Artist Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr.

Imagination Academy is an artist project which takes the form of an institution that facilitates events and activities to cultivate and expand young minds. As part of this larger umbrella project I often work with young people to build their culinary skills. For the 2018 Art and Social Practice Assembly Conference in Portland Oregon I conceived of Real Food, Faux Truck, Food Truck (RFFTFT) in an intergenerational collaboration with young artists Riley and Beck Jacobsen. RFFTFT is a pop-up street food experience co-managed by mixed race young people and myself that serves real food out of a masonite food truck facade. At Assembly we served pancakes with an option of bacon and greens to 40 people. Later RFFTFT was re-deployed with Beatrice Red Start Fletcher serving fried tofu and broccoli at the 2018 Art Department Open House. Each iteration of the project posies my youth collaborators as co-owners of the truck. They decide the menu, the prices, and perform quality control. RFFTFT offers youth an opportunity to get some real life experience managing a for profit(ish) business that requires them to make decisions on the fly while interacting with a primarily adult clientele. RFFTFT marries my love of food with a practice where I am learning from the ideas and inspirations shared by youth collaborators and add to that all my skills, abilities, and intentions towards the growth of their imagination and development of their self confidence.

Elijah is a young person with whom I connected with in September 2017 through King School Museum of Contemporary Art (KSMoCA) Mentorship Program at King Elementary School.

Together we explore ideas and activities that are of common interest to us both. Taking turns leading the explorations so that each of us is coming away with new skills and understanding.

Currently we have an exhibition up at KSMoCA of a collaborative project featuring Elijah's drawings in response to prompts, and my interpretation of his drawing of his favorite toy, “Batman Elevator.” 

We also completed a collaborative drawing of a bridge to submit to a juried show at Longview Public Library.

Then we began to explore cooking as a practical skill and artistic medium that can encourage healthy life habits and be shared with others.

And newly we’re working on developing and making a “Power Suit” of Elijah’s design.

2017 - 2019 (Current)

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Imagination Academy is an artist project which takes the form of an institution that facilitates events and activities to cultivate and expand young minds. As part of this larger umbrella project I often work with young people who are children of my close friends. Once my friends began to have children I realized this was an audience who well fit my primary creative interests while holding the dualistic positionality of being born to an existing loved one. I began to realize that these little people represent an audience that will age through an awareness of me and my artist practice allowing for a slowly growing potency of the work’s value.

Johannes Tesfahun is the three-year old son of my highschool friend Rahel. He is a collaborator who has the earnest desire to be an astronaut and pilot a rocket ship into space. Our collaboration began the day we met while visiting Seattle in 2018 with an inquiry about his favorite toy which was a spaceship. Together we are collaborating to design and build a space station attached to a volcano for Johannes board and launch into space riding a handmade rocket. This inaugural mission will be recorded and made into a documentary called Johannes Goes to Space.

So far I’ve created and prepared various inspiring drawings, prints, pins, and post cards and sent them to Johannes so that he can begin to imagine how his adventure through space will go!

Tables for Two is a pop-up event featuring a multi-course meal served to tables set for two. Each iteration of Tables for Two is unique, the first being on February 14th, 2013 held in the lobby of the Alfred University art building. The following three iterations of Tables for Two were hosted in personal homes to varying degrees of complexity.

Tables for Two, Emma and Ray, happened on Valentines Day Belated in 2018 and produced a bit of a revelation in my artist practice involving food. The event occurred in the home of Emma and Ray Colburn, elucidating the rich context of the social realities surrounding the meal. I prepared a four course vegan meal that would leave mom feeling like her family was being nourished in accordance with their dietary needs and desires while simultaneously pleasing the eyes and palette of a 5 year old. While I thought the panache was in the dinosaur shaped pasta and cookie cut tofu, it was really in the holding of space for a mother to truly enjoy an evening with her son unburdened by the labor of preparing dinner. Bath time, a full belly, and a story before bed, oh what a night!

