Student
Ashley Yang-Thompson
The product of a Chinese immigrant and a white polygamist from Fort Scott, Kansas, Ashley Yang-Thompson has been a performance artist since the day she was ruthlessly shoved out of the safety of her mother’s womb. She works in a wide range of media, from figurative painting and zines to Diogenes-style performative pissing. Her art has been exhibited at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, the Museum of Moving Image, and the Essex Peabody Museum (Spring 2023), as well as numerous national and international spaces. She is a recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Creative Equity Fellowship and Mass MoCA’s Assets for Artists Grant. In 2021, Bateau Press published her graphic novella, How to be the worst laziest fattest most incontinent piece-of-shit in the world EVER.
Worm Slut
A collaboration with Nia Musiba
Zine collection 2022
WORM SLUT, a collaboration with Nia Musiba, is a Portland-based risograph zine that confronts issues of identity, as well as which barroom bathrooms are transgender nightmares, diurnal bowel movements, and the best breakfast burrito in Portland (an ongoing investigation). Nia and I started the zine in February 2022, and have 13 issues. We freely distributed 250 copies of each zine at various local coffee shops and throughout the PSU campus, with open calls for participation. Worm Slut is our personal invitation to the world: please be the weirdest version of yourself around us. It is our love letter to the lonely and our inoculation against the shrinking human being inside each of us.
Jane Fonda’s Original Workout / “Flex” Factory
Ever since 2016, I have done Jane Fonda’s Original Workout (the best-selling VHS of all time) almost every day. In an era where women were discouraged from exercising and gyms were dominated by men, Jane Fonda’s Original Workout (1982) was groundbreaking. It popularized fitness for women (as well as a neon spandex fashion craze), and the proceeds supported leftist political organizations. During my residencies at Vermont Studio Center, The Wassaic Project, and Oxbow School of Art, I made Jane Fonda’s Original Workout into a daily happening, and invited residents and staff to participate in this iconic aerobic ritual. In the heyday of Equinox, Class Pass, and the disgustingly remunerative Cult of Health, Jane Fonda’s Original Workout functions as a free, silly, and moderate group workout that only requires a towel. The workout attracted a heterogenous group of residents, including Cheryl R. Riley, who actually did Jane Fonda’s workout with Jane Fonda in the 80’s. In 2019, I was asked to lead Jane Fonda’s Original Workout (advertised as a “queer comedic fitness demo”) at Socrates Sculpture Park in Astoria, NY as part of Flux Takeover!
Video made in collaboration with Zehra Khan
Cognitive Disobedience (and the right to be Lazy)
Syllabus:
please contact me if you are interested in enrolling in this course:
contact: ashley.yang.thompson@gmail.com
website: ashleyyangthompson.com
newsletter: ashleyyangthompson.substack.com
Midori Yamanaka
Socially Engaged Designer.
Just like you probably, I have been exploring who I am and how to make myself and the world better. It would be great if we can come across and work together. I am excited to hear your stories and your dreams. I would be very happy to help your challenges and share what I have. Together, let’s make our world better. –Midori
Manfred Parrales
A latin art communicator from San Jose, Costa Rica. I believe in communicating through and by art.
After graduating from the Art School of the University of Costa Rica, my interest as a designer and art enthusiast is in creating art communications solutions/experiences around the use of technology.
+ 6 years of experience in design and visual communication in the technology industry with several expressions in video, design, and photography.
I created videos for Costa Rican rock bands, art videos, as well as educational videos about art topics and art history.
Student at Portland State University MFA Art and Social Practice for Fall 2022.
+ Take a look here
+ Instagram here
Morgan Hornsby
Born in eastern Kentucky, Morgan Hornsby (b. 1997) is a photographer and educator. She studied photojournalism and history at Western Kentucky University and photography at the Danish School of Media and Journalism. She works as an editorial photographer for clients including the New York Times, The Marshall Project, The Guardian and New York Magazine. She currently lives in Tennessee, where she teaches art in rural county jails.
Using traditional documentary photography practices in her project Before I Go, Hornsby examines her interpersonal relationships in the context of her family’s Appalachian landscape.
Website: www.morganhornsby.com
Instagram: @morganhornsby_
Nadine Hanson
Nadine Hanson is an artist based in New York City. While attending the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee- where she studied creative writing- she worked in a nightclub located in the basement of a grocery store. In the decade that has followed, Nadine has worked various service-industry positions in bars, restaurants, hotels, and other people’s homes. Her occupational experience informs her interdisciplinary practice, which uses collaborative approaches to performance, writing, and experimental documentary to explore commonly under-valued and feminized knowledge bases and forms of labor.
