Lisa Jarrett & Jamele Wright Sr.

Patricia Sweetow Gallery is pleased to present Lisa Jarrett from Portland, Oregon, and Jamele Wright Sr. from Atlanta, Georgia, in a two-person exhibition. Black migration suffuses the works of both artists, with personal and community histories at the core of their respective studio practices.

The gallery has been anticipating the upcoming exhibition with Jamele Wright Sr. for close to two years. The process of learning about the monumental tapestries, small assemblage boxes, and rough hewn, reclaimed wood & fiber windows has been a gratifying undertaking. Painting with Georgia clay and acrylic on Dutch Wax cotton prints, Wright Sr. hand and machine sews abstract tapestries of Black Migration, as told through the lens of his family history. The small assemblage boxes packed with personal artifacts once treasured, now discarded, provide further evidence of an untold, unseen history.

Jamele Wright Sr. graduated with an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. He completed a fellowship at Project for Empty Spaces in Newark, New Jersey, and The Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, Rabun Gap, Ga. Residencies include Mass MoCA in 2022 and the Golden Foundation in New Berlin, NY.

Lisa Jarrett works in social and visual forms. Her intersectional practice considers the politics of difference within a variety of settings, including schools, landscapes, fictions, racial imaginaries, and communities.

The works on view will be drawn from Jarrett's series Migration Studies. "Migration Studies weave hair into paper to examine the role of hair care and beauty routines as protection within Black culture. They both trace and extend our relationships to lost languages and homelands by connecting us to our collective past and future. I often think about artmaking as the home-place of liberation, where inventing and re-inventing our own survival looks like claiming beauty standards that exist beyond and before dominant narratives."

Lisa Jarrett is co-founder/director of KSMoCA; the Harriet Tubman Middle School Center for Expanded Curatorial Practice. Jarrett is Assoc. Prof. at Portland State University, School of Art & Design.