Curated by Mack McFarland, “Gathering Autonomy: Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative” was the inaugural exhibition at the new campus for Pacific Northwest College of Art, and the first retrospective exhibition of Justseeds since we formed our cooperative in 2007. The broad-reaching exhibition featured work by all 30 members from all over North America, including rotating selections from our portfolios and a significant collection of ephemera, publications, and documentation of how Justseeds graphics have been used and reused in the past decade.

“Gathering Autonomy” incorporated PNCA’s alumni-run Creative Activism Lab (CAL), which put Justseeds methods into practice locally with groups like the immigration rights group, VOZ. Led by Carmen Denison, Lauren Heagerty, and Danny Mackin, CAL set up a small print studio in the 511 Gallery and ran workshops with students throughout the course of the exhibition.

This exhibition spawned several programs which featured visiting Justseeds members:

“Gathering Thoughts: A Group Conversation”
(Alec “Icky” Dunn, Chip Thomas, Fernando Marti, Jess X. Chen, Josh McPhee, Roger Peet, and Thea Gahr)

“Gathering Resistance: Black Lives Matter – The Artists’ Call”
(Jess X. Chen, Don’t Shoot Portland, Black Creative Collective: Brown Hall, and Arresting Power Filmmakers Julie Perini and Erin Yanke)

“Gathering Thoughts: This is an Emergency!”
(Meredith Stern, Molly Fair, and Jess X. Chen)

“Gathering Thoughts: A People’s Art History”
(Nicolas Lampert)

“Gathering Hands: Cooperative Economics & Radical Economies”
(Shaun Slifer, Bec Young, Mary Tremonte, and Roger Peet)