Intisar Abioto

Community Clarion: Intisar Abioto Wants Her People To Fly

Written by Amber Flame; Photographed by Katy Weaver

It seems inevitable that Intisar Abioto would pursue an artistic career. Creative practice is simply a fact of life in Abioto’s family: between her parents and four sisters, the multi-hyphenates include filmmaker, poet, drummer, writer, herbalist, ecological thinker, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, dancer, theater actor, illustrator, visual artist, orator, food creator, assemblage artist, and arts educator. When I ask how her family feels about her career choices, she shrugs, casually. “Everyone’s an artist, so they have their own practices…and sometimes we work on things together.”

Intisar herself holds sway in the realms of dancing/movement art, large public art exhibits and installations, photography, curation, public speaking, and creative community building. The way she speaks about family and community snaps people into focus as if they populate the room with us. We are with her on the streets of Portland, and through her eyes we see the rare Black person, and approach, hungry to document their existence, to collect into community. (See The Black Portlanders, an installation of light-filled portraits from her street photography project.) The primary lens that guides and informs Intisar Abioto in art, in facilitation, in engagement, is always Black people.

As a Black transplant to the Pacific Northwest, I believed at first that I was drawn to Abioto’s work because it felt so firmly rooted in Portland, Oregon. How, I wondered, did this Black artist find so many Black people in OREGON?! It reminded me of going to a Jill Scott concert in Seattle—I wanted to follow all of them home and see where they disappeared to! Maybe it was Portland!

In Black Legend, Black, Oregon, Intisar’s “exploratory photo endeavor,” we see “the lore and living legend of Black presence in Oregon” —artists, elders, poets, historians, and more. The portraits, displayed on the walls of the Oregon State Capitol’s Office of the Governor and activated with live performances of community movement and music, rang like proof of life for me—and I felt a jealous aching for this experience: a brilliant Black creative ensconced in legacy, ancestry, and a vibrant community of artists to sharpen and grow with. Collaboration is too bland a word for what Abioto accomplishes—she is writing into the canon of our existence, of the very realness of those of African descent, here, now. And Portland wasn’t the secret to this mission—she’s not even from Oregon.

Intisar Abioto was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and seems to have emerged from the womb with a body of works-in-progress. Her father was a member of The Nubian Theater, a collective of dancers, drummers, writers, and performers, and so her childhood was steeped in a multiplicity of art forms. “First, I remember dance. Then I started teaching myself photography when I was around fourteen.”

The city, as a creative hub rich in Black culture, was more than home—it was an education in possibility that fed Intisar’s artistic imagination. “Growing up in Memphis, there was a lot of art all around so I could see what it was like, being a Black artist.” That exposure, seeing herself reflected in the art world, shaped her conception of the role of artist: “When I think about being a Black artist, I think of Black liberation, Black community.”

After Intisar studied dance in college, the Abioto family decided to move out of the South. When a small (“Really small—tiny. But it freaked my mom out.”) earthquake crossed California off the list, they settled in Portland and opened a vegan and raw food restaurant together. “I was still planning to do my art, but I wanted to build something with my family.”

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During this time, she returned to that passion for photography, seeking out Black faces and finding pockets of Black community for what would become the common thread in her large public exhibits: An Altar to Alter: A transcendent experience in Black Feminine Art and Healing with Portland In Color; Sugar Lee; The Black Portlanders; and Black Legend, Black, Oregon.

It was a family collaboration that launched it all, one centered around the myth collected in Virginia Hamilton’s The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales—

They say the people could fly. That long ago in Africa some of the people knew magic.

Beginning in 2007, the Abioto sisters traveled across the US, to Morocco, Djibouti, and Jamaica for The People Could Fly Project, asking Black folk about their dreams, seeking the real stories of the flying Africans, the diaspora. “A folktale, a myth, is kind of a dream passed forward,” Intisar says.

In an effort to get their bearings as young people in a new community with a dramatically different racial makeup than the world they were part of in Memphis, the Abiotos began to ask what it was like to be Black in Portland. “It comes back to the story of The People Could Fly—it’s about Black beingness, wherever we are. Our dreams matter. Who we are matters. We can change our stories…. Wherever we go there’s always going to be an infinite place for us to receive restoration.” This place, this sense of belonging and being valued, feels inextricably founded on the “we” Abioto speaks of, the we of family—blood and chosen—not a place so much as a common heartbeat.

And so, for the last decade-plus, the Abioto family has built, crafted, nurtured, grown, sculpted, sang to life a place in a vibrant Black community in Portland, Oregon. As her work grows in scale and collaboration within an ever-growing collective of fellow artists and students, Intisar finds herself curating and facilitating more and more. This time finds her most pulled to support those very community members as they seek to reconnect, particularly after the long quarantine and through the loss of elders and family members. With her newest multimedia installation projects, Black Domain and BLACK RAINBOWS WHEN, she continues in her insistence that we exist, we are living and thriving.

“The stories of Black people are important, and they need stewarding and protection,” Intisar says. But the work of shepherding the stories of her people is a weight that she feels deeply as her career grows. “As the influence of the stories you tell in the world gets bigger, the responsibility to community gets bigger.”

When I ask Intisar Abioto about joy, and how she feeds it for herself, there is some weary wistfulness in her response. She needs to redefine her joy, she says, because “the work of bringing forth these unique stories of flight and freedom is hard labor.” We’re still in America; it’s still Oregon. Abioto’s joy sparks brightest in the creative space, in a circle of fellow artists, and she hopes she’s expanding the circle, and not holding this work as a solo storyteller. She is seeking out fellow stewards of play and exploration and improvisation; she dreams of Black-owned and -curated spaces for our stories to be honored, shared, and held sacred. “Make the thing,” Intisar says, “and then watch it have a life of its own through community stewardship.”

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Community Clarion: Intisar Abioto Wants Her People To Fly

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