"Migration Studies (No. 20, Janie’s first dream I; After Zora Neale Hurston)," 2021, by Lisa Jarrett

MIGRATION STUDIES

Migration Studies (2018-present) is an ongoing project. Jarrett works with drawing, sculpture, and installation to examine hair care and beauty routines within Black culture as a bridge to themes about inventing our own survival. These routines are rituals wherein we claim beauty standards existing beyond and before dominant narratives. She uses the tools of these ritual practices as drawing materials whose histories both trace and extend our lost languages and homelands. These material and formal choices reflect her broader interest in repetition and reproduction as tools of consumer culture and cultural preservation. Jarrett is curious about how our personal/private routines (and the attendant products and purchases) live within our imaginations, conversations, and stories while also connecting us to our collective past and future. The art object is the transformative mechanism by which different systems of value become visible and knowable.

Lisa Jarrett

Lisa Jarrett (she/her) is an artist working in social and visual forms. Her intersectional practice considers the politics of difference within a variety of settings including: schools, landscapes, fictions, racial imaginaries, studios, communities, museums, galleries, walls, mountains, mirrors, floors, rivers, and prisms. She recently discovered that her primary medium is questions; the most urgent of which is: What will set you free?

She is co-founder/director of projects like KSMoCA (Dr MLK Jr School Museum of Contemporary Art); the Harriet Tubman Middle School Center for Expanded Curatorial Practice in NE Portland, OR; and Art 25: Art in the 25th Century.

Lisa exists and makes work within the African Diaspora. She lives in Portland, Oregon where she co-authors social practice projects and continues her 14+ year investigation into Black hair and its care in various forms. She is Associate Professor of Community and Context Arts at Portland State University's School of Art + Design where she teaches classes in Art + Social Practice.