by Sarah Luu + Gwen Hoeffgen + Domenic Toliver + Adela Cardona Puerta

In this Art + Social Practice Conversation Series, we returned to a question about context: What lies around the work? What shapes it, survives beyond it, and who gets to tell its story?

by Haruka Ostley + Angela Ostley

“Where is the evidence? The images themselves, the act of taking them, the way they’re placed and redacted, the curation, the gesture of giving them to us, or the eyes that look? It is never just an image. It is a whole system showing its seams.”

by Peery Sloan + Yvonne Shortt

“I don’t want my board of directors to just be people. I want them to be the bobcat I see, the fox that travels along, the soil we’re using to make our instruments.”

by Domenic A. Toliver + The Honorary Mayor of Albina, Paul Knauls Sr.

“They’ll remember forever. You don’t know what it means to them, but they’ll remember.”

by Rose Lewis + William J. Diebold

“Well, you know, we’re all connection-making machines. So if you have thirteen pieces of common information, you can connect them. You may be wrong to do that, but you can do it.“

by Sarah Luu + Adela Cardona Puerta

“I am the official hummus maker of my family. One Christmas, I had made the hummus because my mom needed help, and I followed the recipe exactly as I had seen her do  it. When my grandma tasted it, she asked who made it because it tasted like her mom’s hummus, and I was like: I can die now. I don’t need to achieve anything else.”

by Lou Blumberg + Susan Jahoda + Caroline Woolard

“What if instead of being invited in to name a problem, we create something we actually want and live with the consequences of how messy it is to build something that you believe in?”

by Bitter Kalli + Nina Vichayapai

“I think that we can learn so many lessons from horses about the ways that people have connected to the land and to other living beings throughout time. Because horses tell stories about slavery, about indigeneity, about work. And I think that my relationship to horses reminds me that collective struggle is always somehow related to the land.”

by Clara Harlow + Midnight Variety Hour

by Alex Deets + Elbow Room’s Katie Savastano and Quinn Gancedo

“That’s what we’re doing every day, facilitating connection. And those are always our biggest success stories that I think that a lot of our outside guests don’t get to see or understand.”

by Simeen Anjum + Daniel Tucker

“I realized I had a choice: I could do a really short project and move on to something else, or I could be responsive to the moment and engage with opportunities for the project to be politically useful to people trying to have difficult conversations in their communities.

I think that was the moment I decided to put in the work to make this project live in a way I never anticipated.”

by Sarah Blesener + JoAnn Stevelos

“Where is the evidence? The images themselves, the act of taking them, the way they’re placed and redacted, the curation, the gesture of giving them to us, or the eyes that look? It is never just an image. It is a whole system showing its seams.”