Resonance Commissions | Seek What You Want to Find

Commission story

Resonance Ensemble learned in the summer of 2022 that four previously unseen works by Portland-based artist Henk Pander would be on display at Historic Alberta House as part of the 7th Vanport Mosaic Festival. The oil paintings, inspired by Pander’s eyewitness accounts of the downtown protests sparked by viral videos of the state-sanctioned murder of George Floyd, make subjects of the federal courthouse and the justice center – two high profile epicenters of Portland’s racial justice protests in 2020–2021. Upon seeing these buildings-turned-fortresses flanked by armed federal officers in tandem with the increasingly emboldened white nationalist presence around the city, Pander recalled his childhood living in Nazi-occupied Holland at the end of WWII. “This is what fascism looks like,” says Pander. The first of the set, called Stain, features the federal courthouse with a prominent vertical smudge, “a stain on the American justice system.” The paintings, in addition to Pander’s works depicting scenes from the 1948 Vanport flood, really demand our attention, and it was clear that we would need to program the concert to be in dialogue with them.

Along with works by Margaret Bonds, David Lang, and Joel Thompson, video segments from Arresting Power: Resisting Police Violence in Portland, Oregon, and with Pander’s artwork as the frame, we sought to fill out the concert with local perspectives. We commissioned three local poets – Dr. S. Renee Mitchell, A. Mimi Sei, Vin Shambry – to write texts for new choral works by three local composers – Judy A. Rose, Kimberly R. Osberg, Kenji Bunch. We also collaborated with photographer Tojo Andrianarivo who spent several months in 2020 on the ground documenting protests in both Portland and Seattle to select images to project throughout the concert.

About SEEK WHAT YOU WANT TO FIND

Seek What You Want to Find was commissioned by Resonance Ensemble as part of a concert reflecting on protest, militarization, and nationalism. The text, written by Dr. S. Renee Mitchell, responds to a series of paintings by acclaimed artist Henk Pander which were on display at the Historic Alberta House in 2022-2023.

Among the paintings on display, four towering works in the main performance space depicted scenes of the 2020 protests that took place in Portland in response to the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless others. I was living in downtown Portland, just blocks away from where heavily-armored police officers, Proud Boys, and other right-wing and supremacist groups clashed with protesters. The paintings heavily feature buildings and armed police.

Other paintings on display included scenes from the historic 1948 Vanport flood; physically segregated from Portland, Vanport was the second largest city in Oregon at its peak, housing over 40,000 residents— and a majority of Oregon’s Black population (around 6,000). The 23-foot flood displaced nearly 20,000 people, creating tensions as minorities from Vanport looked to settle in Portland proper with very little help and no small amount of hostility from the local government and white citizens of Portland. These paintings focus more heavily on the people impacted, including a gut-wrenching depiction of a father waist-deep in water holding the limp body of their child.

Those familiar with Oregon’s history of segregation, racism, and white supremacy immediately sense the connections between the events depicted. Walking around the gallery, I was increasingly aware of how little had really changed for so many Americans in the last several hundred years. It was easy to see the violence, the dehumanization, the abandonment— such despair.

Dr. S. Renee Mitchell’s poem, however, offers the opportunity for the reader to seek something deeper than what you first see. She doesn’t shy away from the pain or brutality of the scenes depicted (drawn guns and gated barriers…the shouting and angry rush of cold, unforgiving change), but urges us to look closer, to recognize the fearlessness of ordinary human beings. The references to “Wade in the Water” could be taken literally as referring to the flood, but the song’s history as a way for escaping slaves to communicate that they should enter the water to throw off the scent of tracking dogs also places the events we saw in the paintings as part of a much larger story about how Black communities have always found ways to move forward—and using song as a means of not only maintain freedom and community, but to survive. The poem asserts that even in death, in disorder, in a forced passage, hope is always there, and it is up to us to seek it out.

Setting this poem, I wanted to capture the poem’s nuance of finding light without dismissing the horrors of violence, discrimination, and systemic oppression. Throughout the piece, I placed bits of the text in conversation with one another—creating a dialogue with both the hope and the pain the text depicts. While there is a forward push towards hope in the ending sections, the last moment uses a thick and ambiguous chord that draws out different sonorities over a long sustain—stripping away to a final, evasive harmony. What do you see?

program note by Kimberly Osberg

Return to Commissions Gallery

Only in Falling | Poet-in-Residence | The Talk | LISTEN | Safe Harbor
We Hold Your Names Sacred | After Time Has Gnawed | Normal Never Was
Abya Yala | An African American Requiem
We Are Murmurs | Seek What You Want to Find | RE-FLEC | Shout Out
From the Book of Sankofa