‘Black Friday’ Screening Honors Black Portlanders, Encourages Sense of Belonging

For those seeking an antidote of sorts to a bruising presidential election, Black Friday offers the Black community a chance to feel at home in a city that has often pushed them out. 

Now in its second year, the Black Friday event returns to the Hollywood Theatre this week, premiering two short films that celebrate pillars of the community: "Dear Young Black Portland," which writer Donovan Scribes penned in honor of former Portland NAACP president Sharon Gary-Smith, and the second episode of the "Where We Goin'" series, which explores the interdisciplinary work of artist and activist Intisar Abioto, who recently curated the Black Artists of Oregon exhibit at the Portland Art Museum. 

Letters Of Love

Donovan ScribesLast year, Scribes and filmmaker Devin Boss collaborated with Portland icon Paul Knauls Sr. to create a love letter to Knauls’ late wife, Geneva – a celebration of both Black love and Black-owned businesses. Scribes’ approach has been to work with the subjects of his documentaries to better learn their stories, then use his own talents as a writer to distill some of that wisdom into narrative letters that are true to their voices and experiences. 

Scribes said he chose to focus on Gary-Smith for this year’s Elder Anthologies series in part because he considers her a mentor. 

“I had known Miss Sharon for some time, but I got to know her more deeply around the time that we were trying to take back the Portland NAACP,” Scribes told The Skanner. “In the arc of that whole process, I really came to respect her even more than I had before because I saw her leadership in a different light, where she was reaching across generations and really making space for all the different opinions in the room, and standing firm in her own capacity with what she had to say. Miss Sharon is not shy about her opinions.”

Scribes recalled a Zoom meeting in 2020 where he wondered aloud if the local chapter of his NAACP could be saved, or if a more drastic dismantling was in order. At the time, the chapter had just been rocked by the resignation of its president E.D. Mondainé amid abuse allegations. 

“That was something that made (Gary-Smith) reach into me more deeply,” Scribes said, “and she asked me questions that actually show up in the letter that I wrote from her perspective (for the film). She asked me why, she asked me what else I was willing to burn in the place of the ashes, and in the process of writing this letter in her perspective, what I learned is that she had other people who had asked her those same type of questions when she was feeling frustrated with some of the status quo and making noise about it.

Scribes praised Boss for the way he made the letter come to life on film. 

“I’m proud of the visuals Devin was able to put together alongside it,” Scribes said. “When you watch the series, he put in a lot of intention to not make this just be some regular b-roll.”

“Ultimately I spoke with Donovan enough about what he had written, I had read it enough times to gain an understanding of how it made me feel and how I wanted to transmute those feelings visually,” Boss told The Skanner. “So I kind of just went into the work of shot-listing the scenes as I felt they needed to sit…Some of them are simple scenes, some of them are me just going into the city and filming a particular thing at a particular time of day that I think coincides with the moment or an idea or a feeling, trying to showcase her life in a way that felt fresh and immersive and heartfelt. I really kind of let my emotions guide me on this one. I think Donovan’s work really spoke for itself, just allowing the emotions that radiated from that to inspire me in the filming process.”

Boss and Scribes worked with Scribes’ partner, co-producer Zoe Piliafas, to shape this year’s Black Friday and set up the logistics of filming and screening. 

"Where We Goin'"

The second episode of the “Where We Goin’” series focuses on Abioto, an artist who has become a venerable local historian, re-energizing historically Black spaces throughout Portland and highlighting myriad Black Oregonian artists.  

Intisar Abioto
Two years ago, Abioto launched an impressive if ultimately unsuccessful campaign to purchase the Beatrice Morrow Cannady house in Grant Park to be converted to an artists’ retreat and historic space that would keep Cannady’s legacy prominent – as Abioto put it, “a home in the Black arts tradition” rather than a simple museum. Cannady was an influential community organizer, civil rights activist and founding member of the Portland NAACP; the editor and owner of Portland’s first Black-owned newspaper, The Advocate; and the first Black woman to graduate from law school in the state of Oregon when she received her degree from Northwestern College of Law in 1922. Her legislative work ultimately led to the overturning of racist laws that disenfranchised African Americans in Oregon.

Devin Boss
“I think the overarching theme of the episode is home and belonging,” Boss said, “and that theme was kind of about how Intisar was using one of her powers, which is her ability to bring together artists, and her artistic eye and prowess, and her communal spirit, to create place and belonging through art. That curation really was a form of place-making, much in the same way a lot of the work and efforts of Beatrice Morrow Cannady before her were about place-making, in the same way that the work that (Albina Vision Trust) is doing right now, seeding a place in the city, it’s about place-making – just finding those throughlines just speak to a story as old as time, as far as Black people go, Black Portlanders go, Black Americans go. It’s a story about anchoring in place and viewing a space with love and life, and figuring out what belonging looks like.”

The second film highlights the groundbreaking work of Albina Vision Trust to restore Black neighborhoods that were decimated by gentrification and the city’s poor policy decisions. 

Scribes marveled at the sense of connectivity that emerges from this year’s Black Friday lineup: Like Abioto, the artist who fought to save Cannady’s Portland home for historic preservation, Cannady curated an exhibit at the Portland Art Museum, albeit a century ago.

“(Cannady) is a cofounder of the Portland NAACP and here we are, in “Dear Young Black Portland,” honoring Miss Sharon, who was an NAACP Portland president. (Photographer and documentarian) Richard Brown, who’s receiving our Black Rose Laureate Award, appears in ‘Where We Goin’.’ That wasn’t done with any specific intentionality, but it does show how interwoven we are. It just shows what our community it is.

“There is the community here. Even if it’s not one static place, we are a community and we are communally woven by what is happening now, and then we have histories here too that have helped get us here, so I feel like that name that Devin had chose for this series is so appropriate: Where are we going? The stories we have now do shape our reality. So being able to (share) that does shape literally where we’re headed as a community.”

For more information on the event, and to buy tickets, visit https://hollywoodtheatre.org/show/black-friday.