Category Archives: Multicultural

OUR STORIES OUR VISIONS

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Frances Grace Mortel

Biography

Frances Grace Mortel (she/her) is a photographer and filmmaker, born and raised in Manila, Philippines. She studied in University of the Philippines Film Institute (UPFI) and worked as art director/production designer for several film and television projects. She moved to Spokane, Washington in 2016 and completed the Digital Media Production program at Spokane Falls Community College (SFCC) in 2019. She graduated with a BA Film degree at Eastern Washington University (EWU) in 2021, receiving the Dean’s Student Excellence Award, Social Justice Advocate of the Year Award, and Achievements in Screenwriting and Criticism.

A member of Brown Girls Doc Mafia, Filipino American Artist Directory, and Spokane Film Project — she has exhibited in Terrain, FemFest Art Festival, Spokane Arts’ Saturate, Pagdiriwang’s Larawan in Seattle Center, and other group shows with local collectives such as LFrances currently works as Communications Specialist for APIC Spokane and serves as board member for Spokane Film Project. A member of Brown Girls Doc Mafia and Filipino American Artist Directory — she has exhibited in Terrain, FemFest Art Festival, Spokane Arts’ Saturate, Pagdiriwang’s Larawan in Seattle Center, and other group shows with local collectives such as La Resistance and Shades of Me. She participated in Santa Barbara International Film Festival – Film Studies Program (2020), Telluride Film Festival – Student Symposium (2021), and is part of the pilot batch of WA Filmworks Media Mentorship Program (2021). She recently won the Most Promising Filmmaker Jury Award at the Spokane International Film Festival 2022 for her short film, Dear Nanay, which also took the Honorable Mention Jury Award at the Local Sightings Film Festival 2021 and Cinemetropolis Award for Best Local Short at Seattle Asian American Film Festival 2022. You may find her upcoming exhibits and screenings here: mortelmedia.com/calendar

About her work

The challenges of being a mother, immigrant, and queer artist of color fuel her desire to tell empowering visual stories that expose human truths and stand for social justice. Frances is currently capturing conceptual portraits with focus on women and QTBIPOCs (Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, People of Color), exploring street reportages highlighting the working class, writing and producing fiction & non-fiction films about the plight of immigrants, and experimenting on other alternative and accessible ways to create intersectional and intergenerational media.


https://www.mortelmedia.com/

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Elaine Gerard

Biography

I am a Native American artist of Blackfeet descent from Montana currently working with acrylics on canvas. I have been painting with acrylics for about ten years after retirement from office work. Rather than aiming for photo-realism with my subject matter, I endeavor to mine the spirit and mood with bright earthy colors. I share studio space with the artists at Yes Is A Feeling art gallery in the Steamplant Building in downtown Spokane.

I work hard to produce a professional product and also offer prints of some works to make it accessible and affordable to all who wish to have my art in their homes.

Artist Statement

As a visual artist working with acrylics, I am endlessly seeking that elusive composition, that outstanding color, that singularity that I need to capture on canvas. But the search doesn’t end in a simple recreation of what I see, because inside all of the creatures and people and scenes I portray, I am also looking for the energy within to bring it out with the language of color. I want to appeal not only to my indigenous people but to all peoples and to share the beauty that I see in the simplest animal or the most complex human being’s face. This is what drives my art, this search to find the language of color and to be able to speak it with competence some day.

My subject matter includes portraits, scenery, animals and Native American peoples. I am an enthusiastic advocate for my people and my art reflects our Blackfeet people’s love of horses and bison, our ancestral lands, the energies and magic that these animals represent to us. I am challenged by the medium of paintbrush and canvas but energized by color and the inner life of all of creation and I hope to convey that excitement to the viewers of my art.

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Consuelo Soto Murphy

Consuelo Soto Murphy studied Art and Art Education at Eastern Washington University and Spokane Falls in Spokane Wa.

