, little wood stove.

So it was like going to another time, and I was enthralled by it.

[ ♪♪♪ ] There's a lot of natural details and a lot of animals in what I do.

There's almost always plants in my drawings, and I think that that plays in to just, like, my tía's remedios.

You know, it was all made from plants.

And I think that there's nothing as valuable or mysterious as the things that are easy to see on our planet.

I actually found a four-leaf clover when I was a kid.

I wished for a horse, and the next day, I had a horse.

No kidding.

So the power of four-leaf clovers.

Come on, Scout.

Scout is my very precious dog, and we walk almost every day.

And I bring a lot of things home.

Another pinecone... [ chuckles ] to add to my many pinecones.

I can't resist them.

Come on.

I pick up acorns, leaves, pieces of plants, rocks, anything and everything.

I love when poppies are just about to come out of their shell.

It's like there's a really beautiful dress in there about ready to pop out.

[ ♪♪♪ ] I take a lot of pictures, too.

I'm always looking down.

I like -- I call it bug-low, like getting on your hands and knees and looking at things on that scale.

Like, it's really fun to look underneath a mushroom, because mushroom gills are spectacular.

You can imagine what it looks like for a bug.

I like to walk at all times, but it is fun to walk at night.

It's kind of spooky, but that's exciting.

And just the warm, lit-up windows that you see in all the houses that you walk by just look so cozy.

And, like, you imagine what people are having for dinner or what their lives are like.

There's something so mysterious and comforting about walking at night.

[ ♪♪♪ ] This was inspired by the book The Photo Ark, which was about animals that are about to be extinct.

There was a photo of a really bedraggled-looking rabbit, and it was the last of its species, and it just really got to me.

So I was thinking this is the last one of its kind.

When I was working on this creature, the thing that I was really enjoying about him is I could really imagine how he would move.

All of these little spines would move to propel him forward.

I was a really shy kid, and drawing was an escape for me, and it still has that same effect.

It's a way to escape the world and create your own world.

[ ♪♪♪ ] I don't quite have a title for this one, but I wanted it to be about possibility.

I was thinking it was someone very young, because I think when you're young, it's like the world is just unopened and everything's possible and you're unafraid of what's before you.

Originally was going to put something coming out of this egg, but then I decided it was better not to know.

You know, for everybody, it's been a very rough couple of years.

But something's coming out, something good.

It's important to me to notice things, to notice little things, because there's vast amount of inspiration in the smallest of things.

Look up, look down, because it's everywhere, things to notice, things that are important.

[ ♪♪♪ ] To see more stories about Oregon artists, visit our website... And for a look at what we're working on now, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

[ ♪♪♪ ] It's like a sea creature.

Support for Oregon Art Beat is provided by... and the contributing members of OPB and viewers like you.