Blackfish Gallery

Blackfish Gallery artist Eddie Reed is featured in BLACK MATTER now on view. This exhibition centers Black artists across Oregon, creating a space for work that resists expectation and insists on self-definition.

Through color, layering, and charged abstraction, Eddie’s paintings move through the contradictions of American life, where beauty, race, power, and perception continuously overlap and unravel. Drawing from social realist storytelling and symbolic language, the work invites viewers into a deeper kind of engagement: one grounded in attention, reflection, and a willingness to sit with complexity.

Come see these works in person!

Images:
Eddie Reed
Gang Violence
30x24in
Acrylic mixed medium on wood board

Eddie Reed
Hello Stranger
40x36x2in
Acrylic mixed medium on wood board

BLACK MATTER affirms the idea that Black artists contain multitudes. Here, the work is allowed to breathe freely.

Works on paper by artist, Nia Musiba.

BLACK MATTER, invitational group show, runs through June 2026 at Blackfish Gallery, 938 NW Everett Street
Portland OR 97209, Weds.- Sun. 11 -5PM.

Blackfish Gallery is honored to present BLACK MATTER, now in its eighth iteration, which has grown into more than an exhibition; it’s a sustained act of community-building among Black artists in Oregon. Included in this exhibition is artist Philip A. Robinson Jr.

Robinson's practice examines structure as a living system — how materials carry memory, how patterns encode history, and how built environments shape identity. Working across wood and steel, Robinson constructs layered compositions that move between natural growth and industrial fabrication.

Image #1 Title: Respiration
Image #2 Title: Phenomenal

Black Matter Exhibition at
Melanie Stevens is an artist, illustrator and writer. She is the creator of the graphic novel series, WaterShed, and the founder and director of black whole Press, a printmaking studio that hosts free workshops and provides resources, funding and residency programming for artists from marginalized communities.
Stevens investigates narrative as a site of reflection or reinforcement of societal power structures and over-determined norms, specifically the manner in which stories (both real and fictional) supposedly centering people of the African diaspora have a long history of appropriation and erasure.
Image:
Charlotte Rising
Linocut print 30 x 23 inches framed

This June Blackfish Gallery will be hosting the 8th exhibition of BLACK MATTER. BLACK MATTER is more than an exhibition—it’s an act of reclamation, resistance, and reverence. It’s a living, evolving archive of contemporary Black artistic voices rooted in Oregon, created in defiance of erasure and in celebration of presence. This ongoing exhibition was born from the recognition that Black artists have long been systemically excluded from mainstream institutions, denied the space to simply create without the burden of justification. BLACK MATTER seeks to disrupt those exclusions by offering a platform where Black artists are not asked to perform their pain or define their identity solely in terms of oppression, but rather to speak, make, and dream on their own terms.

BLACK MATTER includes the work of textile artist Jocelyn Rice, a regenerative clothing designer and artist working at the intersection of garment making and Black speculative futures. Rice’s work, Influenced by Black Quantum Futurism, nature, Harriet Tubman, and ancestral craft traditions, approaches time as nonlinear. Past, present, and future coexist within each piece. By marking, dyeing, writing on, and altering garments by hand, she makes labor and ritual visible, challenging extractive design systems and proposing regenerative models rooted in relationship, land, and community care.

Come on by Blackfish Gallery today for First Thursday from 5pm-8pm to take in BLACK MATTER

Jocelyn Rice .rice

Compass Convertible Jumper
Three-piece fleece convertible jumper with Gold Plated Compass, and Mimi Fresh Tees recycled tote back panel, Womens size Medium

Revolutionary Tenderness
Red Utility Vest. Repurposed technical textiles, hardware, utility vest system, seed beads, mixed media garment

The Debt
Vintage silk American flag durag, cowrie shell, cord, faux currency
48 × 20"

Tonight join us for our 1st Thursday celebration of BLACK MATTER
5-8pm

This exhibition resists the limitations often placed on Black artistic expression. Rather than centering narratives of trauma or political agendas, BLACK MATTER creates space for Black artists to exist fully and freely, exploring abstraction, intimacy, joy, memory, and contradiction on their own terms.

The works presented here are diverse in form and approach, united not by a single theme but by a shared commitment to self-definition and honesty. Together, they form a living archive of contemporary Black voices expansive, evolving, and rooted in presence. BLACK MATTER is both an invitation and a call to action: to witness without assumption, to engage without reduction, and to recognize Black artistic expression as vital to our cultural landscape.

This June, Blackfish Gallery is proud to present the 8th BLACK MATTER group invitational, as well as the collaborative two-person exhibition I Am, by Eddie Reed and Mae Al-Jiboori in Gallery 2 and the James Hibbard Gallery.

In coordination with Black Matter, I Am presents the work of Blackfish Gallery artists Eddie Reed and Mae Al-Jiboori. In the new collaborative exploration I Am, Reed and Al Jiboori reach together toward the roots of human connection and obstruction. Alternating between stark dissections of the social constructs that keep us apart and the struggle to bridge the divide, I Am’s passionate urgency engages viewers with its underlying big picture questions.

Eddie Reed

Redemption Song
Acrylic/mixed medium on wood panel
46” x 36” x 2”

Promises Promises
Acrylic/mixed medium on wood panel
40” x 30” x 2”

Mae Al-Jiboori .maurice.aljiboori

Settled in sweet company
Acrylic, oil pastel on wood
48” x 38.5”
2026

Missing the way you swim
Acrylic, oil pastel on wood panel
15” x 18.5”
2026

This month Blackfish Gallery: BLACK MATTER

Blackfish Gallery is honored to present BLACK MATTER, now in its eighth iteration, which has grown into more than an exhibition; it’s a sustained act of community-building among Black artists in Oregon. What has emerged is not only a network, but a family grounded in care, connection, and creative exchange. Rooted in the legacy of creative autonomy that has defined Blackfish Gallery for nearly five decades, BLACK MATTER invites audiences to invest deeply in the artists and their work. It calls for a relationship built on attention, respect, and genuine engagement with the ideas and futures these artists are shaping.

Participating artists

Philip A. Robinson Jr.
Jocelyn Rice .rice
Melanie Stevens
Nia Musiba
Ebony Frison

Participating Blackfish artists

Eddie Reed
Mae Al-Jiboori .maurice.aljiboori