Black Life Experiential Research Group

Lisa K. Bates is an activist scholar who uses community-engaged research, art practice, and spatial intervention to develop new visions of Black history, present, and possibility.

Artist Bio

Sharita Towne is an transdisciplinary artist and educator based in Portland, OR, born and raised on the west coast of the U.S. along Interstate 5—from Salem, OR, to Tacoma, WA and down to Sacramento, CA.

Artist Bio

The Black Life Experiential Research Group (BLERG) is a think tank. Instead of dry analytical reports, it produces transmedia experiences. It anchors itself to a Black geography of Portland, but it doesn’t stop there. It’s porous and collaborative with diverse artists, thinkers, audiences, and cityscapes. It can fly through neighborhoods that were razed by slum clearance, exhume voices and documents that unsettle our understanding of what happened then, now, and can happen in the future. It gives language, shape, and form to Black imagination through public art and intervention, augmented reality, print, and video, to breathe possibilities back into sites of Black Life in Portland and beyond.

This project was discontinued in 2019.

See Lisa K. Bates’s Untitled Black Spatial Imaginary Project
and Sharita Towne’s UNTITLED (Black Wanderings, Reckonings and Reveries).

Discipline
Multimedia, Social Practice
Award Year
2019
Status

Discontinued

Themes
bates-lisa-k

Lisa K. Bates

Portland, OR

Lisa K. Bates is an activist scholar who uses community-engaged research, art practice, and spatial intervention to develop new visions of Black history, present, and possibility. Bates is Associate Professor in the Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University.  She has a PhD in City and Regional Planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 2016 she was awarded the Dale Prize for urban planning scholarship that advances community self-determination and racial justice.

Photo credit: Kelly James

Collaborator

Sharita Towne is an transdisciplinary artist and educator based in Portland, OR, born and raised on the west coast of the U.S. along Interstate 5—from Salem, OR, to Tacoma, WA and down to Sacramento, CA.

towne-sharita

Sharita Towne

Portland, OR

Sharita Towne is an multidisciplinary artist and educator based in Portland, OR, born and raised on the west coast of the U.S. along Interstate 5—from Salem, OR, to Tacoma, WA and down to Sacramento, CA. She is interested in engaging local and global Black geographies, histories, and possibilities. She is also known as “Mariah Carrie Mae Weems,” one-fourth of the post-colonial conceptual karaoke band Weird Allan Kaprow. Towne holds a BA from UC Berkeley in Interdisciplinary Studies & Art, an MFA from Portland State University in Contemporary Art Practices, and teaches at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.
Collaborator

Lisa K. Bates is an activist scholar who uses community-engaged research, art practice, and spatial intervention to develop new visions of Black history, present, and possibility.