Lehuahuakea Fernandez + anna marl + kai lewis + victor maldonado:  Nat Turner Pops Up

Lehuauakea Fernandez is a Native Hawaiian-Japanese interdisciplinary artist from Hilo, Hawaii. She has participated in several group shows in Portland, Oregon, most recently “Window Waiting” at the Center for Contemporary Art & Culture. Through painting, sculpture, performance, or otherwise, her art serves as a means of exploring human relationships, Indigenous cultural identity, and innate ties to the natural world. The artist currently lives and explores in Portland, Oregon, while completing her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Painting at Pacific Northwest College of Art.

Anna Marl (b. 1995 in Incheon, South Korea) is an interdisciplinary artist; they received a BFA at Pacific Northwest College of Art.

Kai Lewis  is an Oakland, California native now living in Portland, Oregon as an artist continuing her education with Pacific Northwest College of Art. As an intermedia major, she uses the blend of writing, video, sound, and sculpture to help breathe life into her indeterminate feelings about her environment and purpose in society; in context of her being Black. “My creations express my truth.. and truth within itself, is belligerent by nature.”

Victor Maldonado is a multidisciplinary artist, freelance curator, and writer who lives and works in Portland, OR. He is an Assistant Professor and Inclusions Specialist at Pacific Northwest College of Art. He was born in Changuitrio, Michoacan, Mexico, and grew up in the Central San Joaquin Valley of California in a family of migrant field laborers. Maldonado received a BFA in Painting and Drawing from the California College of Art(2000), and his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of Art Institute in Chicago(2005). Deploying both traditional mediums including painting, printmaking and drawing alongside contemporary strategies such as performances, instillations and interventions, Maldonado expresses the challenge and power of identity to author experience and perception. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA, the Museum of Fine Art, Houston, TX and the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Salem, OR.

half of a pop up

Lehuahuakea fernandez is a pisces and a wonderful person to work with, and one of the few artists NTP has worked with multiple times. fernandez’s work is often a tender mediation on process and materials. i have performed with fernandez at disjecta and it was amazing to share space and energies with her and those feels were continued when we worked together for this pop up show, which was up for only a weekend.

victor maldonado is a pisces, artist & educator. victor maldonado is the secret identity of mad mex, a masqued art presence. maldonado practice is centered around labor and trying to do “nothing” which to maldonado often involves donning his lucha libre mask and laying down. this is exactly what he did for NTP pop’s up. maldonado’s work also included a honeycomb mask as sculpture,  which was created by putting a lucha libre mask in a bee’s nest, continuing his exploration of labor.

by maximiliano

The Center Will Not Fold

Kai Lewis’s If you take some shit from me, Tell the Real Story is an ambitious and sweeping catalogue of the continued theft and mining of Black culture and existence.  Displaying a small assemblage of casts, molds, and small apothecary bottles, each labeled with both abstract and physical commodities as “Black Ideas” and “Melanin Cells” (and priced accordingly), Lewis evokes both the scientific and historical trauma of the experiences of Black Americans.  Amongst these items, sits a small golden cast of Lewis herself, centering her existence as the result and proof of these injustices: past, present, and future.

Beauty is a strange thing.  It can seem deceptively simple.  This is the first thing that comes to mind when I am looking at Anna Marl’s work, a quiet collection of objects that use color, transparency, shadows, text, poetry, and language to pull you into these intimate moments. I find myself moving around them, gliding really, for fear that my presence is breaking some kind of serenity.  It affects me in ways that are not quite conscious, but there nonetheless, pinching at the surfaces of my understanding. There is a sharp edge to these “things”, an allusion to mortality and time that wrestles with melancholy but suggests something much more resolute. They feel like gifts; untouchable gifts bearing literal and metaphorical messages, some whispering more loudly than others.

-Melanie Stevens