where the community could come together and dream towards harm reduction. This residency at after / time immediately followed my MFA work centering my personal grieving process over the loss of multiple friends, namely my middle school best friend Thi-lan Johnson and a lovely human I met during a summer in Los Angeles, Nigeria Rami. They were both artists, they were each radiant in their unique ways and I am so grateful to have known them both. They deserved better. They deserved more resources, more care, more community. They deserved a world that wanted them to live. We existin a country which actively devalues care, devalues human life. Which actively targets some and not others. I am thinking about Gaza, I am thinking about Sonya Massey, I am thinking about Pauly Likens. Tonight is about each other, how we can come together in collective grief, how we can imagine community care, and how we can work to protect those most affected by structural and state violence. 

I have named this event an Anti-Reception in an attempt to push against the idea of receiving a completed work of art or fully formed exhibition. Anti because this gallery is not filled with an installation per formal exhibition expectations. This room, this massive gallery is so expectant, blank, and waiting. I spent many hours alone in this huge space wondering how I was possibly going to fill it. I knew, like all things in this life, I could not do it alone.

So I have started with those I know, people I am in proximity to, who I believe are dreaming of a future that looks much different, who believe in transformative justice and collective liberation. I invited my friends, strangers, classmates, into the space and into connection. I asked poets, writers, visual artists, and grassroots organizers working in harm reduction to be part of the conversation. The space filled up, emptied out, held, bewildered, arrived, never quite arrived, catalyzed, shifted. In trying to figure out how to create a space for community care and collective grief I realized we were already making that space together. I’ve lost track of how many times I have quoted Gabrielle Civil, in saying “It's only the giving of the making that's evidence of being alive. " (Swallow the Fish: A Memoir in Performance Art). 

The process became central; thought and stillness and laughter and the relief of a cool dim room in the height of summer. Because sometimes what grief most needs is a place that will acknowledge we are brought together in our sadness, and then not need us to show up in any particular way about it. Just coloring at a bench and talking. It really can just be that. We all carry so much and we don’t always have a moment to just sit and color or read a book, and not have to know what we need. It is not about the walls, it is about us together in a space looking inward toward each other.

This residency was made possible through the generous support from Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC) and Prosper Portland.