Don’t Shoot Portland: Archives for Black Lives: A Liberated Archives Exhibition
On view: June 11th – June 30th, 2023
Hours: Thursday – Saturday, noon-5pm
Don’t Shoot Portland’s Liberated Archives installation series focuses on education, documentation, and preservation of history. Through a partnership with the City of Portland Archives, Don’t Shoot Portland has used their access and relationships with archivist to promote exhibits that inform current systems. These educational assets are vital to sustaining social change.
It’s our hope that using research to create installations using archives will promote civic participation and movement building. We provide these multimedia artworks to build upon these dialogues through a historical context, Don’t Shoot Portland is activating a call to action.
This Liberated Archives installation features several archival documents, including maps, photographs, correspondence letters to past police commissioner Charles Jordan, and sheets of a 196 paged petition filed to Portland city commissioners in 1940 demanding their refusal to allow Black settlement in the Albina neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. These items are presented as a wallpaper display. In addition to these documents, the Liberated Archives exhibit showcases multimedia footage from 1981’s ‘Opposum Incident’, a series of events surrounding a racist and intimidating ‘prank’ by Portland Police officers against a thriving local Black business.
The exhibit then moves forward to the recent social uprisings of the 2000s with another wall display presenting social media images captured from organized protests that center violence, racism and retaliation against people of color in Portland as shown.
