Calavera Copter has teeth. The paper helicopter hanging from the rafters, casts a long shadow across a blue wall some 10 feet wide where three impressionist watercolor works hang, their subjects clouded in white. The paper is tattered on all sides. Hand-processed mineral and botanical pigments recreate three protest scenes on amate paper. A fourth work plots a map of over 100 locations where police officers tear-gassed racial justice demonstrators across the United States.
“We have more panoptic eyes over our heads than any industrialized nation,” Sandy Rodriguez, the artist who created the works, said.
A new exhibition at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, or PICA, sets out to consider the history of policing and its purpose today, highlighting how police have used violence as a tool to marginalize people locally and across the U.S. In tandem with panel discussions and an ongoing film series at the Clinton Street Theater, dozens of artists and collaborators offer a look at interrelated systems of oppression, colonization and historic divestment while contemplating new futures in which violent, segregated systems are rendered obsolete.
Inspired by Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, exhibition co-curators Nina Amstutz and Cleo Davis prompted artists to interrogate notions of power within the mind, body and space, offering rich perspectives on racial and environmental injustices.
“I tend to look at … how systems are attached and beget other systems,” Davis said. “In order to do that you have to look at the history of that system and the purpose.”
Amstutz said she and Davis wanted to investigate the history behind policing near and far, adding that the history is as important as the events of the 2020 uprising, during which Portland Police, or PPB, documented over 6,000 use-of-force incidents. That’s more than in any other city in the U.S.
“They didn’t come out of nowhere,” Amstutz said. “That history needs to be understood and really absorbed in order for us to have meaningful change in the future.”
Time capsules
Three shipping containers, repurposed as time capsules, flank one side of the gallery — vehicles to convey how U.S. policing affects the minds of Black Americans, according to the design collaborative Black Aesthetic Studio, formed by Davis and a handful of other local artists.
The first capsule outlines the settlement of Oregon in the 1800s and the policies allowing for the inhumane treatment of Black and Indigenous people. In its founding, Oregon was a sundown state. For 80 years, Black exclusion laws were on the books for the purpose of discouraging free Black Americans from moving to Oregon. Those laws did not technically end until 1926.
The time capsule illustrates the interconnected struggles of Black and Indigenous peoples in Oregon, using a display case full of magazines, toys and other iconography used by settlers to justify their harsh segregation laws.
“We tend to forget that this is an occupation,” Davis said.
Davis said the intent of law enforcement was and is to protect the colony and the citizens of that colony while harassing and intimidating those deemed unwelcome.
“The purpose was not to be violent,” Davis said. “Violence is the tool that’s used against the folks that you’re supposed to keep in line.”
Center of Injustice
Aaron Campbell, Quanice Hayes, Kendra James. Tyrone Johnson. Don’t Shoot Portland, an arts and education organization and community action plan, installed printouts of news clippings, lawsuit documents, protest signs and photos from vigils for Portlanders killed by police along a massive wall in the PICA gallery.
Don’t Shoot maintains a growing archive demonstrating a long history of disinvestment, police brutality and racism in Portland. Don’t Shoot founder Teressa Raiford’s nephew, Andre Payton was killed in downtown Portland in 2010 — a case PPB never solved — sparking her ongoing work for arts and education and against gun violence.
Raiford’s daughter and Don’t Shoot board president Tai Carpenter, said Don’t Shoot started as a way to find accountability for their loved one but recognized early on that the policing system was working as designed — obfuscating its practices.
“There is no real accountability to be found when the system of policing is broken; when there is over-policing for a reason, when there is profiling at a very young age for a reason, and when families are targeted for a reason,” Carpenter said.
PPB officers have been involved in at least 72 shootings since 2010, killing 37 people, according to PPB data.
The Center of Injustice, Don’t Shoot Portland’s mixed media installation, was created in collaboration with the film production company Media Pollution. It features a VHS video Raiford received from her uncle, showing local news stories covering police misconduct and responses from the community at that time.
For Raiford, activism inescapably runs in the family. In 1981, two white police officers dropped two dead possums on the doorstep of Raiford’s grandparents' Northeast Portland restaurant, Burger Barn. Jim Galloway and Craig Ward, the two police officers responsible, lost their jobs, sparking counter-demonstrations from community members and the police. The officers were ultimately reinstated with short suspensions, sending a clear message to the community most impacted by their actions.
The Center of Injustice merges past and present eras using VHS loops of television news on police misconduct beside clips of local Black Lives Matter protests of the past decade, many of which were organized by Don’t Shoot Portland.