Tables for Two has interestingly served as the precedence to my entire socially engaged practice, with an emphasis on all the work I do using food, and gathering around it, as a medium. Between the four iterations I’ve served communities in 4 states, in public and private spaces, and courses have ranged from surf, turf, and garden grown. The project remains my most frequently reproduced artwork to date, and promises future iterations as time goes on. If you’re looking for something fun to do on Valentines day or for any other time with single, or multiple, table settings for two, book me a flight and you’ve got a personal chef ready, willing, and able!

Belated Birthday is an artist project that happens within the month October sometime after my birthday which is on the 3rd. The precedence for Belated Birthday is informed by the birthdays that I've thrown myself while I was an adult living in the DC Metro area by making the traditional meals of my family heritage and sharing them with friends.The impetus behind this activity is to draw together the people I care about and provide for them. Providing for others is an activity in which I hold in high regard, and my birthday is the perfect time to summon those important to me together for the purposes of relaxation and enjoyment. At this gathering, once we’ve sat down to eat, guests are prompted to share about an instance where they experienced a mixing of cultures in a round robin story share.

The first installment of this ongoing practice too place in October 2017 and involved preparing a subversion of my grandmother’s traditional meatballs and eggplant gravy for the PSU Art and Social Practice cohort at the time. The meal was prepared in the home of and in collaboration with Shoshana Gugenheim Kedem and family. The family keeps a Kosher Kitchen, which required an alteration to the traditional recipes including the omission entirely of dairy, and the requirement that the meat used be Kosher.

In addition to specific guidelines regarding the ingredients, we also had to Kosher the kitchen utensils and cookware. This process involves running boiling water over each instrument and container. Once this process has been done we created a "Meat Kitchen," which allowed for the preparation of the meal.

While cooking the meal I taught Shoshana's children about a tradition of my own called "Stealing a Meatball." Often conducted by a matriarch of the family a process of permitting a young person to have one meatball before dinner while the sauce slowly simmers to perfection. This meatball was their first ever, and later we sang the meatball song that up until Belated Birthday was their only knowledge of meatballs.

The event continued on as guests arrived and the meal was shared with the larger community of the Social Practice program. The intention to bring people together, share a meal, and exchange time and attention together under one roof was satisfied.

Once the meal was done leftover packages were made for members of the community that could not make it to the event. All of the instruments and containers were Koshered once more returning the kitchen to its Kosher state.

During the summer of 2018, I collaborated with Eric John Olsen and the Ethiopian Community in Seattle summer youth program to co-create Between Two Shores. Each week during the summer school program, we worked with the youth to develop interview skills and questions so that they could gather oral histories from community elders. At the end of the summer, we staged a daylong reenactment at Pritchard Island Beach of elders’ childhood stories. Other youth-led activities based on interviews included rock games, team handball, jump rope, an Ethiopian version of duck-duck-goose, swimming, barefoot soccer, and dancing. Members of the Ethiopian Community in Seattle cooked some of the elders’ favorite snacks, like dabo kolo, and we provided other snacks mentioned in the interviews, like organic fruits, candies, and mango juice. Youth illustrated the different snacks and activities uncovered during the oral histories, and Michael and I composed these drawings into large images that we installed in the park to commemorate the stories and re-enactments.

During past interviews with elders on projects address age-segregation in our communities, I learned that intergenerational exchanges are some of the experiences seniors value and miss the most. Between Two Shores responded to this need by using re-enactment as an way to value stories passed between generations, and a way to celebrate the wealth of elders’ lived experiences.

Between Two Shores was made possible with the generous support of Seattle Public Parks, the Office of Arts & Culture, and all the staff and community members at the Ethiopian Community in Seattle.

Imagination Academy is an artist project which takes the form of an institution that facilitates events and activities to cultivate and expand young minds. As part of this larger umbrella project I often work with young people though King School Museum of Contemporary Art (KSMoCA).

Magic school is a artist project I did in collaboration with Shawn Creeden where we taught students in Ms. Ellis’ 3rd Grade class how to make wands, write spells, and cast them. First we led them through the enchanted forest to select a wand, and then to magical chest of treasures full of magical talismans. Then at the synthesis lab we assembled their magical wands by binding the two together. Next we gave them each a spell book in which to write their spells. We talked them through identifying what they would think, say, and do to successfully cast their respective spells of choice. At the end we had each of them cast their spell in front of the group who looked on offering them encouragement along the way!

