Faculty
Lisa Jarrett
2023-24 Art + Social Practice Program Coordinator
Lisa Jarrett was born in Morristown, New Jersey. Growing up as a Black American who moved with her family tovarious,oftenconflictingpolitical climates in cities in Texas, Minnesota, andNewYork,theinfluencesofher upbringing in a post-Civil Rights and increasinglyso-called“post-racial” America are apparent in her work, which seeks to confront ideas of racial differenceandperceptionsofracial equality.Thoughconflatingcomparisons of self and Other within a racial context are surely not limited to the American Black Experience and can be examined in myriad global racial milieus, Jarrett’s work is typically centered upon deconstructing, defragmenting, and, in turn, reconstructing and reassembling her personal experiences as a Black woman in America into a visual expression that asks viewers to consider their own roles in present-day race relations.
https://www.lisajarrett.com/
Kye Grant
Kye Grant is an artist and performer working in experiential, collaborative, and attention-generating social art forms. They use their training in theater, voice, dance, and music to devise participatory public events that deepen our relationships to place and to one another. Projects have taken the form of a pedestrian parade with fifth-grade crossing guards, a ten-day artist residency in Times Square, the open invitation dance ensemble Public Acts of Dance Company, a 40-person mall walk in a Portland shopping center, a Queens public access television show, and the musical performance persona Jennifer Vanilla (established in 2015). They produce Planet Lloyd, a free newspaper about Portland, Oregon’s Lloyd Center Mall, supported by the Regional Arts & Culture Council.
Grant spent ten years as a vocalist, keyboardist, guitarist, and co-writer in the experimental Brooklyn pop band Ava Luna, during which time the group toured internationally and released seven records. Grant’s performance work has brought them to MoMA PS1, Queens; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Portland; Apollo Theater, New York; Joe’s Pub, New York; Irving Plaza, New York; and hundreds of other venues across the United States, Europe, and Japan.
Grant received an MFA in Art + Social Practice from Portland State University and works as a voice actor, security guard, gallery attendant, adjunct instructor, assistant director for a children’s musical, occasional contributor to the Portland Mercury, and visiting artist at PSU College of the Arts. Find them at their monthly performance party, Club Alive.
Laura Glazer
Laura Glazer (she/her) is an artist whose work is socially-engaged and depends on the participation of other people, sometimes a close friend, and other times, complete strangers. Her background in photography and design inform her social practice, and her projects appear as books, workshops, radio shows, zines, festivals, exhibitions, installations, posters, signs, postal correspondence, videos, and sculpture.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and published in The New York Times Magazine, Wall Street Journal, NPR, and the BBC. Her book of photographs and interviews, I Want Everyone to Know: The Black History Month Doors at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School, was published in collaboration with the Dr Martin Luther King Jr School Museum of Contemporary Art in April 2022. She was a 2022–2023 Artist Fellow at the New York Public Library Picture Collection.
She holds an MFA in Contemporary Art Practice: Art and Social Practice from Portland State University and a BFA in Photography from Rochester Institute of Technology. Born in northern Virginia, she was a longtime resident of upstate New York and is now based in Portland, Oregon.
lauraglazer.com @helloprettycity
Emily Fitzgerald
Emily Fitzgerald is a consultant, photographer, artist, educator, and storyteller. Her practice focuses on the intersection of the social, political, and visual in order to inspire dialogue around complex issues and reframe our ways of relating to one another. Emily facilitates conversation and creates site-specific art installations in non-traditional, public, and unexpected places. She is the co-founder of Works Progress Agency, a socially-engaged art studio and consultancy, and from 2016-2019 was a co-curator of MATTER, a storefront space dedicated to social practice exhibitions, workshops, and other happenings. She teaches art, photography, Design Thinking classes at Portland State University.
Michelle Illuminato
M. Michelle Illuminato (she/her) creates events, public exchanges, and artworks that help to reveal the complicated and often contradictory relationship between people, their culture, and the land they live on. She works individually as well as with the collective, next question on projects that have been exhibited nationally as well as in Italy, Poland, Germany, and Serbia.
In 1982, Illuminato began working in the steel mill town of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. Over the next several years she invited hundreds of artists to collaborate with each other, the towns people and the place. The project received, ‘Best Event in Pennsylvania’, the key to the city for Illuminato, as well as broke ground on new ways that socially-community-driven artworks could receive art funding. After visiting Aliquippa, curator Mary Jane Jacob included her in a year-long project, ‘Points of Entry’, funded by the Three Rivers Art Festival and included Group Material, Ann Carlson, Fred Wilson, Daniel Martinez. Recent work includes: Momentary Monuments for a Wednesday Afternoon, Portland,Tripoli Street BakeYard, Neu Kirche Contemporary Art Center, Pittsburgh, and Lost & Found Factory, Pittsburgh and Denton, Texas, which received a national award from Americans for the Arts. With next question, she created, The Neighborhood Revisited, a trolley tour that used Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood tours as a way to better understand shifting city spaces.