In second grade, her teacher declared her an artist when she brought Consuelo up to the front of the class and she held up a drawing of a twisted and very large and brightly colored octopus. Consuelo believed her and from then on she was an artist.

Consuelo graduated from Sunnyside High School in 1979 and Graduated from Eastern with degrees in Art Education, Studio Art and K-12 Education. In 1989 Consuelo began teaching Art at Richland High School in Richland, Washington where she taught Art for 32 years while continuously pursuing her painting career.

Consuelo Soto grew up as a child migrant worker along with her family, doing field work across the United States, season to season, before eventually settling in the Yakima Valley of the Pacific Northwest.

Despite the grueling, backbreaking work, Consuelo’s art pieces are inspired by the positive memories of the beautiful landscapes, the flourishing crops, and the love and relationships forged with her family and friends. Consuelo was the seventh child of nine children. While the older ones worked all day in the fields, Consuelo was able to go to school during the day, working before and after school and during the summers.

While Consuelo works primarily in acrylics on canvas, she is far from limited to this medium. The magnificent pieces produced by Consuelo Soto Murphy have gone to homes all over the world. Her work has been featured in publications and galleries as well as featured on television productions.

https://www.sotoart.com/

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Chip Thomas

The question I’m asked most frequently is how a black doctor in his 50s working on the Navajo reservation started doing street art on said reservation. In retrospect, it was only natural for this evolution to occur.

I started working in a small community between the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley called Inscription House in 1987. I’d always been drawn to photography and built a darkroom shortly after my arrival on the Navajo Nation. My passion photographically is shooting black and white in a documentary style inspired by people like Eugene Smith, Eugene Richards, Joseph Koudelka and others. By going out and spending time with people in their homes and family camps, I have come to know them as friends. Interestingly, these home visits enhance my doctor/patient relationship by helping me be a more empathetic health care practitioner.

I’ve always been drawn to street art, graffiti and old school hip-hop. I was attracted to the energy of the culture in the 80s and though I was miles away from the epicenter, I thought of myself as a charter member of the Zulu Nation. I would travel to New York City to see graffiti on trains, on buildings and in galleries. I did some tagging in the 80s before coming to the Navajo Nation and participated with a major billboard “correction” on the reservation shortly after my arrival. My early interventions on the street were largely text based saying things like “Thank you Dr. King. I too am a dreamer” or “Smash Apartheid” and so on.

In 2009 I took a 3-month sabbatical to Brasil which coincided with a difficult period in my life. Though I wasn’t looking for an epiphany, I was fortunate to stumble upon a passionate group of artists working on the street who befriended me. It was during this time that I appreciated how photography could be a street art form.  Inspired by Diego Rivera and Keith Haring, I’d become disinterested in showing my photographs in galleries isolated from the people I was photographing and wanted to pursue a more immediate relationship with my community reflecting back to them some of the beauty they’ve shared with me.  And in truth, I was infatuated with the feeling I got being with the artists in Salvador do Bahia and wanting to find a way to keep that vibe going I started pasting images along the roadside in June 2009.

My early photographic influences include the work of Joseph Koudelka, Garry Winogrand, Charles Moore, Robert Frank, Eugene Smith, Gordon Parks, Larry Towell, Mary Ellen Mark, Susan Meisalis, Roy DeCarava, Sebastio Salgado and Eugene Richards.  I was blown away by Richards’ work in the late 80s and early 90s for Life Magazine and had an opportunity to spend 5 days picking his brain at Santa Fe Photographic Workshops in 1991.  It’s this one person with one camera, frequently with only one lens shooting black + white film in ambient light aesthetic that informs my eye as well as 25 years spent in my home darkroom pursing the zone system.  It’s been an interesting challenge attempting to bring that look to black and white prints on regular bond paper coming off a toner based plotter. I’d like to think that my vision is a part of the storytelling, first person, humanist tradition of the people I look up to mixed with a healthy dose of Diego Rivera + Keith Haring.

Regardless, I give thanks that the journey continues.

