The Artists’ Biennial is a survey of works by visual and performing artists who are defining and advancing Oregon’s contemporary art landscape.  Initially started by the Portland Art Museum as the Portland Biennial in 1949, Oregon Contemporary began the new iteration in 2010 and expanded to include artists Oregon-wide in 2016.

April 3rd - July 5th

Opening event: April 3rd 6-8pm

Rememory: A Poem

“If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place - the picture of it stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there in the world.”—Toni Morrison

Ebony Frison and Stephanie Adams-Santos, both Portland-based artists and poets, come together to create a space to recall, reflect, and hold grief. Working in distinct visual languages, both artists engage memory as something active and persistent that lingers in image, land, and the body.

Bringing together printmaking, installation, photography, and the written word, the exhibition takes its title from the concept of “rememory” in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, where memory is understood as experiential. Memory can live and breathe, love and admonish. Haunt.

This exhibition is curated by TK Smith and is part of the Oregon Contemporary Artists’ Biennial, a survey of works by visual and performing artists who are defining and advancing Oregon’s contemporary art landscape.

Blackfish Gallery is honored to present BLACK MATTER, now in its eighth iteration, which has grown into more than an exhibition—it’s a sustained act of community-building among Black artists in Oregon. What has emerged is not only a network, but a family grounded in care, connection, and creative exchange.

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Rooted in the legacy of creative autonomy that has defined Blackfish Gallery for nearly five decades, BLACK MATTER invites audiences to invest deeply in the artists and their work. It calls for a relationship built on attention, respect, and genuine engagement with the ideas and futures these artists are shaping.

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This exhibition resists the limitations often placed on Black artistic expression. Rather than centering narratives of trauma or political agendas, BLACK MATTER creates space for Black artists to exist fully and freely—exploring abstraction, intimacy, joy, memory, and contradiction on their own terms.

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The works presented here are diverse in form and approach, united not by a single theme but by a shared commitment to self-definition and honesty. Together, they form a living archive of contemporary Black voices—expansive, evolving, and rooted in presence.

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BLACK MATTER is both an invitation and a call to action: to witness without assumption, to engage without reduction, and to recognize Black artistic expression as vital to our cultural landscape.