An artist project done in collaboration with Jane Orr and Torri Lynnn Ashford of Thick Air Studios during the Summer of 2018 at Artscape in Baltimore MD. The project consisted of hired community members helping to facilitate bicycle powered can crushing for festival goers. People would toss collected bottles and cans into the machine to be crushed and recycled.

The inspiration for The Department of Beauty and Maintenance was an ad campaign that preached a "new city game" -- tossing litter into a bin and keeping the streets clean. Back in 1974, when it began, the campaign won awards. People thought it was funny and cute. Neighborhoods even held “Trashball” tournaments. The magic of this project was people of all ages, especially very young people, were having fun cleaning up and being ecologically responsible.

On the last day of the the event we bundled up all the crushed cans and shared them with our number one fan!

BEAM LARP is a workshop I offered at, Beam Camp in Strafford NH in July of 2018 in collaboration with Simon Rabatin. Beam Camp was founded to provide young people with exciting experiences in creative problem-solving through working with their hands and actively collaborating with others.

Live Action Role Playing is when participants physically portray characters of fictional or historical design. In BEAM LARP players pursued goals within a fictional dystopian future that they co-created through sharing concerns they had about the world we live in. The fictional universe is represented by a real world setting and participants interact with each other in character while playing through the fantasy universe augmented with cardboard cutouts of the enemies they were facing.

On the first day participants made character’s and shared their concerns for the world as we know it. In between the first and second day I made game mechanisms for each of the items and abilities they designed, as well as a map for the playable universe. On the second and third days of the workshop each participant played through the storyline in the co-created universe.

The result was an epic final battle against a cybernetic dragon that was controlled by the supercomputer that was originally designed by a corrupt government which then developed sentience and turned on human kind. The final blow was struck by Parl, a character that seemed to literally never hit a target throughout the entirety of the game, however on a lucky, double roll with initiative, struck down the fearsome dragon in one mighty flash of a trans-dimensional void that sucked the dragon and super computer into another universe. Never, to be seen, again....

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As guardian to Artist Matoska I have become increasingly interested in creating an environment and set of collaborative parameters that will allow my faithful companion to further explore their artistic interests and creative potential. To this end we’ve spoken with three animal parapsychologists to help develop my understanding of Artist Matoska’s voice.

This is the beginning stages to a longer and deeper collaborative relationship between myself and Artist Matoska.

Stay tuned for more! Keep up to date on Artist Matoska’s Instagram!

And don’t forget to pick up the first 2019 issue of the SoFa Journal which has a transcription of Artist Matoska’s interview with Deborah Erickson, PhD

PlayTime is a project that centers an audience of young people and involves setting up a workshop where young people will be. As young people approach the workshop they see a treasure trove of thrift store toys and become intrigued. Once their attention is captured I engage and share that I will make a custom toy just for them if they fill out a PlayTime order form.

I interpret their inputs on the form, but also closely monitor which toys they are being drawn to. We start a dialogue and pick a few items from the smorgasbord that reflect their interests. I take the selected toys and begin to synthesize a new one by sewing the various selections together. This is quite the amazing event as the young person observes their innermost desires manifested before them.

Once the toy is complete their parent and/or guardian finalizes the transaction with the signing of a contract. There are fields for both the young person and parent/guardian to sign promising to commit to invest time and attention in each other.

Through this practice PlayTime offers young people exposure to the ability to subvert what is accessible and manifest their dreams. As the parent/guardians watch their child interact with me they have the opportunity to see just how easy it is to give their children a portrait of actively engaging, believing, and manifesting their greatest dreams. And finally the contract helps everyone to see the agreements they need to make with each other, and themselves, to have infinite access to this incredibly form of power and prosperity.

Rock HOUNDing with Fred is a project centering Fred Tschida as an audience, and myself as a secondary audience. In the research for this project I was sent on a mission to go to various rock shops in Oregon and ask "What does only Oregon have?"

Leading with the inquiry given to me by Fred, I followed up with inquires regarding a favorite rock hounding story and what does only Oregon have in a non geological context.

Going from rock shop to rock shop I discovered that Oregon has various unique geological forms, including its own unique opal. Which, given that opal is my birthstone, I am on a personal mission to find and unearth my own specimen.

