The title and concept for CONDITIONS came into focus as the editorial team launched its first issue, FIGURING. Here, we shift form FIGURING’s multiple perspectives on the body and psyche to examine the cultural and biological mysteries and actualities of life at this tenuous environmental and socio-political moment. As our need for breath and sustenance are foregrounded across an accounting of our shared lives, we hope that CONDITIONS offers a space to meditate on the ways in which works of art (including writing) support us in making meaning from our state of, and provisions for, being.

In an effort to awaken new insights from the visions, projects, and persons that make up the arts communities in this state, Critical Conversations once again dispatched two commissioning editors to enlist authors to tune their curiosity antennae toward a subject. Returning to this role for a fourth year is Stephanie Snyder, the John and Anne Hauberg Curator and Director of The Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College, whose past editorial works, along with those of Sue Taylor, Professor Emerita of Art History at Portland State University, were published online by the Visual Arts Ecology Project in cooperation with the Oregon Arts Commission. This year Snyder was joined by a new commissioning editor, Mack McFarland, a cultural producer, educator, and Executive Director for Converge 45.

In addition to these new texts, the editorial board reviewed texts previously commissioned by the Foundation and by Oregon ArtsWatch. Fourteen works in total were gathered for CONDITIONS. Perhaps shy of full clarity, together they aid in sharpening the picture of our nesting in the same temporality; that is, within a shared resolution of time and being.

In an effort to find our footing in the river of the moment, we gathered words surrounding us, forming stepping stones, aiding our way toward publishing this volume and building our resolve for the next. We came to this list by passing words back and forth, absorbing the present, ruminating on the recent past, and hypothesizing what may come. While by no means a catalogue raisonné, the ensuing pages offer more of a function précis.

Temper / Invisibility / Land / Encoded / Lack / Immemorial / Suffering / Dissociated / Abundance / Alternative Facts / Access / Migration / Reclamation / Valuation / Accelerated / Projection / Fetish / Mutual-aid / Historicity / Revision / Post-Linearity / Hesitancy / Disoriented / Volatile / Collapse

Critical Conversations Editorial Board
Meagan Atiyeh
Brian Gills
Mach McFarland
Maryanna G. Ramirez
Stephanie Snyder

rise × fall (rubén garcía marrufo, maximiliano, Jaleesa Johnston), AT THE END OF EMPIRE, 2021. Three channel video installation, performance. Courtesy Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (Photo: Tojo Andrianarivo)
Sarah Farahat, Self-Portrait, Yuba River, Yuba Goldfields, California, Nisenan Land, 2015. Archival pigment print, 44 × 66 in. (Photo: Kristine Eudey)
Pat Boas, installation view of Sentinels on artist designed wallpaper, courtesy Sun Valley Museum of Art (Photo: Dev Khalsa)
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The Ford Family Foundation and the University of Oregon are located on the traditional homelands of Indigenous people whose communities have stewarded these lands since time immemorial. Following the arrival of European explorers, the Indigenous communities across Oregon experienced repeated displacement and dispossession through settler colonialism, including the United States government policies that forcibly removed Indigenous populations from their ancestral lands to reservations within and beyond Oregon. Today, the descendants of Oregon’s first people continue to make important contributions to communities, institutions, the state of Oregon, the United States, and the world. We commit to ongoing efforts to center Indigenous presence and knowledge, creativity, resilience, and resistance within the work we do.

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