Just behind the Center of Injustice, the short film “Tear Gas Tuesday” plays in Forensic Architecture’s mini-theater installation. June 2, 2020, just over a week after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd on May 25, is known as “Tear Gas Tuesday” to many Portlanders.
While OC and CS gasses are commonly used for crowd control, the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention banned the use of tear gas in war, but fell short of doing so for law enforcement. Still, demonstrators experienced an onslaught of violence that night as PPB deployed riot control agents including tear gas at a rate hundreds and thousands of times higher than recognized “safe” thresholds.
“From Toxic Air to Toxic Language,” a Forensic Architecture display of various munitions on the outer wall of the mini-theater, elucidates the connection between the environmental, chemical violence of tear gas, and the escalating language used against protestors. Like the Center for Injustice, the installation shows its work through printouts of use of force records from the 2020 protests.
The display outlines the consequences of official statements made by police and elected officials to justify violence against demonstrators. Forensic Architecture created a timeline and a roadmap for observers to follow those statements merged with new information and interviews that became available in the years since.
Cover up
Two large prints hang in a corner of the gallery, one bright orange and yellow with a centered, paint-rolled black box, the other a boarded-up downtown building with thickly painted brown and black redactions along the facade. The photographs, by Carrie Mae Weems, could be mistaken for abstract paintings, blurring a line between reality and abstraction, disorienting and covering the language of the unheard.
Together, they are a powerful display of censorship and the silencing of free expression. During Portland’s 2020 protests, police made statements commending officers for protecting both life and property while silencing calls for justice and an end to police violence against Black Americans.
Growing abolition
While aspects of Policing Justice focus on tear gas, fires and other spectacles, a central aim of the exhibition is also to unleash the imagining of other futures for Portland and beyond.
“If you start with abolition as the goal — forget about whether it’s realistic now or whatnot — if you start with that sort of aspiration, then the whole way that you fund the social safety net changes,” Amstutz said.
The second time capsule in Black Aesthetic Studio’s installation highlights the spatial violence of the 1900s through housing codes and civil forfeiture laws. Eminent domain and urban renewal plans allowed for the Memorial Coliseum, Emanuel Hospital and Interstate-5 projects, ultimately displacing Black-owned businesses and residents in the neighborhood.
Davis, whose family’s displacement is central to the Albina Vision Trust’s innovative North Portland future, said the challenge is to thrive in the face of oppressive systems.
“How do you sustain yourself when you know they’re trying to get rid of you?” Davis asked. “In many ways, they destroy your mind, your spiritual system, your body, your family, your community.”
Black Aesthetic Studio’s third time capsule transitions from the 1900s and the near-future reimagining of the earth to the year 3024, following a rebellion, new treaties and a more just future, thanks to the work of their ancestors. The Afro-futurist film gives space to consider a new future in which police have fallen into disuse.
Davis said the shipping containers themselves parallel aspects of Black history, painted indigo and gold to represent both the intrinsic value and the fungibility of Black Americans forced into slavery.
“We’ve been transported and moved around,” he said. “We came here as cargo.”
In “Mapping the Pipeline,” an installation by Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr. and Blue, the future starts with educational opportunities for young Portlanders. A model Portland propped up on desks and bookshelves highlights young city residents, drawing a connection between school expulsions and their long-term impacts, sometimes wrapping young people up in the criminal justice system before they have a chance to thrive.
Long game
Panelists at a March 9 symposium offered visions of a future in which opportunities are available and cultural expression is celebrated. The panel discussions featured teachers, technology justice advocates, public defenders, former and hopeful city commissioners, journalists, activists, historians and chemists. Three hour-long conversations offered a look into how the local avant-garde seeks to manifest a more just future in which police violence is extinct.
“That’s the takeaway for me,” Davis told Street Roots: “What are we policing?”
The city of Portland spends nearly 31% of its funds on policing, according to Vera, an organization that tracks police budgets nationwide. The PPB budget has increased by 47% since 2012, totaling $256 million in the 2023-24 fiscal year.
Amstutz said most crises could be dealt with by creating and using more appropriate resources, and if the aspiration is to make a system of mass incarceration obsolete, policing is not the way society should deal with most issues.
“If we build our system differently — again, with abolition in mind — the police shrink and shrink and shrink until they’re potentially gone altogether,” Amstutz said.
Fixing the narrative
As with any gallery show, the separate works of the exhibition maintain a dialogue with one another. There is an unavoidable experiential relationship between the pieces within Policing Justice, with the audio from Forensic Architecture’s second short film, “The Murder of June Knightly,” reverberating throughout the gallery.
