Lisa Jarrett
For the month of November, Russo Lee Gallery exhibits Nightlights by Lisa Jarrett. The body of work in this exhibition is part of Jarrett’s ongoing series Migration Studies, from 2018 to present. Jarrett works with drawing, sculpture, and installation to examine hair care and beauty routines within Black culture as a bridge to themes about inventing collective survival. These routines are rituals in which beauty standards that exist beyond and before dominant narratives are claimed. She uses the tools of these ritual practices as drawing materials whose histories both trace and extend lost languages and homelands. These material and formal choices reflect her broader interest in repetition and reproduction as tools of consumer culture and cultural preservation. The art object, in her view, is the transformative mechanism by which different systems of value become visible and knowable.
Lisa Jarrett—who exists and makes work within the African Diaspora—is an artist and educator living in Portland, Oregon. A Professor of Community and Context Arts at Portland State University’s Schnitzer School of Art + Art History + Design, she leads the Art + Social Practice MFA program. Jarrett is co-founder/director of projects including KSMoCA (Dr Martin Luther King Jr School Museum of Contemporary Art); the Harriet Tubman Middle School Center for Expanded Curatorial Practice; and the collective Art 25: Art in the 25th Century. She was a 2022 Joan Mitchell Center Artist in Residence and, in 2018, received a Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award. In 2023, she received an honorary doctorate degree from the Columbus College of Art and Design (CCAD). Jarrett holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Montana, School of Art, Missoula, MT, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), Rochester, NY. Her intersectional practice considers the politics of difference within a variety of settings including: schools, landscapes, fictions, racial imaginaries, studios, communities, museums, galleries, walls, mountains, mirrors, floors, rivers, and prisms. She recently discovered that her primary medium is questions, the most urgent of which is: “What will set you free?” Jarrett exhibits nationally and is included in the public collections of the North Portland Albina Library and the Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR. Her upcoming solo exhibition titled Tenderhead is featured as part of the inaugural presentation in the Portland Art Museum’s new Black Art and Experiences Gallery, November 20, 2025 – November 2026.