home school
2022-2023
Oregon Contemporary has selected collaborative curatorial duo home school (manuel arturo abreu and Victoria Anne Reis) of Portland, Oregon, to be our next Curators in Residence for the 2022—23 season. For its seventh year of curriculum, the home school season will seek to answer the questions: How can art communities behave in sacred duty to one another and to the world at large? In what ways can and should art spaces become spaces of sacred community? In what sense is the concept “art” itself, having originated from European Christian theology, spiritually bereft or repressing some deep mystery? This curatorial effort would in turn be informed by a commitment to shared embodied experience after five years of distance learning-oriented curriculum, reflection on mortality, and community responsibility.
home school is currently exploring the possibility of incorporating as a church or 501c3, and our residency would reflect this exploration. We believe that this type of space, whether as a pop-up (church as congregation) or physical location, is more suited than ‘school’ to characterize the contemplative and critical care which is home school’s deep focus.
—manuel arturo abreu and Victoria Anne Reis
Founded in 2015, home school provides welcoming contexts for critical engagement with contemporary art through a genre-nonconforming edutainment curriculum of artist talks, exhibitions, monthly classes, poetry readings, publications, and more. Their pedagogy honors the casual rigor of the etymology of “school,” from the Greek ‘shkole,’ meaning “spare time, leisure, idleness, rest.” They seek to combat the marketizing of aesthetic education in favor of slow learning, critical care, and a focus on diversity of thought. Working with primarily BIPOC artists, home school avoid tokenistic or identity-based curation, focusing instead on what it means to weave together different voices for engaging larger narratives around aesthetics, the body, criticality, placemaking, the imagination, et al.
Oregon Contemporary’s Curator in Residence program is the first of its kind in the region. Through the Curator in Residence program, audiences are inspired by viewing local, national, and international work in their region and the arts community establishes new connections throughout the world. Curators host a series of exhibitions onsite with supplemental public programming. From its debut in 2011, the program has advanced the work of 10 curators and over 195 artists. Oregon Contemporary offers a flexible model through this program that reaches beyond a singular curatorial voice, while still promoting perspectives historically underrepresented in the arts, and engaging these populations to impact and intervene in the contemporary arts dialogue.
manuel arturo abreu (b. 1991, Santo Domingo) is a non-disciplinary artist working with what is at hand in a process of magical thinking, with attention to ritual aspects of aesthetics. They have lived and worked in Portland, OR since 2009. With Victoria Anne Reis, they co-founded and co-run home school, a free pop-up art school in Portland in its sixth year of genre-nonconforming edutainment curriculum.
Victoria Anne Reis (b. 1982, East Meadow, NY) is trying to be a good mom and a good person. She lives with her parents and daughter, and works on a tree farm, in Boring, OR, and is currently microobsessed with the haptic poetics of friendship.