For 2023-24, Illuminato will be the Coordinator of the Art + Social Practice Program and since 2016 has been the Head of the CORE Program at Portland State University. Deeply interested in alternative teaching practices, she received the Master Teaching Award from Foundations: Foundations: Art, Theory, and Education in 2017.
michelleilluminato.com
Alison Heryer
Alison Heryer is an interdisciplinary artist whose work combines costume, installation, performance, and community engagement. As a costume designer, she is a member of United Scenic Artists, Local 829. Her design credits include productions at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, 59E59 Theaters, La MaMa, The New Victory Theater, Portland Center Stage, Portland Opera, Kansas City Repertory Theatre, Indiana Repertory Theatre, Artists Repertory Theatre, ZACH Theatre, The Hypocrites, and Redmoon. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, World Stage Design, and The Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space. Awards include a RACC Build Grant, Drammy Award and Austin Critics Table Award for Costume Design, and the ArtsKC Inspiration Grant. Heryer is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Texas at Austin. She is a faculty member at Portland State University where she was recently granted the Sue Horn-Caskey & Charles F. Caskey Professorship of Textile Arts & Costume Design.
Alison Heryer’s 2021/2022 projects have been generously supported by a RACC Build Grant.
Patricia Vázquez Gómez
Patricia Vázquez Gómez works and lives between the ancient Tenochtitlán and the unceded, occupied, stolen and colonized lands of the Chinook, Clackamas, Multnomah and other Indigenous peoples. Her art practice investigates the social functions of art, the intersections between aesthetics, ethics and politics and the expansion of community based art practices. She uses a variety of media to carry out her research: painting, printmaking, video, exhibitions, music and socially engaged art projects. The purpose and methodologies of her work are deeply informed by her experiences working in the immigrant rights and other social justice movements in the US and Mexico. Patricia’s work can be explored at patriciavazquez.art.
Shay Mirk
Sarah “Shay” Mirk (she/they) is a graphic journalist, editor, and teacher. She is the author of Guantanamo Voices (Abrams, 2020), an illustrated oral history of Guantanamo Bay prison, which Kirkus called “extraordinary… an eye-opening, damning indictment of one of America’s worst trespasses.” She is also a zine-maker and illustrator whose comics have been featured in The Nib, The New Yorker, Bitch, and NPR. Her book on the craft of making nonfiction comics, Drawn from the Margins: The Power of Graphic Journalism (co-written with Eleri Harris), will debut from Abrams ComicsArts in 2024.
She is the author several books, including You Do You: Figuring Out Your Body, Dating, and Sexuality (Lerner, 2019), Sex from Scratch: Making Your Own Relationship Rules (Microcosm, 2014), the graphic novel Open Earth (Limerence Press, 2018), and the self-published collection Year of Zines (2020).
Mirk is an adjunct professor in Portland State University’s MFA program in Art and Social Practice, where she teaches a graduate seminar on writing and research.
Mirk holds a degree in history, with honors, from Grinnell College. She identifies as white, nonbinary, and queer. In her free time, she befriends strangers’ dogs.
Ariana Jacob
Ariana Jacob (she/her) makes artwork that uses conversation to explore political and personal interdependence and disconnection. Prior to working as an artist and academic Ariana managed a farmers market, worked in a cabinet shop, co-ran a secret cafe out of her apartment, and fished for salmon commercially. While being an artist and academic Ariana also does union organizing and group facilitation, alongside being a partner, friend, family member and wonderer. Ariana currently teaches in the Social Practice MFA Program at Portland State University and is the Chair of Bargaining for PSUFA Adjunct Faculty Union. Her work has been included in the NW Biennial at the Tacoma Art Museum, Disjecta’s Portland 2012 Biennial, the Open Engagement Conference, the Discourse and Discord Symposium at the Walker Art Center. She has exhibited work and organized events at apexart and Smack Mellon in New York City, Betonsalon in Paris, France, Broken City Lab in Windsor, ON, Canada, PICA’s TBA Festival, The Portland Art Museum, The Department of Safety in Anacortes, WA, Southern Exposure in San Francisco, CA; and in many public places.