Black History Month for Black Futures
To close out this years’ Black History Month for Black Futures we would like to ask you to help us uplift the voices of our local elders in the struggle for social change. Isaka Shamsud-Din has issued a challenge for us to reclaim the former Albina Arts Center. Once a bustling center of creativity, the building has fallen into a severe state of environmental hazard and disrepair. We have tried several times to get a response from the Oregon Community Foundation, but our voices are still not being heard. We believe we can be successful in creating a vision for the Center as a place for archiving and the preservation of art to provide education and promise for Portlands’ Black community.
Images below from the Albina Arts Center:
Excessive black mold due to faulty ceiling, water leakage inside building near wires resulting from broken concrete ramp in back of building.
People around the world and in our city are reckoning with white supremacist violence and horrors of racism and we are pushing to right these wrongs through community education. We deserve to build on the efforts of the elders from our community so that their work is not in vain. We deserve a space in Portland, Oregon where we can enrich and empower those who have continuously been met with obstacles and barriers rather than routes of access.
If you are able to endorse this campaign publicly, make a statement of support, or even write an opinion editorial, you can help us push this mission forward. We can reach our goal with your support! We have free posters available for storefronts or organization’s public spaces. Coordinate with us to pick up posters and share them throughout your neighborhood in public meeting spaces. Visibility of this campaign truly matters and it’s the best way to get more people engaged.
Thank you to everyone who has donated to support our work, signed the petition, grabbed posters, and also hosted Zooms to discuss our vision for Reclaiming the Albina Arts Center. Every signature matters - please help keep the momentum by sharing the petition!
Thank you to our community partners in this campaign, IDL Worldwide, who helped us get designers and artists from across the country involved in creating these amazing posters. The embedded QR code leads you directly to the petition with immediate ways to move the petition forward, making them instrumental in helping to get the message out. For Black History Month, we bought stickers from No Limits PDX, a Black-owned business that did an incredible job on reproducing our IDL posters into sticker sizes! These are available to anyone free of charge and we will also have them at the same businesses that are hosting our posters.
If you’ve yet to visit our current art exhibit, Feeling Documents: A Liberated Archives Experience, please make an appointment! The installation will be up through March 27th.