About The Festival

THE 6th VANPORT MOSAIC FESTIVAL
May 26-June 30, 2021

 Contact: laura@vanportmosaic.org - 510.717.2441

From May 26th to June 30th the 6th Vanport Mosaic Festival will offer Oregonians virtual and in-person memory activism opportunities to Remember, Repair, Reclaim, and Re-imagining our collective story.

In 2020 we explored the critical question: Who gets to be American? What does it mean to be an American today? The 6th Vanport Mosaic Festival will dive even deeper into our history of exclusion, and invite us to re-define who is the WE in “We The People.” The combination of complex stories and multitude of perspectives will inspire us to reclaim and rebuild a civic identity rooted in equality, diversity, justice, dignity, and truth.

The Vanport Mosaic Festival was awarded the Oregon Heritage Excellence Award 2017, the Spirit of Portland Award by City Commissioner Nick Fish, and the Columbia Slough Watershed Council’s Achievement Award. 

For a taste of the Vanport Mosaic Festival and its impact, we invite you to watch the short documentaries: Legacy of A Forgotten City - The Vanport Mosaic Festival 2017: And A Call For Memory Activism: The Vanport Mosaic Festival 2018

PROGRAMMING (schedule and more info to be announced soon!)

In Person EVENTS:

North Park Blocks Activation 

• History Is Now - a reactivation of vacant storefront windows with memory activism displays that amplify community histories and current calls to action - a collaboration with Vanport Mosaic and Design As Protest collective.

• The Venderia - a pop-up vending machine with gifts that fill your heart, amplify silenced histories and motivate you to action: zines, postcards… PLUS! a community zine-making event will populated the machine - curated by A’Misa Chiu with Taylor Valdes

• Soul Restoration Project by Darrell Grant - Artists will join in devising daily rituals of shared artistic practice employing music, movement, poetry, visual art, reading and other artistic gestures to intentionally renew and re-consecrate our civic space

• Poetry slam curated by Ken Yoshikawa

• Youth Voices - Friends of Noise

• Pop-up art gallery curated by Latoya Lovely

• WE THE FUTURE Video installation by Josue Rivas

• ALTAR US - A participatory Altar created by Chisao Hata as a call to Spiritual Activism

• Sound postcards from Old Town - Street Roots in collaboration with Vanport Mosaic

• FUNERAL FOR FLACA - a reading/presentation on the newly published book by Emilly Prado: an exploration of things lost and found—love, identity, family—and the traumas that transcend bodies, borders, cultures, and generations.

EXHIBITS:

• VANPORT: A SURGE OF SOCIAL CHANGE - a Vanport Mosaic exhibit developed in collaboration with Pittock Mansion. Currently on display and running until July 12. Info here

CELEBRATIONS:

• Public celebration/renaming of Vanport Building and reveal of Vanport Mosaic PERMANENT TRIBUTE TO THE SPIRIT OF VANPORT

TOURS:

• ALL THE POWER TO THE PEOPLE- walking tours led by Kent Ford, founding member of Portland Black Panthers

• COME SUNDAY by Darrell Grant/Third Angle Music, a pilgrimage in sound and time that winds through the King, Humboldt, and Alberta neighborhoods — once the heart of Oregon’s largest Black community. 

Virtual EVENTS:

• A Community Call to Confront Hate - virtual summit presented by the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland on May 26th. We are honored to be part of this coalition, and to present THIS America, a session presenting historic impacts of Anti-Asian attitudes and laws through a personal journey of being "othered and forever a foreigner" in America. Led by Chisao Hata, artist/community activist followed in dialogue with Jennifer Fang, Director of Education for the Japanese American Museum of Oregon.

• Confluence Story Gathering, a story-driven discussion to elevate indigenous voices 

• The Statesman’s Fisticuffs- In a world full of re-tweets, trending topics and 24 hour news cycles, the art of spirited discourse sees little light. Enter “The Statesman’s Fisticuffs,'' a platform for spirited debates on topics that polarize the world. Moderated by writers Bruce Poinsette and Donovan Smith, this debate will take on a topic major cities across the country are grappling with in the wake of George Floyd’s death “Defunding the Police” versus “Abolishing the Police.”

• This Is Not For You: An Activist's Journey of Resistance and Resilience with author Richard Brown, a Black Portlander who has spent decades working to bridge the divide between police and the Black community. In conversation with Salomé Chimuku, co-founder of the Black Resilience Fund

• Vanport: The Miracle City: a presentation by Prof. James Harrison

• Maxville: A presentation by Gwen Trice Maxville was a timber town—like so many towns in the Pacific Northwest— but, unlike most timber towns, it was home to both African American loggers and white loggers.

• Screening of SOUL’D: the economics of our black body. This fully realized new work is conceived by Damaris Webb and devised by a cohort of local professional Black performers and designers, and engages with the ways our Black bodies have participated in the American economic dream. 

• A staged reading of Martha Bakes: a Biography of a Revolution and Insurrection that never happened, a new play written by Don Wilson Glenn and directed by Damaris Webb.

• Table read of Walking through Portland with a Panther: the life of Mr Kent Ford, All Power. The first draft of a new play written by Don Wilson Glenn

• Forget Me Not America, an audio recording of a living poem by Josie Seid that goes on an emotional ride through American history and centers on Black Americans 

• From Maxville To Vanport: A collection of songs and short films produced by composer Ezra Weiss with lyrics by S. Renee Mitchell and vocalist Marilyn Keller perform with the PJCE accompanied by shorts by filmmaker Kalimah Abioto to celebrate the shared history of African-American Oregonians, focusing on two towns that represent distinctive viewpoints of the state’s under-discussed Black history.

• Vanport The Musical directed by Shalanda Sims/World Stage Theater

• Lost City, Living Memories: Vanport Through The Voices of Its Residents, a virtual watch-party of multimedia oral histories from Vanport Mosaic living archive - curated and produced by Story Midwife Laura Lo Forti

• OFELIO - A Borderline Story By Andrew Siañez-De La O - produced by MediaRites Directed by Francisco Garcia and performed by Phillip Ray Guevara, “Ofelio” tells the story of a former border patrol guard who is now a father of a young baby. As he cares for his child, he is haunted by the faces of children who were detained at the border. 

FUNDERS

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