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.
Life & Work
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.
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
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).