Intisar Abioto via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Intisar Abioto:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix via ↴
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Intisar Abioto
- City: Portland, Oregon
- Country: United States
- Hometown: Memphis, Tennessee
Current News
- What's Up? Storytelling, dreams, history, memory, geography, and choreography are at the root of my practice. My mediums are cross-disciplinary. The tools are what can be found at hand. I was a dancer, first; a writer, second; a photographer, third; and a human body wending her way through space and time always. This sense of the body in space .. both sensing and affecting the landscape is my way. This is choreography. This, too, is the body aware of all her sensors and in every direction. This, too, is precognition .. to hear the story that could be from all around you.. all that is known and unknown, immediately sensed and not. If a photograph is a stamp, one packet in time's knowledge, then this is a weaving of information across geographic and temporal existence. I hope the path taken is one of connection, an ever an emboldening of life, care, and love through our image.
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Intisar Abioto (b. Memphis, TN. 1986) is an explorer-artist working across photography, dance, and writing. Moving from the visionary and embodied root of Blackgirl Southern cross-temporal cross-modal storytelling ways, her works refer to the living breath/breadth of people of African descent against the expanse of their storied, geographic, and imaginative landscapes. Working in long-form projects that encompass the visual, folkloric, documentary, and performing arts, she has produced The People Could Fly Project, The Black Portlanders, and The Black. Co-created with her four artist sisters, The People Could Fly Project, was a 200,000-mile flying arts expedition exploring realities of flight and freedom within the African diasporic myth of the flying African and Virginia Hamilton’s award-winning book, The People Could Fly.
Abioto is the recipient of a 2018 Oregon Humanities Emerging Journalists, Community Stories Fellowship for which she began a continuing body of research on the history of artists of African descent in Oregon. She has performed and/or exhibited at Ori Gallery, Portland Art Museum, Duplex Gallery, Photographic Center Northwest, African American Museum in Philadelphia, Poetry Press Week, Design Week Portland, Spelman College, Powell’s City of Books, University of Oregon White Box Gallery, Portland State University, Reed College, and Zilkha Gallery among others. Selected for an Art in the Governor’s Office solo exhibition in 2019 she exhibited and performed with nine Oregon-based Black artists against the inner expanse of the Oregon State Capitol building in Salem OR. Her publication Black Portlands documents interviews with Black Portlanders alongside her photographs. She was a contributing photographer to MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora (2017) and her photographs illustrated the Urban League of Portland’s State of Black Oregon 2015. With the five women artists in her family, she is the co-founder of Studio Abioto, a multivalent creative arts studio. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
Contact Information
- Contact by Webpage: http://www.intisarabioto.com/contact
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Twitter: intisarabioto
- ▶ Instagram: intisarabioto
- ▶ Website: http://www.intisarabioto.com
- ▶ Website 2: http://theblackportlanders.com
- ▶ Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/23/arts/design/black-artists-portland.html
- ▶ Articles: http://www.intisarabioto.com/cv
More
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Quotes, Notes & Etc.
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2020
BabeSis, Aunts Ten, Ms. W, Miss Choomby .. & In Our Company. Forest for the Trees, Portland OR
2019
Black Legend, Black, Oregon, Office of The Governor, Oregon State Capitol, Salem OR
2017
Black Portlanders, Black Portlands, Littman Gallery, Portland State University, Portland OR
The Black, University of Oregon White Box Gallery, Portland OR
2016
The Black Portlanders, Reed College, Portland OR.
2015
Contents, Duplex Gallery, Portland OR
The Black Portlanders, Powell’s City of Books, Backlight Corner Gallery, Portland OR
2013
The People Could Fly, Multnomah County Public Library, Portland OR
2009
The People Could Fly, Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, Middletown CT
Selected Group Exhibitions
2020
Spirit Women: Adriene Cruz & Intisar Abioto, Oregon State University, Corvallis OR
Passages in the Black Diaspora, Photographic Center Northwest, Seattle WA
2019
In Between: Hank Willis Thomas & Intisar Abioto, RACC Public Art Installation, Portland OR
An Altar to Alter, Portland In Color, Portland Art Museum, Portland OR
In Conversation: Visual Meditations on Black Masculinity, African American Museum in Philadelphia, Philadelphia PA
Brown Sugar: Where We At, Tips on Failing, Portland OR
2018
Resistance, Multnomah County Public Library, Portland OR
Elements of Reclamation, Ori Gallery, Portland OR
Selected Performance
2019
Sugar Lee / Brown Sugar: Where We At, Tips on Failing, Portland OR
Black Legend, Black, Oregon: Black Artists at the Capitol, Office of The Governor, Oregon State Capitol, Salem OR
2017
Moving Through Darkness,This Is A Black Spatial Imaginary, Paragon Gallery, Portland OR
2016
In Response to Fujikasa Satoko’s Flow #1, Portland Art Museum
A Reading, Poetry Press Week. Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, Portland OR
2014 Story Design, A Danced Treatise on Story as Act of Place, Design Week Portland
Clips (more may be added)
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging through New Orleans and Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... and Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
