Lisa Jarrett
Spring 2024
Current Resident - Public Programming
Lisa Jarrett is the Spring 2024 Current Resident, an innovative public art project that delivers black art right to people’s doorsteps. In the first week of June, Jarrett’s project, Phenotyped, will reach over 24,000 people in the Central District neighborhood of Seattle, WA.
In Jarrett’s words, “Phenotyped is a project about kinship, beauty, and Black culture. I am weaving together vernacular family photos with photographs I have taken at various Beauty Supply stores across the U.S. It relies on the lived memories of my kin as documented by the photographs we have taken, many of which were captured long before I was born. Phenotyped seeks to understand and suggest how identities are constructed, how they are maintained, and how they shift over time.”
Post your copy on Instagram by tagging @blackembodiments and #CurrentResident
Images:
Above (exterior print): Phenotyped (Rachel, Miley, and Lisa in North Carolina + MID-K Beauty Supply in Oregon), 2024. 25.5 x 20 inches.
Below (inside spread): Phenotyped (Great Auntie Jeanette Jones in Arkansas + Elegant Beauty Supply in Florida), 2024. 18 x 32 inches.
Current ResidentAbout Lisa Jarrett
Lisa Jarrett (she/her) is an artist working in social and visual forms. Her intersectional practice considers the politics of difference within a variety of settings including: schools, landscapes, fictions, racial imaginaries, studios, communities, museums, galleries, walls, mountains, mirrors, floors, rivers, and prisms. She recently discovered that her primary medium is questions; the most urgent of which is: What will set you free?
She is co-founder/director of projects like KSMoCA (Dr MLK Jr School Museum of Contemporary Art); the Harriet Tubman Middle School Center for Expanded Curatorial Practice in NE Portland, OR; and Art 25: Art in the 25th Century.
Lisa exists and makes work within the African Diaspora. She lives in Portland, Oregon where she co-authors social practice projects and continues her 14+ year investigation into Black hair and its care in various forms. She is Associate Professor of Community and Context Arts at Portland State University's School of Art + Design where she teaches classes in Art + Social Practice.
InfoAbout Current Resident
Current Resident commissions black artists to create a unique work of art that will be mailed to all residents of distinct Seattle zip codes. This public art project is inspired by the data collection and distribution processes of direct mail service providers that businesses (and politicians) use to solicit new customers—the "Current Resident" mailers are typically addressed to.
The Black Embodiments Studio purchases ad space in the same glossy, colorful direct mail packets that residents already receive frequently – sometimes even daily — with the goal of generating unexpected moments of encounter with black artists and their works. In the process we aim to push the practice of “public art” and the idea that “art should be accessible” to their limits. What if we simply sent free black art to as many people as possible?
Past Programs