Artist Statement:
When I set out to write about memory, what came to me were vast spans of forgetting, broken up at irregular intervals by starkly recalled moments, like occasional lanterns along a dark passage. Early trauma has erased much of my individual memory. Collectively, my family’s memory is patchy, too. Like many descendants of diaspora, we have lost things to movement, displacement, violence, and time. I have often felt like an amnesiac, and have struggled to engage artistically with both my Jewish and Puerto Rican identities because I know so little about the individuals I came from, their decisions, their struggles, joys, stories, and traditions. The Little Books of Memory & Forgetting attempt to center forgetting as the story itself, or an essential part of it. This series of short essays explores forgetting as its own landscape worthy of discussion, while celebrating what memory has endured, warped or otherwise. I offer them to other diasporic people, and all amnesiacs - anyone who has been shaped by loss..

Artist Bio:
Rachel Attias is a writer, educator, and editor based in Portland, OR. Her writing has appeared in n+1, Porter House Review, X-R-A-Y and more, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the Best Small Fictions anthology. She holds an MFA from Oregon State University, and teaches writing at Portland Community College and around the Pacific Northwest. She is at work on her first novel. 

Artist Statement:
In the last two years, an inordinate number of things broke. Things shattered: utilitarian objects and heirlooms that slipped from hands and shelves; words and their meanings; hearts; relationships; systems; and institutional beliefs.  

My poems, prose, and mixed media are the re-collection of pieces, gathered from dispersed corners of the earth and memory. Concepts and items are relocated and joined. Nothing is the same. Some things are stronger than before, and some are still finding their way back.

This collection is offered in prayer for healing for the millions of unjustly separated families: indigenous families, immigrant and refugee families, and those fractured by the domestic legal system. Many children and parents have died without justice; many have been seeking it for decades. May we cease the epidemic of “othering,” and may all be healed and find wholeness.

"In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible."
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

Artist Bio:
Rachael Baskind is a writer, educator, mother, counselor, and social justice advocate based in Portland, Oregon. Her poetry, prose, and mixed media explore memory, identity, healing, and faith. As a ritualist, she investigates the ways embodied writing can restore connection across personal and collective experience. Rachael earned her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Artist Statement:
I don’t experience memory in a typical way. My past doesn’t return to me as something vivid or lived, rather as a set of facts as though reading someone else’s journal. These images are about coming to terms with the black hole where my memory should be. They explore what it means for me to document my life when the documentation doesn’t trigger any memory. Over many years of attempting to capture the magic and joy of my family’s life, to preserve what will inevitably be lost,  I now pause to notice, to experience the beauty and life  in the here and now, accepting those moments as good enough. Maybe more than good enough; an active letting go of the need to remember. 

Artist Bio:
Zalmy Berkowitz is a documentary photographer, focusing on the heartbreakingly magical, beautifully chaotic, and painfully fleeting, world of childhood. He lives in Portland with his wife, seven-ish unschooled kids, and one ghost.

Artist Statement:
L’dor V’dor (from generation to generation) explores memory, adornment, and why we hold on to what we hold on to. This patchwork quilt is composed of garments belonging to Carol Ann Lee, my 93-year-old maternal grandmother and last living grandparent. For over two decades, she has pinned meticulous notes to her clothing documenting when and where each item was worn. Even ordinary everyday garments carried her notes, treated with the same care as special occasion pieces-an insistence on remembering that I’ve always found both compulsive and glamorous. When she decided to donate these clothes, I asked to keep them instead. I was drawn to quilting as a way of gathering these pieces into a single object  in order to preserve not only the garments themselves, but her way of remembering.

Artist Bio:
Brenda Bingham is photographer, archivist, project coordinator, book designer, and fiber artist. Originally from New Jersey, she is currently working for artists and arts nonprofits in Portland,OR. Brenda works in embroidery, beading, and with natural materials to create amulets and adornment for body and home.

Artist Statement:
I submit to you fragments of letters. These are love letters my Grandmother received from my Grandfather.  This history, memories which were never shared, are such a fascinating insight into this chapter of their story. They grew up on the same street in Nuremberg, shared a birthday, were childhood playmates, and were later separated in 1933 when thirteen year old Hans (John) was sent to America.  They reunited eight years later in New York, fell in love and began a very complicated marriage which had an ugly ending.  Though they didn’t speak for 50 years, my Grandmother saved these letters through two more marriages –artifacts from my family, saved with love, hidden away, sometimes cruel, often accompanying expectations, judgments, hopes –collected, reimagined and arranged.

Artist Bio:
Stashia Cabral is a visual and performance artist from Portland, Oregon. She works in movement and traditional media such as sculpture, and painting, and has a passion for ready made and assemblages.  Archival artworks, mined from her family’s archives and alternative photography processes, are constant interests of hers.  Stashia’s performance pieces range from traditional belly dance, to butoh and burlesque and feature beautifully handmade costumes and props.  Quirks and oddities are her happy place.  Stashia has shown work at galleries and cafes locally, and has performed at cafes, theaters, and big stages, including the Northwest World Reggae Festival.

