Sitka Center offers fresh focus
Photo by Renee Lopez
The Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, located just north of Lincoln City, thrives on welcoming and sharing a diverse selection of voices from a wide spectrum of artistic expression.
Writer, photographer and dancer Intisar Abioto is the whole package, and will be sharing her work, musings and concerns about the uncertainties and discoveries of the past year via Zoom on Thursday, May 27.
Abioto will also talk about the work she created and considered over the course of her May Sitka Center artist residency.
Born in Memphis and now living in Portland, Abioto describes herself as “an explorer-artist, moving from the visionary and embodied root of Blackgirl Southern cross-temporal cross-modal storytelling ways.”
Her works refer to the living breath and breadth of people of African descent against the expanse of their storied, geographic and imaginative landscapes.
Working in long-form projects that encompass the visual, folkloric, documentary and performing arts, she, with her four artist sisters produced “The People Could Fly Project,” a 200,000-mile flying arts expedition exploring realities of flight and freedom within the African diasporic myth of the flying African and Virginia Hamilton’s award-winning book, “The People Could Fly.”
Abioto is the recipient of a 2018 Oregon Humanities Emerging Journalists, Community Stories Fellowship for which she began a continuing body of research on the history of artists of African descent in Oregon. She has performed or exhibited at venues including the Portland Art Museum, Photographic Center Northwest and the African American Museum in Philadelphia. Selected for an Art in the Governor’s Office solo exhibition in 2019, she exhibited and performed with nine Oregon-based Black artists against the inner expanse of the Oregon State Capitol building.
She was a contributing photographer to MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora and her photographs illustrated the Urban League of Portland’s State of Black Oregon 2015. With the five women artists in her family, she is the co-founder of Studio Abioto, a multivalent creative arts studio.
The talk will begin at 4 pm. For more information go to www.sitkacenter.org.