Diondra Dukes — with her 7-year-old son Jaxon in tow — didn’t know where to look first when she stepped into one of the Portland Art Museum’s newest galleries on Sunday.
Works by Black Oregon artists lined the walls and filled display cases throughout the multi-room gallery space, including enormous fiber-focused multimedia installations, drawings, paintings and a two-story high photo grid of hairstyles posed on barber’s mannequins.
503 Portraits of Wig Mannequins and 1 Portrait of Diana Ross, by Lisa Jarret.Tatum Todd
It was the grand opening of the Thelma Johnson Streat gallery, a permanent display of art by Black artists that opened to the public on the first day of Black History Month.
“I was a little overwhelmed, but in a good way,” said Dukes, whose sister works for the organization that helped launch the gallery. “I’m really impressed so far.”
Her son, Jaxon, said that an intricately painted piano installation called Ode to Dimorph — by Oregon artist Noah Beckham — was his favorite piece so far.
“It had lots of details,” he said of the intricately patterned hand-painted instrument with a mural behind it.
Ode to Dimorph, by Noah Beckham.Tatum Todd
The gallery, and the curated collection of art inside it, is the result of a collaboration between the museum and the 1803 Fund, an organization that works to advance Portland’s Black community, said D’Artagnan Caliman, vice president of philanthropy and partnership for the fund.
D’Artagnan Caliman, 1803 Fund’s vice president of philanthropy and partnership.Tatum Todd
The 1803 Fund, which started in 2023, has purchased several acres and real estate in the lower Albina neighborhood, the historic center of Portland’s Black community. It expects the redevelopment of those properties will generate hundreds of local jobs. In April, the organization also announced that it will be funding two Portland-based nonprofits with $75 million in grants over the next 10 years.
It has also supported projects that promote Black culture, in addition to economic and financial projects, Caliman said.
“It’s important to really think about who we are as a people,” he said. “(The gallery) also gives us an opportunity not only to express ourselves through Black creativeness and creativity, but also gives us an opportunity to really create this sense of togetherness.”
The gallery features work by Black artists in a variety of different mediums.Tatum Todd
He added that the gallery’s namesake — Streat, an artist, dancer and educator who grew up and went to art school in Portland in the 1930s — is the first Black female artist to have a gallery in a major art museum in the U.S. named after her. Decades after her death in 1959, her work is still on display in prominent art museums across the country, including the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art and Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, according to the Oregon Historical Society’s Encyclopedia of Oregon.
“We thought it was very important to really highlight her and her history,” Caliman said.
Among the crowd of people who showed up to check out the gallery for the first time on Sunday was artist Philip A. Robinson, who made a series of ornate metal pins to commemorate its opening.
“It’s important, especially for our young students to be able to come here and see the space,” he said, adding that he also works as a teacher. “To see themselves represented in these spaces where predominantly they would not see themselves.”
The Thelma Johnson Streat gallery’s opening was timed to coincide with the first day of Black History Month.Tatum Todd
Elsewhere in the crowd, Bil Spigner and Jeff Harris were mingling with other visitors and taking in the art. Spigner is the operations director for a leadership incubator for Black youth called Word is Bond and Harris is the namesake for #JEFFSSHOECHALLENGE, a back-to-school drive that gathers supplies for youth in underserved communities.
“I’m really liking that it’s unapologetically Black,” Spigner told The Oregonian/OregonLive of his impression in the first half-hour after the gallery opened. “And I’m interested to see more of it.”