Marissa Perez
Marissa was born in Portland, Oregon in 1994. Over her summers she has worked at over six summer camps and considers herself a life long camp counselor and youth worker. She makes comics, parties, prints, posters, and gifts. She interested in neighborhoods and their capacity for safety, fun, resilience and friendship.
This past summer she organized a neighborhood talent show. Some of the acts included: a rubiks cube demonstration, singing, opera, and storytelling. Here is the poster!
You can find more of her art here and find her on instagram here.
Gilian Rappaport
Gilian Rappaport (they/she) is an artist, educator, and naturalist.
In this urgent moment of climate catastrophe, their practice is asking “What can we learn from closeness with nature, and the paths to get there?”
They experiment with co-authorship to deepen our sense of connection to our natural environments and communities.
Their design thinking practice allows them to continue asking these questions while supporting the vision for projects aiming to renew, restore and nurture our world.
The granddaughter of Ashkenazi migrants by way of Russia and Poland, they were born and raised in New York between the Hudson and Delaware Rivers.
Their work has found its way into the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Vogue, and The New York Times. They are currently a collaborating artist at KSMoCA, a contemporary art museum inside a public elementary school in Northeast Portland, Oregon.
They are openly queer, and live and work in Rockaway Beach, Queens and Portland, Oregon.
Follow along: @gilnotjill
Portrait by Seth Caplan
Lillyanne Pham
Lillyanne Phạm is an artist and cultural organizer based in unceded territories of Cowlitz, bands of the Chinook, and many other nations of the Nch’i Wána (so-called Columbia River) in so-called East Portland, Oregon. LP is currently pursuing an MFA at Portland State University’s Art + Social Practice program. LP creates art with a systemic consciousness framework specifically place-based justice and racial equity work.
LP’s first projects involved founding Youth for Parkrose, a creative placekeeping program for teens of color as part of Parkrose Neighborhood Prosperity Initiative and leading the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon’s Orchards of 82nd Curatorial Committee for three exhibitions as their Cultural Work intern. Soon after, Lillyanne collaborated on various community design initiatives involving teens, libraries, games, affordable housing units, plants, refugees, immigrants, technology, and more.
To do so, LP’s creative research relies on their relational work, and vice versa. LP approaches art as an intimate, expansive, and ancestral means for wayfinding, nesting, and communicating. LP uses art and the art world to facilitate culturally and politically meaningful webs of care and connection. Currently, Lillyanne asks, “What is a neighborhood?” because it can open doors to talking about covert and overt power structures, online and offline, and how those most impacted by systems of oppression make and keep home. LP has intimately worked inside institutions such as non-profits, city offices, and schools. LP uses art within them to challenge their current structures and create pathways for communities to directly challenge them too.
LP has been supported by Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon, Mural Arts Institute, Regional Arts and Culture Council, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, City of Portland Arts Program, City of Portland Columbia Slough Watershed Program, City of Portland SEED Initiatives, and Dorothy Piacentini Endowed Art Scholarship. (b. 1997, LP/they/bạn/she/em/chị, lillyannepham.com)
Current Project:
The Parkrose High School Artist-in-Residence (PHS AIR) Program was founded by Lillyanne in 2021. During their time leading Youth for Parkrose with Historic Parkrose, LP worked on two projects prioritizing place-based justice and Parkrose youth of color led creativity. The first one was Backpack Kids, a zine with teens of color facing housing insecurity, funded by the Regional Arts & Culture Council Make Learn Build grant. The second one was a series of collaborative filmmaking workshops with youth impacted by gun violence in partnership with Outside In, funded by the City of Portland’s Community Healing Arts Initiative. From these students, LP saw the impact of and need for accessible art programming that overtly intersects with the personal and political lives of the youth.
With another Regional Arts & Culture Council Make Learn Build grant, LP launched PHS AIR in collaboration with the five first resident artists: Makenzie Sanders, Christina Trevino, Keelee Cavil, Ty’Zeer Miller, and Ta’John Miller. We created a zine called May Our Joy Pulse Through Generations. It is a collection of conversations on comfort, community, and art by teens of color and their loved ones in Portland’s Parkrose district. The zine was a response to the active displacement of families of color and low-income families in Parkrose. These findings were uncovered in the Parkrose Community Plan.
