"The goal of this exhibition is to examine the concept of cultural inheritance and through the lenses of the artworks and the artists who made them, to come to a richer and more complex understanding of how culture is transmitted, embodied, and wielded. At a moment in American society when identity politics are wreaking havoc on democratic process, these artists offer nuanced and empowering ways of engaging with their own cultural inheritance to address pressing issues of our time."

Hannah Barco, Curator

Choosing to Portage brings together five artists who operate with deep reverence for the embodied knowledge that is passed down through skilled making processes and culturally specific materials. From distinctly different cultural backgrounds, these five artists’ work manifest quite diversely in the gallery: from illustrations that represent family to live task-based performance, from photography of ephemeral monuments to material translations of pre-existing objects, to poetic documentation and sculptural records of socially engaged projects, and more. This exhibition highlights how these artists leverage making processes and materials specific to their own lives and cultural heritage to create complex and vital inquiries into the urgent topics of our time. The resulting artworks do not look inward at the identity of the artist, but rather investigate such issues as the absurdities of white masculinity, the erasure of indigenous cultures, police killings of Black men, the visibility of Iraqi culture in the US, the ravages of war, and the loneliness of grieving.

This exhibition uses the metaphor of the portage to emphasize cultural heritage as an active process. When traveling by boat, one may choose to portage—to carry one’s boat—to avoid an obstacle or to transfer from one body of water to the next. Just as a traveler must approach a portage, these artists produce their artwork with strategic decision-making, self-awareness of their skill (or lack thereof), and a commitment to the labor. It is a complex logistical and choreographic task to carry one’s boat and belongings over the land. These artists wield agency as they navigate the turbulent waters of contemporary identity. In doing so they forge paths for us to embrace the complexity of cultural heritage and embody our collective inheritance as simultaneously burden, responsibility, and empowerment.

Exhibition Catalogue with Checklist

Noelle Garcia

Noelle Garcia is a Chicagoland area artist and educator who focuses on themes of identity, family history, and recovered narratives. She is an indigenous artist from the Klamath and Paiute tribes and sees her painting practice as an embodiment of her native worldview. She also employs traditional beading techniques to create soft sculptures of everyday objects and mythologized artifacts from the story of her incarcerated father, through whose lineage she is now an active member of her tribes.

Garcia holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2007) and an MFA from the University of Nevada Las Vegas (2012). Her work has been exhibited across the US, earning awards and fellowships from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, the Nevada Arts Council, the Illinois Arts Council, and the American Indian Graduate Center, among others.

Ashley M. Freeby

Ashley M. Freeby is a multidisciplinary artist with roots in rural Pennsylvania. Freeby anchors her labor-intensive art and archive practice in her passion for truth telling and challenges her audiences to consider how injustices against people of color throughout history inform our understanding of American society today.

Freeby holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2018) and a BA from Bucknell University (2015). Recent solo projects at Kanzlei, Berlin, and at Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago Artist Coalition, and The Annex @ Spudnik Press, in Chicago and group exhibitions throughout the US and Canada. She was a Halcyon Arts Lab Fellow in DC in 2020 and awarded artist residencies and awards from Chicago Artist Coalition (recipient of the Spark grant), Vermont Studio Center (recipient of the Artist Opportunity Fellowship), and the Institut für Alles Mögliche (Berlin).

Jeff Huckleberry

Jeff Huckleberry, based in Boston, MA, has been performing art for the last 20 years, both nationally and internationally. He enjoys the bicycle, the hammer, the saw, the wood, his wife and son, his family, his friends, his work. (...except sometimes he doesn’t enjoy these things as much; it depends.) He is the son and grandson of far more practical people, which he tries to express in his art. His mother often thought he should stop getting naked in front of people and privately he thinks she is probably right; and something about death.

Huckleberry received his BFA (1999) and MFA (2004) from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Active for 30 years, he has performed internationally (France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Scotland, China, and Canada) and in the US (Boston, NYC, Chicago and LA). In 2016, he was a featured performer at Venice International Performance Art Week. He is a member of Mobius Performance Art Group and the co-founder of the peer-reviewed journal on performance art, TotalArtJournal.

Jackie Milad

Jackie Milad is a Baltimore City-based artist whose mixed-media abstract paintings and collages address the history and complexities of dispersed cultural heritage and multi-ethnic identity. She has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally.

Select exhibitions include Harvey B. Gantt Center (Charlotte, NC), Loyola University Maryland (Baltimore, MD), The Walters Art Museum (Baltimore, MD), The Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore, MD), Academy Art Museum (Easton, MD), Weatherspoon Art Museum (Charlotte, NC), The Mint Museum (Charlotte, NC), Arthur Ross Gallery University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA), Luis De Jesus Gallery (Los Angeles, A), Museo de Arte de Mazatlan (Mazatlan, MX). Milad is a multi-year recipient of the Individual Artist Grant from Maryland State Arts Council.

In 2019 she was named a Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize Finalist and a Robert W. Deutsch Foundation Ruby Grantee. In 2022 Milad received the Municipal Art Society of Baltimore City Travel Prize to conduct in-depth research on the Egyptian antiquities held at the British Museum and Petrie Museums in London. Milad was commissioned by the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2022 to create an installation of new work in response to Fred Wilson’s Artemis/Bast (1992).

Milad received her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, MA, and her MFA from Towson University, MD.

Michael Rakowitz

Michael Rakowitz is a Chicago-based Iraqi American artist working at the intersection of problem- solving and troublemaking. Rakowitz actively provokes public discourse and participation as a key ingredient of his public projects, installations, and events.

Rakowitz has exhibited internationally, including dOCUMENTA (13), P.S.1, MoMA, MassMOCA, and other recognized biennials. He’s presented solo projects with Creative Time, Tate Modern, The Wellin Museum of Art, MCA Chicago, SITE Santa Fe, Malmö Konsthall, Tensta Konsthall, and Waterfronts - England’s Creative Coast. He is represented and exhibited by Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; Jane Lombard Gallery, NYC; Barbara Wien Galerie, Berlin; Pi Artworks, Istanbul; and Green Art Gallery, Dubai. He is the recipient of the 2020 Nasher Prize, 2018 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, among many other notable awards.