Featured Gallery Artists

Ara Manoogian (they/them/any) is a queer, trans designer and textile artist of Western Armenian and Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. As an artist in diaspora, their practice of cultural and ancestral (re)connection inspires them to create work that highlights how we find everyday moments of connection across emotional and physical distance. Where they’re from, fire season is year-round, their dad makes them a bowl of fruit every night, and fighting over the check is a form of love. They are fortunate to have shared their embroidery and Ժանյակ (Armenian needlelace) work at the SWANA Rose Culture and Community Center in so-called Portland, Oregon, most recently as one of five artists in residence for the Through the Looking Glass artist in residence program. In addition to their textile work, they’ve designed scenery for live performance with Hand2Mouth Theatre and Fuse Theatre Ensemble; they are also fortunate to have graduated from the inaugural PATHWAYS program, a professional development program for BIPOC-identifying emerging artists through Artists Repertory Theatre. You can find them stitching, eavesdropping, admiring the moon, and trying to pet every cat they see. You can find their work at aramanoogian.com and @wishing.janyak on Instagram.

Sarah Farahat is a transdisciplinary Egyptian American* artist, abolitionist, healer and aunti dreaming of a more collective future for all beings. She holds a B.A. in Psychology from Occidental College, a B.F.A. in Intermedia Arts from PNCA and an M.F.A. from California College of the Arts.  She was a cofounder of the SWANA Rose Culture and Community Center and is a member of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative. She currently teaches Art and Ecology and Art in Community at Pacific Northwest College of Art. For the past eighteen years Farahat has explored the embodied relationships to the socio-political landscape in the US and abroad-intervening with works exploring grief, connection, assimilation, storytelling and engagement. Supporting grassroots movements for justice and liberation informs her work. She finds joy in reading speculative fiction, talking with plants, cooking, and dj-ing. As a nomadic child of diaspora, Farahat plants portals through taste, smell, and sound while continually attempting to live in reciprocity with the land wherever she creates home. 

Her work lives in protests, archives, non-profit, public, digital spaces and is in the permanent collections of the City of Portland, the Justseeds Collective, the Arab American Museum & Library, the Charles Voorhies Fine Art Library, The Palestine Poster Project and The Center for the Study of Political Graphics.  

Her work has been featured in publications including Art Forum, The Oregonian, L’Orient Le Jour, KBOO Radio, The Daily Star and forthcoming in DIVAZ magazine.

*she grapples with an appropriate way to name her location amidst the ongoing legacies of harm to land and people by colonialist projects