Lisa Jarrett
For the month of June, Russo Lee Gallery is pleased to present Heart Condition by Lisa Jarrett. This recent work is from the ongoing series Migration Studies (2018-present). Jarrett uses drawing, sculpture, and installation to examine hair care and beauty routines within Black culture.
Lisa Jarrett is an artist and educator in Portland, OR. She received her BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, and her MFA from the University of Montana, Missoula, MT. She is Associate Professor of Community and Context Arts at Portland State University’s School of Art + Design. She is co-founder and co-director of KSMoCA (Dr. MLK Jr School Museum of Contemporary Art), the Harriet Tubman Middle School Center for Expanded Curatorial Practice in NE Portland, OR, and the artists collective Art 25: Art in the 25th Century. Jarrett’s intersectional practice considers the politics of difference within various settings, including schools, landscapes, fictions, racial imaginaries, studios, communities, museums, galleries, walls, mountains, mirrors, floors, rivers, and lenses. She exists and makes socially engaged work within the African Diaspora. She recently discovered that her primary medium is questions.
A Portland-based artist and an associate professor of art at Portland State University, and a recipient of a Joan Mitchell Fellowship, Lisa Jarrett makes socially engaged work within the African Diaspora.
Hair is everywhere: clouds of hair imprinted on large white sheets of paper, a weave on the table, afro combs traced over and over onto pieces on the wall, hairnets emerging from others. This is the studio of Portland artist Lisa Jarrett, and hair is threaded—sometimes literally—through her work.
The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School Museum of Contemporary Art has faced a difficult year, but it has adapted to the pandemic and kept its students engaged.