Portia Cobb, Artist Statement
from: Rooted: Pomp & Lizzie performance, 2018
I am a collaborative, socially engaged, interdisciplinary digital artist and poet, working in video and expanded documentary and narrative forms. My practice has integrated installation, site-specific performance, sculpture and heritage gardens. I find inspiration in histories of place, dislocation, and forced forgetting. I am an archivist and a storyteller.
In my practice, I have collaborated with other filmmakers, artists, creatives and scholars. My sensibilities of collaborative ideation and practice is rooted in dialogue, memory, story telling and community engagement.
Artists, filmmakers, scholars and cultural producers that I’ve greatly admired, are described as “Citizen Artists.” My collaborations with artists who are citizen artists have inspired and facilitated my own creative, voice, vision and growth. In my assessment of contributions I have made within community, I may also fill those shoes in my role as a artist-academic working shoulder to shoulder across cultures, communities and borders. I find my balance and momentum in dialogue with, in response to and within communities.
Community engagement ground zero:
In 1992, I became the 3rd Black woman hired to lead the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee’s Community Media Project within the Peck School of the Arts and Film Department. This was designed as a ground zero training ground for ideas born of socially engaged, hands-on, creative-film and media- skill building to facilitate the production of stories by and about marginalized communities within Milwaukee.
My social engagement journey began in my development and practice as a poet, living and working within the San Francisco Bay Area. I joined local poets, playwrights and citizen-artists to organize public readings, and performances within not-for-profit spaces, tea houses and prisons.
While completing my graduate degree in film production, I co-founded FOCUS, a film collective of BIPOC Film students studying film at San Francisco. State University. We were deeply impacted and motivated by a movement of Black British Film collectives formed in the United Kingdom, in the mid 1980’s that advocated for equity and inclusion in its film and media institutions.
All are the foundations for the development of my diverse approaches to my practice as an interdisciplinary artist.
Working within a department and university for 31-years has created a number of possibilities for networks of collaborative work within the gates of the university campus and academic field. However, much of my greater achievements as an artist have been born of direct community engagement and the coupling of my role as a professor with projects beyond the gates of the academy.
Community Building
Sao Paulo, Brazil
Creative Arts, Design and Technology residency, April 23-May 4, 2023
Invited as a participant artist artist fellow for a 10-day intensive symposia and creative working space for international artists, techies, scholars and critics. Participants convened in Bim Retiro at House of the People community center to share our community engaged work and to build new alliances toward radicalizing access and utilization of technology within art expression, education and empowerment with marginalized communities. This experience has continued to inspire new questions and stimulate my ongoing creative research.
Voices of Gun Violence:
As a principal investigator and developer of the Milwaukee Voices of Gun Violence archive, this work is a collection of audio interviews with survivors of gun violence in the city and county of Milwaukee. Four professors, student translators and editors work closely with community activist, Debra Gillespie the founder of Mothers Against Gun Violence to record, archive and share these stories, advocating for protections against gun violence and the obfuscation of lives lost or greatly impacted by this epidemic in our city, county and neighboring territories. As a member of this team, I lead the creative outreach vision of this work via partnerships and collaborations designed to promote support and healing-via creative engagement for survivors.
There have been staged adaptations of their stories in a local theater festival. Other examples include specialized print and paper making workshops specifically surviving families. This was a collaboration with UWM Community Arts Faculty, Raoul Deal. The workshop was documented and edited by Jordy Brazo-a graduate of the FVANG Cinematic Arts program. A link to documentation of this workshop can be found here: https://vimeo.com/827677479/7c835c16f8
We have also commissioned students in our school to design and execute a series of public bus stop portrait/memorials with QR codes to share the story archive. We are currently developing ideas for a national conference to be hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
FWD Truth! 2022 (ongoing)
I am a co-founding member of the Forward Truth collective and archive comprised of black women, femmes and non-conforming artists whose work was exhibited at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMOCA) in the 2022 Wisconsin Triennial. It was the first curated by a Black woman and the first to represent 23 working Black women artists from across genres and practices. Our collective was formed as an action of resistance to address conditions leading to the assault of an exhibiting artist-in this show and the defacing and removal of that artist’s work by a museum visitor-with no consequential actions taken.
The FWDTRUTH archive is an active record of our collaborative actions, manifesto and Open Letter calling for structural and systemic change.
The active website hosts an archive and chronology of the events with press coverage addressing our individual and collective actions during and after the public event that was acknowledged in local and national press and built momentum with arts advocates working to create and protect equitable spaces. Our experience has been shared to promote cohesive and inclusive Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies to protect exhibiting artists and museum staff.
As a collaborating artist-creator of FWDTRUTH I continue to agitate for accountability by the Museum, its Director, MMoCCA’s Board and donors.
In summary, we are advocating for Amends, Transparency and Accountability, to change these conditions. Our efforts and concerns have been covered in two major art publications: Art News & Hyper-allergic, and several Madison based newspapers, radio and television programs. We have also participated in a national conversation with artist administrators advocating for equity within Museums and Art Galleries. The archive can be found at: https://fwdtruth.com
Forthcoming:
“Seeking” a performance at Lynden Sculpture Garden with Jazzy Jewels and local dancers-examining Rite of Passage ceremonies across the black diaspora tying Gullah Geechee spiritual practices with Sierra Leone Rite of Passage rituals for girls and Condomble spiritual ritual in Salvador Brazil. August 2023
Collaborations completed:
2023
Participant. Call & Response artist at the Lynden Sculpture Garden with visiting artist, Eneida Sanches and Daniel Minter. June 17/18
Artist In Residency: with Watermarks & the Milwaukee Northwest Side Community Development Corporation (NSCDC). I curated and participated in the Watermarks Community Poetry workshop, honoring water-with two celebrated & published Milwaukee poets, Kavon Cortez Jones and Nakeysha Roberts as a culminating event to introduce and celebrate the installation of the African Water Vessels at the 30th Street Corridor Green Tech Station completed in the fall 2022). April 2023.
Photos linked here: https://www.watermarksmke.org/g-green-tech-station
Woodland Pattern Poetry & Book Center. I am serving on its Board of Directors and have been an active participant in its annual online poetry marathon and its Summer in the Park series.
2022/3
Community Participant dancer-performer with Fist & Heel Dance company at Lynden Sculpture Garden.
Collaborative Public Sculpture development, Vessels commemorating water, with artist Glenn Williams at Milwaukee 30th Street Corridor, Green Tech-Station Bioswale. sponsored by City as a Living Lab and Milwaukee’s Northwest Side Community Development Corporation (NSCDC).
2020/21
Bottle Tree: Tree of Remembrance: Collaborative sculpture with artist Glenn Williams at the Lynden Sculpture Garden. Design and installation at the Lynden sculpture Garden, a collaboration with artist-sculptor, Glenn Williams of an honorific sculpture with vessels based on African and Gullah Geechee African American beliefs honoring the deceased. Image can be found at this link: (adding images here)
2021
Migrations of Gesture, a trans-disciplinary Video collaboration with UW-Milwaukee Dancer-Maria Soledad Gillespie and interdisciplinary artist, Nirmal Raja. Union Art Gallery, January 25-March 15, 2021
2017-18
Call & Response Artist in Residency:
“Rooted” performance and creation of a storied heritage garden “Lizzie’s Garden” Curated , wrote, directed and performed : Lynden Sculpture Garden. Video found: https://vimeo.com/306995590?share=copy
