Erica Thomas, MFA
she, Visiting Assistant Professor
About
MFA, Contemporary Art & Social Practice, Portland State University, 2014
BA, Media Arts & Studies, University of Kentucky, 2005
Research and Practice Areas: grassroots left political and social movements; labor, value, economies and solidarity; place-based, responsive, participatory, collaborative; ethnographies and storytelling; useful art, organizing, and protest; the natural world, resources, and extraction; colonialism, imperialism and power; political communication and propaganda; capitalism; Marxism.
Modes: social practice, installation, printmaking, artist books & publications, film and images, sound, documentary, sculpture, drawing and mixed media, interventions in public space.
Movements: socially engaged art, new genre public art, relational aesthetics, social practice, conceptual art.
Erica Meryl Thomas is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, educator, and organizer whose projects occupy the space in-between the sometimes rigid lines that define other disciplines. She often works as an embedded artist making work collaboratively with other people to uncover layers of history in relation to the personal. The resulting projects take the form of installations, storytelling or documentary, interventions in public space, conversations, publications, and other experiential forms. Her early work was as a producer of film and radio documentary, and narrative interviews, and this interest remains an undercurrent in her art and organizing practices to this day. In her studio practice she is a printmaker, pigment forager, and book-maker, often finding ways to fold words into the work.
Her work as a rank-and-file labor organizer remains deeply intertwined with teaching and art-making, each informing the other. Erica is a member of UFWW (faculty at Western Washington University), a member and the Chair of Political Action for Portland State University Faculty Association PSUFA-AFT local 3571, and an At-Large member of the Steering Committee for the Portland chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Recent projects include curation of an exhibition for the World Forestry Center in Portland, OR, Obscurity: life inside the smoke, which included new work by six Northwest artists which examined what we know and what we think we know about wildfire smoke, and how it makes us feel. Works in the exhibition related our relationship with smoke and fire, how that might look in the future, and how we might respond collectively to the presence of smoke in our lives and the fires that put it there. Exhibition Sept–Dec 2023. Her own contribution to the exhibition was an installation created of extensive research into the experience of incarcerated wildland firefighters who do forestry for the state of Oregon. Using interviews where they described their complex feelings about the labor and redemptive feeling of doing the work. Images of workers were provided by former firefighters, and images of burn sites were taken by the artist during visits to those sites. Ink for the prints, both large format and correspondence cards, was handmade by the artist from charcoal gathered at wildfire burn sites from 2020-2023 in Oregon, northern California, and southern Washington. Collection sites are depicted in the landscape prints, at locations where these same incarcerated firefighters have worked. Exhibition visitors were asked to write a message to one of the incarcerated wildland firefighters, and these were delivered and installed as a mirrored miniature exhibit in the South Fork Prison Camp for a month long exhibition in the prison's cafeteria. At the conclusion of the exhibition inmates were offered the prints and corresponding handwritten messages to keep. Her ongoing research on wildland fire has resulted in a residency in 2024 with the Confluence Lab out of the University of Idaho, to be certified as a wildland firefighter, and learn prescribed burning practices.
Other exhibitions include Nobody Wants to Work Anymore, an exhibition about labor and value, how we spend our time, and an imagined future free from forced work. The exhibition was inspired the collaboration of the artist and labor organizers, together doing the work of building collective solidarity.
Erica has participated in artists residencies at Confluence Lab for Art & Ecology (University of Idaho/Ecostudies 2024), PLAYA (Summer Lake, OR - 2020, 2021), Nafasi Art Space (Dar es Salaam, TZ - 2022), Casa Tres Patios (Medellín, Colombia - 2019), and others.