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In 2018, Portland-based artist Lisa Jarrett released the first pieces in her ongoing series Migration Studies, a project examining “hair care and beauty routines within Black culture as a bridge to themes about inventing our own survival.” She’s used hair nets and Kanekalon (a synthetic fiber often used in braids and hair extensions) in sculptures and paintings. She put human hair at the center of beet sugar “lollipop” sculptures—nineteenth-century farmers cultivated sugar beets as an alternative to sugarcane, which relied heavily on the labor of enslaved people.

In her Beauty Supply collection, a subcategory within the larger series, Jarrett took close-up photographs of silk bonnets, using their luxurious sheen and color as a backdrop for hair picks and combs. She presents these items, purchased at beauty supply stores, in individual portraits, to “call together a sense of identity and representation that has nothing to do with an external gaze,” she said in a conversation with the Ford Family Foundation. Jarrett’s focus on beauty products, on hair care materials and curlers and caps and wraps, centers the idea of unifying cultural ritual and self-determination—the ways people within the Black diaspora use beauty routines and hair care as a way of preserving cultural backstory, but also as self-expression in a society that has restricted and erased countless forms of Black identity. “It’s a real connection point and a real point of solidarity within Black culture a lot of times,” Jarrett said in the Ford Family Foundation interview. 

Nightlights, Jarrett’s current show at Russo Lee Gallery (through November 29), is Migration Studies’ latest entrant, and it follows a thread introduced by her Beauty Supply collection. (Tenderhead, Jarrett’s show inaugurating the Portland Art Museum’s new Black Art and Experiences Gallery, follows a similar trajectory.) Jarrett pairs pinwheels of headscarves and synthetic hair with family photographs, weaves portraits with different textures of extensions. In one piece, among squares of pink leopard-print hair scarves, a picture of Lisa with her mother, Miley, and her sister, Rachel, captures the family on an Arkansas farm—“Papa’s Farm,” per the title. We watch them from behind, the three staring into the distance across an expanse of yellowing grass. The image is almost reminiscent of Andrew Wyeth’s 1948 painting Christina’s World, the American artist’s homage to his neighbor, who was paralyzed by polio. Many read Christina’s World as an expression of yearning, an air of tragedy hanging over its morose Americana. But the artist intended to evoke the subject’s perseverance. “The challenge to me was to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless,” Wyeth once said. Jarrett’s photo is also rooted in a sense of resolve, her mother’s shoulders back and bare, fist clenched. In her artist’s bio, Jarrett described her medium not as sculpture, drawing, painting, or photography, but rather questions: “The most urgent of which is: What will set you free?”

More things to do this week

Elsewhere...

• David Byrne is holding onto hope, even if the rest of us can't. (The New Yorker)
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the 1975, Salem-filmed adaptation of Ken Kesey's celebrated novel, premiered 50 years ago this week. (OPB)