In beauty it is finished.

https://jetsonorama.net/welcome/
https://justseeds.org/artist/chipthomas/

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Charles Tuggle

Biography

Art Institute of Chicago / University of Chicago  BFA: Studied Art History, Painting, and Printmaking; Lone Mountain College / University of San Francisco  MFA: Studied Aesthetics, Art History, and Printmaking

Information Made His Life Matter
By Robert Lloyd

In elementary school when your skin is dark and your nose is broad and your hair is kinky, your peers don’t think your life matters. So, you find a sanctuary in the library. No one beats you up. No one calls you names. You read. You discover how much there is that you don’t know and you can find in a book. A teaching career. A military career. An artist’s career. A medical technical career. A career as a professor of art in Nigeria. African history, philosophy, literature, world travels. Information made his life matter. Charles made his life matter.

Artist Statement

I am interested in bringing into focus a particular space of time which most Americans have avoided. I suppose one could say the idea is not to tell a story or narrate history but rather by presenting fragments of history in visual form, ignite thoughts of history in the viewer’s mind at several levels, conscious and unconscious.

The Nigeria Series

The series of paintings and collages is based on my time living and working in West Africa. To express the feeling that Nigeria evokes in me, visually, I use musicians and scenes of everyday life as representational elements with color and movement as the abstract elements overlying the representational ones. Kind of a theory much like music theory can be viewed as cultural constructs. In Western thought, color is described in visual terms, such as pigment or light. In Nigeria, particular in Yoruba land, where I lived, color was described in terms of temperature, from hot to cold, with various colors also having religious connotations. In Nigeria, art is meant to be multiple, multi sensual experience, not simply a matter of sight, something you look at. This series of art represents a distillation of the many feelings I have for West Africa.


https://www.shipyardartists.com/artist/charles-tuggle/

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Our Stories Our Visions: Ali by Mahleik

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Our Stories Our Visions

Participating Artists

Organization follows Mobilization

People Get Ready In the 60’s artists like Curtis Mayfield used their art to build a movement.

Unpacking the Tension Between Symbols, Systems, and Substance from The Breakdown with Shaun King.

Which Side Are You On? As sung by The Freedom Singers. Words were often adapted to the particular protest and location.

Who benefits from your art? Perhaps you would like to read this article about the art created during the Seattle protests. Saving Seattle’s protest murals

Saving Seattle’s Pandemic and Protest Murals

What! After The March?

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Robert Lloyd, Spokane Civic Activist, May 30, 2020

What do you want?

By now we’ve all seen what’s happening in Minneapolis, Detroit, Louisville, Atlanta, New York, Washington DC, Phoenix, Denver, Columbus, Dallas, Chicago, Memphis, Bakersfield, Albuquerque, Los Vegas,  Oakland, San Jose, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle  and more – twenty plus and growing – due to the killing of Floyd. The question is why and who benefits from these protests. We all know the why – systemic racism and injustice for people of color and the poor.  But who benefits? 

We have all seen this before – be it Martin Luther King’s death Memphis, be it the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles, the Chicago fire truck killing, be it Ferguson, Trayvon Martin in Florida, Eric Garner in New York, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Orlando Castile in Minnesota. The lists goes on. The question is “Who benefits?”.

All of these demonstrations had three components. There are those who want to mourn. The parents and loved ones will bring flowers, teddy bears and pictures of the person lost. 

There are those who will hold non-violent protests. The politicians, the ministers and the status quo organizations will express their dissatisfaction with articulate speeches and venting rhetoric.

Here are some of those who on Sunday May 31 between 2 and 4 pm non-violently protested the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. They met at 2 pm at Spokane’s Riverfront Park and marched to the Spokane County Courthouse and Spokane City Courthouse/Jail. I asked those pictured here to tell us in their own words WHY THEY MARCHED.

