Rememory: A Poem

If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place - the picture of it stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there in the world. —Toni Morrison 

Ebony Frison and Stephanie Adams-Santos, both Portland-based artists and poets, come together to create a space to recall, reflect, and hold grief. Working in distinct visual languages, both artists engage memory as something active and persistent that lingers in image, land, and the body. Bringing together printmaking, installation, photography, and the written word, the exhibition takes its title from the concept of “rememory” in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, where memory is understood as experiential. Memory can live and breathe, love and admonish. Haunt.

Frison works with archival photographs of Black American soldiers from World War II taken by Connecticut-based Army photographer Newton Carroll. These images hold moments of camaraderie and youth, while also revealing the profound contradictions faced by Black soldiers asked to fight for freedoms denied to them at home. Through poetic intervention and print media processes, Frison engages the images as complex historical archive containing traces of both resilience and systemic injustice, inviting viewers to reflect on the enduring racial structures that shape American life.

Portland-based artist, writer, and educator Stephanie Adams-Santos offers a parallel meditation through imagery drawn from her own illustrated tarot deck. These interpretations of the Major Arcana emerge from an animist symbolic world that affirms a cosmos alive with forces beyond the human. The images offer a language through which viewers may contemplate unseen relations between ancestors, land, and spirit, opening imaginative space for futures not bound by the logics of empire. Accompanying the tarot prints, Adams-Santos presents a communal altar installation as a participatory space for reflection and encounter with the forces, memories, and presences that move among us.

This exhibition is curated by TK Smith and is part of the Oregon Contemporary Artists’ Biennial, a survey of works by visual and performing artists who are defining and advancing Oregon’s contemporary art landscape. Oregon Contemporary Artists’ Biennial 2026 will explore the interconnected themes of place, power, and promise, especially as they relate to our complex relationships with the land, our histories, and our nations. This exhibition intends to act as a response to the 250-year anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. This pivotal document emancipated the 13 American colonies from British rule, establishing the new nation with the promise of certain “unalienable rights” to all citizens. Since its signing, there have been long and violent battles to combat the restriction of those rights and the denial of full citizenship, often fought by the most vulnerable of us.

Ebony Frison

Ebony Frison is a Portland-born visual artist, printmaker, future beekeeper and community builder whose work explores memory, history, and identity through analog processes rooted in care and material inquiry. Raised in Portland’s historic Black Belt, her practice is shaped by personal and collective histories, examining the lasting impact of displacement, labor, and cultural erasure on Black communities. Working across drawing, painting, printmaking, bookbinding, she creates work that functions as both witness and reclamation.

Frison’s work engages archival imagery, family histories, and overlooked visual records to uncover silenced narratives of Black life and labor. Central to her practice is the Black Valor Archive, a collection of archives that include Black Valor: The Frison Archive and Black Valor: The Carroll Archive.

Her artistic practice is deeply informed by her lived experience. She is the granddaughter of sharecroppers whose grandparents migrated to Portland in the mid-1960s seeking opportunity and dignity. She is also an Air Force veteran and former social worker, experiences that continue to shape her understanding of service, care, and collective responsibility. These intersecting histories inform her commitment to centering Black voices and examining how systems of power shape individual and collective identity.

Stephanie Adamns-Santos

Stephanie Adams-Santos is a Guatemalan-American interdisciplinary artist writer whose work spans poetry, prose, screenwriting, and illustration. Their work reflects a fascination with the weird, numinous, and primal forces that shape inner life. They are the author of several full-length poetry collections and chapbooks, including Dream of Xibalba (selected by Jericho Brown as winner of the 2021 Orison Poetry Prize; finalist for a 2024 Oregon Book Award and Lambda Literary Award) and Swarm Queen’s Crown (finalist for a 2016 Lambda Literary Award). Stephanie served as Staff Writer and Story Editor on the television anthology horror series Two Sentence Horror Stories (CW/Netflix), winner of a 2022 Gold Telly Award in TV Writing. Stephanie has received screenwriting fellowships from The Gotham, Sundance, Film Independent, and Ojalá/Universal. They are also a recipient of the Miller Foundation Spark Award for Oregon artists. Most recently, Stephanie wrote for the new season of Nocturno, a Latinx horror radio anthology hosted by Danny Trejo for iHeart Radio. In addition to their literary work, Stephanie is creating an original tarot deck that blends poetry, animism, and ancestral magic.

This exhibition is curated by TK Smith and is part of the Oregon Contemporary Artists’ Biennial, a survey of works by visual and performing artists who are defining and advancing Oregon’s contemporary art landscape.