To learn more about Parkrose becoming whiter, older, and wealthier, visit portland.gov/bps/planning/parkrose-community-plan .
PHS AIR continues to be a response to displacement in East Portland by prioritizing those most impacted, teens of color, and topics relevant to their everyday lives.
Reclaiming Queer Wear: A Youth-Led Fashion Statement is PHS AIR’s latest programming focused on fashion making and wearing to celebrate queerness and uplift youth-led decision making, funded by Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts’ Precipice Fund. As a means to bring more youth-centered socially engaged art resources to PHS students, Olivia DelGandio (they/she) will be our first guest artist facilitator. Olivia brings five years of technical clothing skills. This includes Homegrown Clothes, their on-going project exploring the power of customizing clothes. For this project, Olivia and LP will be facilitating a co-learning space built by queer ideating, fashion experimentation, and embodied awareness. The students will showcase their final works at a public fashion show in May 2023.
Marina Lopez
Marina Lopez is a Mexican American performing and social practice artist, massage therapist/somatic educator, and cultural organizer. Her experience as a bodyworker is essential to her practice as an artist because we can’t separate the art from the body that makes it. Care work is culture work. As an artist, her work is an interdisciplinary weaving of many voices that links to history, social movements, and tradition. She is a co-organizer and creative collaborator with Art.coop, a group of artists and culture workers who co-create and uplift cooperative, connected and care based culture that are alternatives to exploitation, isolation, and fear that is often found in the art world. Marina seeks to create work that articulates and provides an embodied cognition of the ways in which art, culture, and care are foundational within a thriving society. Her work challenges the status quo of who we as a society uplift as expert voices, and inspires curiosity, collaboration, and solidarity
Postcards From Mexico: Cartography of Identity, Trauma, and Curated ‘Self’
This project utilizes embodied art practice as a methodology to explore trauma, identity, and a curated ‘self.’ This multi-lingual work is the product of many voices that have co-authored a journey chronicling the formation, revision, and authorship of belief systems and identities that are fabric of the self. I call on research and theory from Western Psychology, Neuroscience, Narrative Psychology/Medicine, Chicana Feminism, and Borderlands Theory as a means of conducting a deep exploration of the layered self where a symbiotic dynamism between identity and belief systems is a constant gravitational dance. We experience in multiple dimensions, and from many angles, so the ways in which we approach the observation, critique, and exploration of the self may benefit from a similar consideration of many points of entry. A unique aspect of this work is the observation, acknowledgement, and inclusion of a curating self. Our interactions in relationship is a constant exercise in hand selecting from the anthology of stories that is ‘I’ in order to present a highly curated version the self. An underlying concept is this notion of fracturing that is born and bred in many facets of this work. It is the physiological process in which our brains process trauma and the stories associated with trauma, separating and compartmentalizing the experiences as a mechanism of survival within our bodies. Fracturing as the dismemberment of our bodies in medicine and the treatment of [dis]ease. And the disremembering of history, culture, and tradition that is also a mechanism of survival of and survival within this white supremacist, cisheteropatriarchal society. There is also the political division of geographical spaces that consequentially leads to the fracturing, uprooting, and [dis][mis] placement of community, culture, and persons. Through the engagement of diverse lenses, this project explores the edges of these vast landscapes as a means of witnessing the frayed edges as places of knowledge and [re]formation of ways of knowing and being.
Link to multimedia video installation
Movement of a Movement
Invites us to return to something so human at its core and to be within the condition of body and flesh. It is an embodiment of the observation of how the social systems that we move within shape our bodies. And it illustrates how what may appear as a micro-movement is filled with infinite possibility and potential to cultivate something so much bigger. It reminds us to ask, “how am I standing in this historical moment?” And to use the knowledge gleaned from that embodied discourse to serve us in shifting political discourse.
Olivia DelGandio
Olivia is a mixed media artist interested in human connection, what it means to be tender, and the joy/sorrow dichotomy. She finds solace in creating through and for grief and is currently thinking about how grieving can become more of a community practice. She asks questions like:
Olivia likes to make books for and about the people she loves. They’re all about love taking a material form:
And if she isn’t working on a book, she’s working on a video: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgSOSJiWixUFXzyJSyzdEqg
You can find more examples of her work at https://oliviadelgandio.com/
and find her on Instagram at @liv__bliss