Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

PCC’s final HARTS Artist in Residence explores education’s liberatory and colonizing practices

Photos and story by Misty Bouse

Portland Community College’s North View Gallery on the Sylvania Campus in Southwest Portland announces the final Humanities and Arts Initiative (HARTS) Artist in Residence featuring Una Kim with an opening reception from 3-6 p.m., Saturday, Jan. 27.

The “Battlegrounds” exhibition runs Monday, Jan. 8 through Feb. 8 and features new work by HARTS artist Kim, who is also a PCC art faculty member. Showcasing recent mixed media paintings of abstracted figures that dance and struggle against internal and external forces, the series of paper banners investigates both the liberatory and colonizing practices of formal education. The physicality of these large-scale paintings is stunning and recalls the intensity of artists like Marlene Dumas, Willem De Kooning, Max Beckman, and Rick Bartow, who Kim identifies as significant influences on her development.

In Korean, “Una” means to “embrace the world.” And while the figures in Kim’s new work bend and twist to fit into the limiting structures of oppressive systems, they also open their arms to embrace the world around them. Kim, who immigrated from South Korea at 16, teaches at both PCC’s Cascade Campus and Portland State University. To learn more about her work, visit unakim.net or visit her exhibition page.

Kim is the last of six artists and writers selected for PCC’s innovative residency program, which was inspired by an Obama Administration laureate program. The residency was recently defunded, which makes this the final HARTS Artist in Residence exhibition.

“The HARTS residency was a visionary program that acknowledged the value of the different lenses and diverse perspectives that artists contribute to our college community. In this body of work, Una Kim is engaging with questions of immigration, justice and education: all issues that are important to many of our students and communities,” said Christine Weber, North View Gallery Director.

The public is welcome to attend the opening reception, or visit during regular gallery hours Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., at the college’s Sylvania Campus (12000 SW 49th Avenue). The gallery is in the Communications and Technology (CT) Building. PCC is home to the North View, Paragon, Helzer and the Southeast arts galleries, each located on one of four comprehensive campus locations in Portland. The galleries are dedicated to supporting education and community-building through the arts.

For more information visit pcc.edu/galleries.