Bean Gilsdorf | Project Wall
Model Citizen, 2023
mixed textiles on hand-dyed and -printed cotton, mounted to museum board
15.75 x 14”
Tip of the Spear, 2023
mixed textiles on hand-dyed and -printed cotton, mounted to museum board
16 x 15.75”
Monument, 2023
mixed textiles on hand-dyed and -printed cotton, mounted to museum board
17 x 12”
The Candidate’s Wife, 2022
mixed textiles on hand-dyed cotton, mounted to museum board
17.75 x 15”
Bean Gilsdorf
Textile Collages
June 6 - July 6, 2024
For the month of June, the gallery is also excited to present a small suite of recent works by Bean Gilsdorf as part of our Project Wall program, which spotlights recent editions of prints and photographs by contemporary artists across the globe.
As a fourth-generation seamstress, Gilsdorf uses textiles to create collages, sculptures, and photographs that serve as malleable engagements with historic events along with cultural and political constructs. Her multi-media works explore the relationship between image, object, and narrative through a feminist lens. Working with appropriated images and texts, Gilsdorf creates sculptures and performances that delve into historical narratives, the iconography of authority, and the ways in which representations influence our perception of cultural values. Gilsdorf invites us to consider the limits of power such images have, the point at which they become diffused and illegible, and the absurdity that arises when they are ignored. Gilsdorf will present the lecture-performance Epistemics for Artists for the 2024 Oregon Contemporary Artists' Biennial on June 15 at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art.
Gilsdorf’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, and the American Textile History Museum, as well as exhibition spaces in England, Italy, China, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and South Africa. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Portland Art Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, Kala Art Institute, and the International Quilt Museum at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Gilsdorf is the recipient of numerous awards, including an Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship (2024), a Ford Family Foundation Fellowship Residency at Ucross (2023), an Andy Warhol Foundation Grant (2020) and two creative Fulbright Fellowships to Poland (2015-16 and 2016-17). She currently lives in Portland, OR.
Saturday, June 15, 2024
5 pm: Portland Institute for Contemporary Art
For the 2024 Oregon Contemporary Artists’ Biennial, Bean Gilsdorf presents an experimental lecture-performance that enmeshes facts, figures, memes, and clichés about the arts with key theories from psychology, philosophy, and linguistics. “Epistemics for Artists” will unpack the concept of being “epistemically adrift”—a term originally coined for mood disorders, but which could also be used to illuminate how artists have become patently alienated from the fruits of their own labor. Engaging with current research on the effects of artistic production, Gilsdorf invites the audience to consider the relationship between artist, community, and city. This staging of Gilsdorf’s first performance in Portland is inspired by her own experiences as an artist and builds on her groundbreaking 2021 city-wide study “Seeing Visual Artists” as well as her five years of work as an arts-advice columnist.