Stashia received her MFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art.

Artist Statement:
I write essays that document and explore Jewish family and cultural life through narratives and observations about people I love.  Aging parents and grandparents. Emptying nests. Vanishing memories—these are my central concerns, all set against the backdrop of Jews in the Diaspora, particularly those connected to Israel, in a post-October 7th world. 

Artist Bio:
Andrew Cohen is a Portland-based writer and teacher. His essays have appeared as part of the Jewish Book Council’s Witnessing series, and in journals such as Alaska Quarterly Review,Judith, Zyzzyva, ofthebook, Gettysburg Review, Boulevard, Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Missouri Review, where he received the Editor’s Prize. For the past twenty-three years Andrew has taught writing, literature and humanities at Portland Community College, where he founded and still chairs the PCC Humanities and Arts Initiative to enhance opportunities for students to engage with the humanities and arts both inside and outside the classroom, on campus and beyond. 

Artist Statement:
May Day, Mayday, Mayday is a constellation of projects centered on grief, surrender, and the labor of carrying on. In the nine months between September 2024 and May 2025 I lost three members of my family: my father, Kenric William Hammond (1947-2024), my grandmother, Sidonia Singer (1921-2024), and my nephew, Frederic Han-Eum Hammond (2009-2025). Over the last year, I’ve sat with the relentless, compounding grief of these multi-generational losses. I remember, and I am unable to forget. These projects – a walk and its documentation, an installation that invites release, and a series of gatherings to share the names and stories of people we have lost – are tied together with the multiple meanings of avodah: labor, service, and prayer. Grief is work, and it takes work. It is of this world, and far beyond it. It is deeply personal, and deeply communal. 

No matter how much you water the grass, it will not grow.

Artist Bio:
Julie Hammond is an artist working across theatre, installation, and public practice. Recent work includes the 9 hour performance Hindsight 2020 (presented by Risk/Reward), a sign-based community history of Peninsula Park, and soundwalks created for Third Angle New Music and New Works Calgary. Her practice is driven by questions, deep research, and collaboration, and aims to shift how audiences/viewers/participants consider place and time. She holds an MFA from Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, BC).

Artist Statement:
Susan is a physical response to the tension between wanting to share the memory of a loved one who is no longer here and the untranslatable nature of memory itself. Grief drives us toward the impossible task of preserving every detail of someone’s life, even though so much of it can never be fully passed on or properly translated. What I can offer instead is the feeling of a loved one’s presence rather than the precise facts of their life.

This piece invites you to be held by the memory of the person I love and to experience that in communion with those you love. How you feel while lying there with your friends might echo the comfort my mom gave me in life. In that exchange, her memory is no longer mine alone; you become a carrier of it in a way that’s uniquely yours.

This work developed from a recording of my mom, Susan’s, last words. I played the audio through a Chladni plate, capturing the unique pattern formed by her voice. I then transformed that pattern into a three-dimensional drawing and expanded a section of it to human scale. The final piece is a six-foot by six-foot upholstered sound wave—an object meant for sitting, talking, and being held.

Artist Bio:
Stephen Lorber is an interdisciplinary artist whose current practice centers on creating tactile, handcrafted objects that reflect broader themes drawn from his life. Working entirely from scratch, he bends, welds, grinds, sews, and wires each piece by hand. His roots in activist art inform a continual inquiry into how the spaces we inhabit and the objects we live with shape—and are shaped by—our values and attention.

Artist Statement:
In the 19th century Pale of Settlement, what a klezmer band played at a wedding depended upon how much they were paid. For wealthy, important, community leaders, the kapelmiester (band leader) would fill the evening with virtuosic improvisations and original compositions. The processional and dance numbers would be performed by his top musicians. The music would, generally, be upbeat and include popular non-jewish songs of the day.

 However, for the poor person unable to pay the band, the kapelmeister would send out a fid’l pakl tukhas kapalye (violin, drum, butt band). Their music would be more old fashioned, and depressing, and performed by apprentice level musicians. Further, each individual dance number would have to be paid for by the wedding guests. Thus every tune would end with the same three emphatic notes (octave! fith! root!) or as the klezmorim called it in their own dialect yold, gilb, gelt! (pay up chump!).

The album I produced during my time in  Art/Lab is fidl paykl tokhes music. It’s music that did not flourish in America, it's a side of the Klezmer repertoire that very few people have heard. 

Artist Bio:
David Rosman is a multi-instrumentalist and recording artist from metro Detroit, Michigan. He has worked in a wide range of musical genres from classical and jazz to electronic and metal, to traditional Jewish folk music. In addition to teaching, he performs with a klezmer ensemble and composes music for film and advertising. David holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Oregon where he studied music ethnography and music technology. He currently lives and works in Portland, Oregon.