Be wonderful (white), you are in Bend

Scalehouse Gallery in Bend, Oregon opened a show on Friday, August 6th provocatively titled, “Be Wonderful White, You’re in Bend.” The artists behind the show are a collective that began as an informal Facebook publish hoping to connect men and women of color in Central Oregon in the course of the pandemic.

They gave their Fb team a utilitarian name that they thought would assist other people discover them. And now the collective known as Central Oregon Black, Indigenous, People today of Shade or COBIPOC has expanded from its digital gathering house to on line zines and now, the walls of a gallery.

Two of COBIPOC’s members sat down with Arts & Society producer, Claudia Meza to talk about this evolution.

Claudia: If you at any time visit Bend, Oregon you may arrive across the expression, “Be Wonderful, You are in Bend.” And as innocuous as the assertion seems there are some Bend citizens that experience there are hidden implications to its indicating. With me now to converse about their artwork present, “Be Good White, You are in Bend” is COBIPOC’s direct artist and founder, Bear Patton, and its direct designer and artistic director, Taemi Izumi.

Bear, could you commence us off by detailing why you selected that title?

Bear: Yeah. I can converse to it initially. So there is a bumper sticker. It’s a super well known sticker in Bend. There are two variations of it, a person says, “Keep Bend Nice” and the other a person states, be wonderful dot, dot, dot you are in Bend. It obtained me considering, what does it indicate to be pleasant and what is that communicating to any individual like me or to anyone who is a different black indigenous man or woman of coloration. It communicates to us that as BIPOC we need to make ourselves invisible to be in this article. And that this variation of niceness is so often applied almost as a instrument to keep us peaceful and continue to keep us small.

Claudia: Taemi, would you like to increase to nearly anything to what Bear just mentioned.

Taemi: Yeah. I next that. I assume, you know, Bend is a good position. There are folks, strangers wave to each other and smile in the streets and, you get to a 4-way halt indication and everyone’s generally waving you on. Men and women are quite nice, but I think that, as Bear claimed, it is this concept of not rocking the boat and of not speaking out versus injustices, and leaving the status quo and with Black Lives Subject and our team and BIPOC across the United States, the idea is to stand up and, you know, say this stuff is not appropriate any longer. And so declaring be pleasant is like indicating, be silent, be white.

Claudia: Could you explain to me a minimal little bit about your collective, COBIPOC? Bear, do you want to go first?

Bear: Yeah, so I initially started out the group Central Oregon BIPOC, as a way to satisfy other people today. And, the need was there to develop far more, additional local community, extra like extension of methods. Simply because I think far more than at any time, we had been not remaining noticed.

Claudia: I think it was a Facebook group at to start with, correct?

Taemi: So the Fb team acquired started off really soon soon after George Floyd and all of that was taking place and there was so considerably unrest and I feel a lot of us ended up experience truly unsafe in Bend due to the fact there were stories of individuals targeting people of shade. And so we satisfied to have a protected area to talk about items, even nevertheless we all, you know, have white mates or white associates, it was really liberating to have a harmless place to chat about that things. And I would say we met it’s possible 4 moments and we’re commencing to get truly at ease with each and every other and then I imagine it was Bear that prompt that we do some type of activism piece. I assume we talked about petitioning or there was a total list of factors.

And then, it was like, let us make a zine, let’s make one thing people today can study. Let us make a thing that folks can contribute to and it’s underground and it is, you know, it is just us and no one’s censoring us and we’re just putting it out there for folks to listen to. And soon after we place out our initially zine in Oct of 2020, we determined we needed to get a tiny additional significant. We had been speaking about getting to be a nonprofit but a action toward that was having a fiscal sponsor. And that was Scalehouse, which is the gallery which is placing on this artwork show and they invited us to place on an show and we variety of could not transform that down. It was a good way to be much more integrated in the local community for extra individuals to hear about us that possibly hadn’t heard about us and or us to be who we are and all people to see it.

Claudia: Bear do you want to converse a little little bit extra about the zine that has led to your group’s first gallery exhibition, Be Pleasant White, You’re in Bend?

Bear: Yeah, so from COBIPOC, we produced “Complex(ion),” which is the identify of our magazine. And it is complex, and then in parentheses it is I-O-N, so “Complex(ion).” And we like that name mainly because it signifies our intricate identities and as racial minorities, we want to hook up and uncover our intersections of oppression and develop healing together. So complexion, like the normal shade of our pores and skin, and then advanced, like meaning so many unique and related components. So we started extremely substantial, I believe it was like 15, 20 people today and it is kind of dwindled as soon as we started carrying out a lot more…

Taemi: Issues, getting far more operate [laughs].

Bear: [Laughs] Yeah…but I would just say, we possibly have about 10 people who actively contribute and we most likely have about five persons that are like the core users that are building the production.

Claudia: I was examining up on some of your items in the impending art exhibit. And there was a person I found especially putting. It is the interactive sand sculpture.

Bear: Yeah, so that is titled “Line in the Sand” and basically we have this massive glass situation that is about an inch and a 50 percent thick and we have 10 unique colors of sand put all over the room. We picked the colors incredibly deliberately, we desired them to be shades of brown. And the plan is that folks can occur in they can read through the titles and whichever they’re figuring out collectively as a community, you pour the sand into the glass scenario and it’ll make a visible that signifies what we working experience as individuals of colour in Bend.

Claudia: I uncover it really exciting that your collective, COBPIOC, commenced as just a team of folks supporting every other by means of the pandemic, through the George Floyd protests and all it introduced up, by many forms of isolation, and it’s just grown to be so substantially much more. Is there nonetheless an intention to grow to be a non-income?

Bear: The intention is to proceed to challenge area challenges and allow for other BIPOC individuals in Central Oregon to have their voice listened to and vocalize their individual struggles, and definitely just sustain this feeling of therapeutic and link for us as BIPOC. There is this ingredient of education and learning and supplying a centralized hub of sources. I assume we will continue to produce our zine. But you know, we have built this sort of awesome associations, like there’s a graduate application right here of counselors and they’ve invited a few of our associates to facilitate a DEI workshop for their grad college students. And we have been invited to paint murals to get up place with our artwork and other strategies far too. I believe that none of us were being artists, but I feel we’re artists now and just with each other, we’re something particular. And I consider we’d definitely be open up to new assignments in the potential and it does not need to have to glimpse a specific way for us.

Discover COBIPOC’s zines on Instagram @complexion_bend

Be Pleasant White…You’re In Bend, Fri., Aug 6-Sat. Sept. 25, Scalehouse Gallery, 550 NW Franklin Ave., Suite 138, Bend, Scalehouse.org