‘Black, Black History Month’ runs — free to the public — throughout February in Old Town.
The contributions of Oregon’s small but resilient Black community — to business, culture, art and civil rights — are now on display in a multi-format free public event in Old Town.
From now to the end of the month, the Horizon Enterprise Building is the site of “Black, Black History Month,” hosting galleries, film screenings, performances, panel talks, a book club, interactive art exhibit and an artists’ store.
The pop-up event was organized by the 1803 Fund and Creative Homies and features collaborations with a dozen community partners including the Center for Black Excellence, Albina Music Trust, Oregon Black Pioneers and Don’t Shoot PDX. Featured artists include photographers Jason Hill and Suhela Hassan and multi-disciplinary artists Isaka Shamsud-Din and Shani Storey.
The location in Old Town is significant as that’s the first Black neighborhood in Portland, according to the event’s producer, Taishona Carpenter. The event is also a debut of sorts for the Horizon Enterprise Building, which organizers hope will soon serve as a hub for Black creativity in Portland. Cyrus Coleman and Adewale Agboola, co-founders of Creative Homies, purchased the building for $2.1 million in 2023. The current layout is sparse but renderings for the finished project, displayed in a side room, show an art gallery, co-working makers space and basement speakeasy.
Carpenter says people have so far been excited by the opening of the building and its potential as a community space.
“I think there are lots of buildings in Portland that we pass by and we recognize but they’re not landmarks in the way that we want them to be,” Carpenter says. “So now people are coming in and they’re like, ‘Oh wow. It’s that building.’ And hopefully this brings in more people.”
Three floors of the Horizon Enterprise Building feature exhibits and information on influential musicians, writers and other creators. These figures include Black pioneer George Washington, who founded what is now Centralia, Wash., and William (John) Livingstone, who was born a slave in 1836 in Missouri but died a successful businessman in 1912 in Oregon.
Many of the exhibits like the music-themed photography of “Wall to Wall Soul” strike a joyful note. But the Black experience in Oregon has of course involved hardship, including an exclusion clause in the state constitution that prevented Black people from emigrating to the state, under penalty of lashing. And in Portland, Black residents were displaced for decades by racist zoning laws, misguided urban renewal projects, gentrification and the Vanport flood.
Achieving the right balance between positive and negative was important to the event’s organizers, according to Juma Sei, communications manager for the 1803 Fund.
“That’s something we think about a lot, and it’s honestly kind of a communications challenge,” Sei says. “A lot of what we try to do is just center Black folks in a way that doesn’t have to invoke whiteness, and to think of our mindset fundamentally as one of abundance and not one of deficit.”
Sei’s photographs are featured in an installation titled “For the Record.” They were taken on a recent cross-country move back to his hometown of Portland and a trip to Sierra Leone, where his parents grew up.
Sei and the other featured photographers will participate in an artist’s talk at 2 p.m. Feb. 15. It’s one of a number of events planned throughout the month.
“Black, Black History Month” runs 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. through the end of the month.
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