A February 19, 2022 march at Normandale Park was part of an ongoing series of protests organized by the mother of another Black Portlander killed by PPB in 2018, Patrick Kimmons. The march that night was in solidarity with Duante Wright, who was killed by a Brooklyn Center police officer April 11, 2021; and Amir Locke, who was killed by Minneapolis Police Feb. 2, 2022.
Before the march began, a gunman named Benjamin Smith approached the group at the edge of the park, escalated the situation, and ultimately shot five people, killing 60-year-old June Knightly. Those who were shot were on the opposite side of the park from the demonstration and were not protestors but corkers — volunteers who facilitate traffic away from marches to protect people in the streets.
The film highlights how demeaning language and outright misinformation by PPB and Mayor Ted Wheeler, the police commissioner, sought to discredit demonstrators before and after the tragic attack. The early police narrative said the incident “started with a confrontation between an armed homeowner and armed protesters,” despite the fact that Smith was not a homeowner, had left his home to instigate the situation, and the people he shot were unarmed and not protestors. (One armed guard rushed to the scene and shot back, injuring Smith and ending his shooting spree.)
Robert Mackey, a reporter who has written for The New York Times, The Intercept and The Guardian, interviewed the people who were on the scene that night. Mackey said the most powerful thing about the film is that the corkers get to tell their own stories and challenge the false PPB narrative, through interviews, helmet camera footage, and highly accurate modeling by Forensic Architecture that recreates the scene.
“The people who were there, and who experienced the violence, and witnessed what happened when the police arrived and went through everything else, get a chance to tell their own story,” Mackey said. “The police, they set out a narrative that they had to know wasn't true right at the beginning.”
The 37-minute film offers a complex look into how powerful interests frame stories, often using uncritical media to intimidate those calling to dismantle systems of oppression.
Intimidation tactics
Protestors chant in the streets near Washington’s DC’s Lafayette Square, kneeling quietly with fists in the air. Police in riot gear stand six feet in front of them. “Am I next?” one protestor’s sign asks. “Stop murdering us,” says another.
The film, an experiential visual work by Alfredo Jaar, goes silent as one angry man mean-mugs the officers. Another man in goggles and a durag hugs his friend, calmly bringing him in and urging him to remain peaceful.
“It was such a beautiful sign when they all get together to say 'calm down, calm down, don't get violent — it's important that we do it without violence,’” Jaar said.
Flash. Bang. Police charge the line. Batons and flashbangs disperse the crowd. Overhead, a chill enters the room.
“No justice, no peace,” the crowd chants, middle fingers pointed toward a descending helicopter. In disoriented slow-motion, protestors hang onto fences, their loved ones, and their ears, dropping bikes to the ground as a rotor narrowly misses a building.
“If it had touched the building, it would have been — it would have fallen on the protesters,” Jaar said. “It would have created a major major major tragedy.”
His experience with helicopters played an important role in Jaar’s focus for the film. The Chilean-born New York artist said seeing the violence of Chilean President Augusto Pinochet at a younger age influenced the way he thought about Trump’s use of a helicopter to intimidate left-wing protestors into submission. (Pinochet famously dropped people he called “leftists” from helicopters into the ocean.)
The film is a visceral exploration of space — who is entitled to it? Trump utilized deafening sound and moving air to assert power over Black Lives Matter protestors, dominating space so he could take a photo with a Bible.
Asked what gives him hope, Jaar said the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci said it well in his 1929 collected Letters From Prison. Gramsci was imprisoned by Mussolini in 1926 after his staunch criticisms of fascism and Benito Mussolini.
"I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will," Gramsci wrote.
Jaar agrees.
“Intellectually, when I see what's happening around me and in the world, I am extremely pessimistic,” Jaar said. “But somehow, my will — my inner will — is optimistic and keeps me going.”
Artist: Power and Practices Workshop hosted by Don’t Shoot Portland, March 23 at PICA, 4-8pm.
Policing Justice Film Series at Clinton Street Theater, March 21, April 4, April 18 at 7pm and at PICA April 27 at 1pm.
Policing Justice is on view through May 19, 2024 at PICA.
For more information visit: pica.org/events/policingjustice
Street Roots is an award-winning weekly investigative publication covering economic, environmental and social inequity. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots. Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today.
© 2024 Street Roots. All rights reserved. | To request permission to reuse content, email editor@streetroots.org or call 503-228-5657, ext. 40