Full Circle at the Portland Fine Print Fair

This year the Portland Fine Print Fair at the Portland Art Museum was a little more familiar. With the same venue, location, and largely the same select group of dealers, there wasn’t much of a learning curve. We went through the same pattern as the previous year of coming across stand-out items, or things that we’ve seen at auction over the years that had gone up in price. 

After a quick survey and dashing through the thick Saturday crowd into a briefly empty rack of prints, we returned to explore the favorites from last year’s show. One of these was Mallowney Printing, which had been reinforced through their presence at the Seattle Art Fair last fall. With prints ready to explore from across centuries and far-reaching locales, we decided to spend our time on what was contemporary and local. This seemed to be the place to do it.

Several prints stood out. One was a set of abstract works by Brad Brown. It’s colored aquatint etching with monotype. Harry Schneider, the director of Mallowney Printing, had just graduated from PNCA in 2016 when he made these prints. The black ink was applied freely to interact with and respond to the colored stripes. The series remains one of Harry’s favorite and he has one at home. 

The other was by an artist we soon discovered had a major work in the current Black Artists of Oregon show at the Portland Art Museum. In fact, Collective Mourn stands out during the show and lingers in thoughts later. A message on the impact of the brutal killings of black men on mothers and other family members, it was an outgrowth of her response to the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. At that time, Sadé Duboise made posters to hand out at the many protests following the murder. Both the posters and this important piece contain her reactions to one of the defining events of the past decade.

“After George Floyd was murdered I said ok I’m going to paint my own posters in resistance to this act that always happens – everyone’s always so shocked ‘Oh how did this happen,’ no it always happens. And that was my way of healing through this trauma,” she says in a PBS documentary. She got a grant from the Jordan Schnitzer Museum to create Collective Mourn to be displayed in a grant show of work by black artists at the museum, a work later purchased for the collection of the Portland Art Museum.

In the film, Sadé says it was her goal early on to create accessible works, and so the prints offered by Mallowney, an edition of two, still contained the sense of immediacy important in her work and were among the most affordable at the fair. Both sold, and that’s probably from a desire to support this promising, and already accomplished, young talent. And we might add, among the most relevant works at the fair. 

Black Artists of Oregon is on display through March 17, 2024. You’ll have to wait until 2025 for the next Portland Fine Print Fair.