Tammy Jo Wilson is a black female artist and curator residing just south of Portland, Oregon in historic Oregon City. She received her BFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art and her MFA from San Jose State University. She has exhibited her work nationally and was awarded the Leland Ironworks Gold Spot Artist Residency in 2017. That same year, Wilson and her husband artist Owen Premore co-founded the arts organization Art in Oregon (AiO). This statewide 501c(3) non-profit works to foster culturally rich regional communities through partnerships, advocacy, and investment in artists, businesses, educational spaces, and community spaces. AiO believes in building and sustaining art patronage through pride in Oregon artists and pride in art ownership. Additionally, she works in the art department at Lewis & Clark College as the Visual Arts & Technology Program Manager.

I seek to share through my work an expanded view of the black female experience in the twenty-first century. I am speaking to those among us that are looking for a broader understanding of commonalities rather than differences. Historically rooted in the feminist art movement my work attempts to further the unraveling of antiquated thinking around women in art and society. The viewer experiences and remembers synchronously the traditions of painting combined with a contemporary approach layering symbolism and the abstracted figure. I offer a visual entrance to an expanded view of the black female experience and the raw realities faced by marginalized people.

My studio practice is unequivocally tied to my community work in the Oregon art ecology. I am compelled to reflect on the morale and temperature of working artists, aging artists, and artists searching for their footing on moving ground.

After exploring a myriad of materials and processes during my art education I settled into painting with oil and encaustic as my primary mediums. I found painting to provide the most effective medium in both materiality and historical context. I occasionally work with ink, pastels, and monotype printmaking as a way to create in a more immediate loose fashion. My process of creating smaller works on paper allows for the continued growth of the visual language I use in my larger works.

My art practice has evolved over the past ten years to be less about individual identity and more reflexive of cultural and societal understanding of inflicted identity versus projected identity. Over time I have grown to be more aware of the connectedness of the individual, the family, the community, the region, and the country, with a global lens. I’m interested in taking a forward-thinking approach to my artistic legacy. I feel a responsibility to take control of my narrative. I’m interested in pushing back against what the Western art canon tells us black women’s art is, or should be.

Email: tjwilson (at) artinoregon.org