Art 25: Art in the 25th Century is a dynamic collective which celebrates a culmination of years (and ancestral lifetimes) of shared curiosity, vision, and an outright insistence to see Indigenous and Black cultures thrive within contemporary art. Investigating how Indigenous and Black art lives in the twenty-first century, the collective seeks collaborations with contemporary artists worldwide who envision how it will flourish into the twenty-fifth century and beyond. Founding members include Lisa Jarrett (Portland, Oregon), Lehua M. Taitano (Santa Rosa, California), and Jocelyn Kapumealani Ng (Honolulu). Their collaborative poem, “Imaginary Photo Album or, When We Die, Our Polaroids Speak to Our Living Descendants” is an excerpt from their multimedia photography installation Future Ancestors, featured most recently at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Future Ancestors opened in fall 2019 at Orí Gallery in Portland, Oregon.
Lisa Jarrett is associate professor of community and context arts at Portland State University’s School of Art + Design and is the cofounder and codirector of KSMoCA (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School Museum of Contemporary Art) and the Harriet Tubman Middle School Center for Expanded Curatorial Practice in Portland, Oregon. Lehua M. Taitano is a queer CHamoru writer and interdisciplinary artist from Yigu, Guåhan (Guam) and the author of two volumes of poetry: Inside Me an Island (WordTech Editions, 2018) and A Bell Made of Stones (Tin Fish Press, 2013). Jocelyn Kapumealani Ng is a queer interdisciplinary artist of Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese, and Portuguese descent whose art blends spoken word poetry, special effects make-up, theater performance, photography, and fabrication to navigate themes of queerness, Indigenous culture, women’s issues and underrepresented narratives.