And then there are those who will co-opt your non-violent protests. The extreme left and right, the anarchists and those who would like to destroy your community, institutions and trust with violence and chaos and destruction. Sometime after 5 pm and late into the evening groups like this looted downtown Spokane stores, broke windows and had confrontations with police that resulted in their use of flash bangs, bean bags, rubber bullets, and tear gas canisters.

After demonstrations like this people will go back home to cynicism, apathy, complacency, self-medication and risky behavior, and party and bull shit and party and bull shit. And there will be no change. The question should be what is it that you want and what is the price you are willing to pay and how do you go about getting it. 

Will you build a grass root organization?  

If so form small groups of 5 – 10 people. Get to know and vet who your people are. Are they actors, allies or accomplices? Are they people who will sit down and meet regularly to discuss strategies and planned actions? Meet in a public place or Zoom. Let us know what your results are at 4comculture.com. Email info to:  info@4comculture.com

I’d suggest that you make this message go viral through your social media outlets. I’d suggest that you print this out on your home printer and distribute it at upcoming non-violent protests. You can become a civic activist and work between horrific events and elections.

Spokane People of Color Legislative Conference

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People of Color Legislative Conference
Areas of Focus Discussion for Spokane Region
Saturday, October 12th, 2019

The summit has three main goals: 1) to stimulate dialogue between diverse POC organizations, community leaders, and state legislators of color to build statewide solidarity, unity and mobilizing capacity on the most important issues to our collective communities of color; 2) to organize a platform for community leaders of color to develop a Legislative Agenda of top priorities for the Senate and House Members of Color Caucus (MOCC) to push forward; and 3) to come out with a working list of who’s working on what issue in what region, so that organizations across the state can build on momentum made at the summit. This is not meant to pre-empt any individual community’s legislative priorities, only build a resource for connecting people and organizations with shared issues.

Racial Justice Community Leaders

“Racial Justice Community Leaders” were invited to the summit and asked to bring their organization’s legislative priorities and were “welcome to invite POC community leaders you know to register for the event.”

Community Leaders of Color

The purpose of the summit was to hear from and connect people of color community leaders and legislators of color to build solidarity and mobilizing capacity across the state for issues that are of highest priority to our collective communities of color.

Below are Spokane’s top 10 priorities for each of the categories discussed.

Racial and Criminal Justice

  • End cash bail
  • Decriminalize driving with 3rd degree suspend license
  • Decriminalize poverty
  • I-1000 (pro) affirmative action (ref. 88 on ballot)
  • Expedition of voting rights restoration of people with felonies
  • HB 1517: Risk assessment, etc. for DV and IPV (need racial equity lens plus broader rep from impacted population)
  • Rights and education for women who enter prison while pregnant
  • True blood legislation

Housing, Homelessness, Displacement, & Human Services

  • Statewide rent control
  • Just cause eviction statewide
  • Fair chance housing
  • Enhance reentry housing
  • More $ for permanent affordable housing
  • Rental inspection
  • Landlord registry
  • Civil-legal aid/right to council for eviction court
  • Build in rent grace period or remove 3 notice protection revocation
  • Decriminalizing public camping
  • Data privacy

Education

  • Loan forgiveness
  • Universal voluntary access to ECAP
  • Full day kindergarten, Headstart
  • Raise ECAP poverty threshold so more people qualify
  • Cultural competence for Pre-K teachers
  • Increase support for teachers plus families for accessing development resources
  • Fund to provide disciplinary diversion to keep kids in classroom
  • More teachers/authority figures of color
  • Race pay equity-equal pay

Other

  • Racial health equity (tied for first priority)
  • Consideration of voting rights/participation in underrepresented communities (tied for first priority)
  • Ask for expulsion of Matt Shea (tied for second priority)
  • More $ resources towards impact of nuclear industry on communities of color (tied for second priority)

If you want to know what organizations and individuals registered for the event and represented people of color in our Spokane community, contact Terri Anderson and Jac Archer, the facilitators of the Spokane summit.

If you would like to see the entire list of issues suggested for consideration click here.