On Transmission

When I chose the theme of transmission for this issue, I was thinking primarily about the Portland art communities that I am still in a tentative — while extremely supportive — relationship with during my time planning and researching as the curator for the 2026 Converge 45 citywide exhibition. Over the past year and a half visiting Portland from my home in New York City, I’ve been slowly building relationships with artists, curators, gallerists, students, producers, organizers, funders, Lyft drivers, and the cashiers at World Foods grocery store downtown. I’ve learned about gathering spaces that have just opened, spaces that no longer exist, relationships broken and mended, people who have left town, people who have just moved into town, and ongoing frustrations when it feels like there’s not enough movement at all. It is a process of receiving information from many sources, which I am then challenged to imagine as one prospective audience for the exhibition, which I hope will find resonance with the wide range of artists and artworks in my exhibition. It’s a chain of transmission that is a welcome interruption to the conversations and complaints in New York City, where the market too easily dominates the collective imagination and seeps into the creative imagination. We can automatically equate “losing money” with “losing support” and be coerced by forces of capital into passivity and denial when faced with the defunding of the arts and censorship of critical thought by our current political regime.

The invitation to five national contributors for this issue was an experiment to see if the particularities of Portland’s resilience and collaborative spirit could be communicated from distance, from a single artist subject. In thinking through who would be most engaged with the invitation, I attempted to expand the knowledge of writers who had limited experience with the city and its artists, as well as learn from those who had once lived or worked there in ways far more in-depth than I. It was apparent in the artists they identified and felt connections with — Meech Boakye, Lisa Jarrett, Linda K. Johnson, Morgan Ritter, and Vo Vo—that the writers were immediately drawn to a question that has also been at the core of my curatorial inquiries: How have artists created their own conditions outside of traditional systems for sharing resources and knowledge? This group of artists is intergenerational and interdisciplinary, and also have varying roots in the city as residents for decades or just a few years. Their movement may continue, but how they’ve shaped the communities they’re part of is indelible. This is clear in Jordan Amirikhani’s essay on Linda K. Johnson’s Mycelium Dreams Project, which archives decades of relationships between dancers and spaces in Portland and beyond, to Meech Boakye’s collective, hands-on approach to transformative, shape-shifting material as reflected on by Marie Catalano. Claire Voon examines the ways in which Vo Vo extends the often restrictive frameworks of the art world to excluded communities in need of care; in parallel, Nicole Kaack focuses on Morgan Ritter’s usurpation of everyday language and material to evade capitalist values. And even as Lisa Jarrett is (finally) celebrated with a solo exhibition in the city’s largest institution, the Portland Art Museum, Allie Tepper shares the intimate exchanges and knowledge which influence Jarrett’s historically and materially expansive installation.

These essays forefront that these artists are educators, community archivists, activists, and art workers who not only shape their own practice, but consider how it is framed and conveyed to others, in turn rewriting the conventions of making, transacting, absorbing, witnessing, and consuming. These entangled relations allow their transmissions to ripple far beyond the city limits.