Letterpress Residency
This residency program is focused on letterpress printing, and is based at our rural campus in Colton, Oregon. Camp Colton provides artists and thinkers of various disciplines an opportunity for secluded production, research, and reflection in a rural setting. The Colton campus offers access to Stelo Press, a letterpress studio nestled within 85-acres of mature forest and hiking trails, with the sound of Canyon Creek flowing next to the studio.
Congratulations to the 2020-2021 artists in residence. Learn more about them and the program below.
Demian DinéYazhi´
Demian is a transdisciplinary Indigenous Diné Non-Binary artist, poet, and curator. Their practice is a regurgitation of purported Decolonial praxis informed by the over accumulation and exploitative supremacist nature of hetero-cis-gendered communities post colonization. They were formed from their mother who is a descendant of sacred beings that came to emerge from this world through the holy act of migration and from a people ceremonially devoted to cosmological harmony and balance. They are a survivor of attempted european genocide, forced assimilation, manipulation, sexual and gender violence, capitalist sabotage, and hypermarginalization in a colonized country that refuses to center their politics and philosophies around the Indigenous Peoples whose Land they occupy and refuse to give back. They live and work in a post-post-apocalyptic world unafraid to fail.
@heterogeneoushomosexual
Alejandra Arias Sevilla
Alejandra (She/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and community printmaker in Portland, Oregon. She deconstructs the intersection of language, domestic spaces, and personal history. These are rooted in the storytelling of her grandmothers, her childhood in Mexico and her experience as a mexican woman in the United States. She engages in an active process of memory to examine the language that knits her identity.
As part of her ethos, Alejandra collaborates with Portland-based community groups to engender action and empathy through art building. She has participated with Don’t Shoot Portland, in printmaking events as a form of sharing knowledge and storytelling. In 2018, she collaborated with artists, translators, and business owners to celebrate the first Dia de Los Muertos in the Portland Art Museum. Her work has been shown with Nat Turner Project, Black Fish Gallery and Converge 45.
May Maylisa Cat
May is a multidisciplinary artist who grew up in Chicago and graduated from the Cooper Union School of Art in New York, NY. Her projects have received support from multiple grants including the Precipice Fund from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Calligram Foundation, the Career Opportunity Grant from the Oregon Arts Commission, the New Media Fellowship from Open Signal, and grants from the Regional Arts and Culture Council of Portland, OR. May has attended residencies at Chautauqua Visual Arts, Wassaic Project, Santa Fe Art Institute, Caldera Arts, Pittsburgh Glass Center, New Media Gallery Residency at Jack Straw Cultural Center, and Glean Portland. She has spoken as a guest lecturer for Carnegie Mellon University School of Fine Art in Pittsburgh, PA and as a teaching artist for Caldera Arts in Sisters, OR. She is currently based in Portland, OR.
giovanni singleton
giovanni is the author of Ascension, informed by the life and work of Alice Coltrane, which won the California Book Award Gold Medal and AMERICAN LETTERS: works on paper, a collection of visual art and poetry. Her writing has been exhibited in the Smithsonian Institute’s American Jazz Museum, Oakland's Digital Literature Garden, San Francisco’s first Visual Poetry and Performance Festival, and on the building of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. In 2018, she received the African American Literature and Culture Society’s Stephen E. Henderson Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry. singleton is founding editor of nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts, a journal dedicated to experimental work of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces. She has held visiting professorships in creative writing at CalArts, New Mexico State University, and Sonoma State University. For ten years she coordinated the Lunch Poems reading series directed by Robert Hass at the University of California, Berkeley where she also served as the 2017-18 Holloway Lecturer in Poetry and Poetics. She regularly consults and gives presentations on writing, editing, graphic design, and publishing at high schools, colleges, and conferences.
Mami Takahashi
Mami is an artist from Tokyo, currently based in Portland, Oregon. Using photography, performance, installation, and urban intervention, her practice explores the complexities of being Asian and a woman struggling for US citizenship. Being the first member of her family to the U.S. and a non-native English speaker, her visual practice incorporates her awkward experience in this new culture. There is an on-going struggle with the complex meaning of being “American” and “foreigner” with the millions of immigrants that came before. Previous exhibitions and performances have taken place at San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco; DANK Haus, Chicago, IL; The International Museum of Art, El Paso, TX; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Alberta, Canada; Gwangju Folk Art Museum, Korea; Instituto Municipal del Arte la Cultura, DG Mexico and Toriizaka Art Gallery, Tokyo, among other venues. She holds an MFA from Portland State University, a BFA from Joshibi University of Art and Design, Kanagawa Tokyo.