“Welcome, then go home!”

subtext:

During the early 1960s, Stewart Holbrook, an author and journalist for The Oregonian, popularized his concern with population growth by forming a fictional James G. Blaine Society in honor of a Maine Senator and presidential candidate of 1884 who never visited the state. Holbrook felt his exclusion from the state should be practiced by all. Living on the fringes, this sentiment was remarked in 1971 Governor Tom McCall saying: “Visit Oregon, but for heaven’s sake don’t stay.” This isolationist view of the territory of Oregon has been long-standing. While inclusionary in its appeal, the historical realities of Native genocide, anti-black laws, Chinese railroad worker massacres, and ongoing occupation of the land, I have expanded on this notion, and centered it.

art description:

Around the James G. Blaine Society’s infamous “ungreeting sign” are images of the KKK, which at one point in the mid-1900s, Oregon had the largest membership per capita in the United States. These images of KK members are within the halls of local governments, and in public parades through cities. Adjoining these images are images of the Klamath and Coquille people, native to Oregon, who suffered a fairly horrendous massacre in 1854. The relationship of native dispossession and the constant threat of forced migrant for black communities represents a landscape of white terror. This collective image is backgrounded by an oral history with my brother. He is only 10 years older than I, but just in that short decade our realities of navigating Portland are drastically different. While the idea of keeping visitors out and limiting population, namely that of non-white persons, has a historical lineage, it is very alive today. Portland was the most gentrified city in the United States in 2015. These spatial logics, turned into spatial realities perpetuate a landscape of injustice.