I met some interesting characters who had knowledge of various mineralogical phenomena. The research has been presented at the Portland Public Library with the intention continue our research indefinitely.

Once the weather permits, I will be scheduling rock hounding journeys with Fred, and Dusty Rocks! a rockhound from Washington I met at the Portland Convention Center Gem Faire.

The recorded interviews can be found here.

While living in Western New York I began to learn about whole foods from various sources including the farms from which they came. I developed a very close relationship with Jerry of Sunny Cove Farm, a local organic and raw dairy farm. Sometimes we would talk for hours about the precarious legality of the harmless and healthy product coming from his farm. I did a lot of promotion and product design for Sunny Cove Farm, but the one thing I couldn’t do much of was serve the raw milk. Due to state and federal law, in New York the sale of raw milk must be conducted on farm only. Furthermore, the milk could not travel across state lines or be used to create any product for consumption outside the home. In a brazen disregard for the laws, I began to prepare and share my homemade ice creams made using raw milk. Each event would occur with the knowledge that the product being served was illegal and therefore may be “unsafe” for consumption. Each iteration of this project was met with happy faces, delighted bellies and a rich discourse on food security and freedom. *No individuals were made sick by serving this illegal substance*

Antisocial media is an ongoing project that involves writing personal letters to friends and love ones. Once I've written the letter I document it and send it off. I take the documentation of the physical letter and digitally redact all of the information.

This project is meant to critique our current cultural paradigm of over use and addiction to social media platforms.

I find that while everyone is "there," during my time using the software I find myself feeling increasingly alone. While I can voyeuristically view the happenings of my friends and loved ones, I don't feel closer, or together, with any of them.

Conversely when I am writing to people I find that they occupy my mind and time much more presently. And when they receive the letter they feel much closer to me and my life than they had prior.

This project has included hour+ long phone calls, and will eventually include an antisocial media tour where I visit people physically.

The intended format for the documentation of the project is a publication.

If you're seeing this and would like to receive a letter, please request it by phone 301 641 8004, or by letter written to:

Artist Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr.
2000 SW 5th Ave
Portland, OR 97201

In March 2017 I in Bismarck still recovering from my time at the front lines of the Dakota Access Pipeline Resistance Effort at Standing Rock North Dakota. During our time at the front line camp, Oceti Sakowin, my friend Bugz was subsisting off of eating mayonnaise and cheese due to dietary allergies. Once we had access to a kitchen and fresh produce, I made them a vegetable lasagna for their birthday.

In March 2018 I happened to notice Bugz had posted on Facebook that they had no where and no one to celebrate their 40th birthday with. I decided to get a plane ticket to Columbus Ohio where Kurt, a now mutual, friend who was willing to host the birthday festivities. During my time I gave Bugz a gentle haircut, we walked Mama, Artist Matoska’s mother, made Bugz another vegetable lasagna, Kurt a meat lasagna, and I left gifts for each of them.

After dinner I flew back to Portland.

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Community pARTnerships is a project I participated in as an Americorps VISTA Volunteer at Arts on the Block for one year from November 2015 to November in 2016. I served as the Community Arts Coordinator whose responsibilities were engaging and collaborating with the East County Community to help create a new ongoing youth community art program for Arts on the Block.

Working closely with Impact Silver Spring we collaborated with the larger East County Community. Together we attended and organized community meetings, facilitated workshops, and ran youth led community mapping and interviewing initiatives. 

Community pARTnerships took many forms, and culminated in many amazing outputs and events. Documented in this gallery is the East County Community Social featuring the Who Got Da Best Shoes Competition. The event served to introduce Arts on the Block to the community and vice versa. The Community Social was planned in conjunction with the young people in the YES Program at the East County Community Center.

The year of service resulted in Explore-Create-Connect, a fully funded after school program at Briggs Chaney Middle School. 

More info about the East County Community Social can be found Here.

My practice does a delicate dance with capitalism. I have no love for a capitalist society, and the cultures it creates, however we all must learn to navigate it as best we can.

My life and practice consist of highly considered decisions about what to do, why I’m doing it, and what that should cost. I have no conclusions on this matter to share other than that I am continuing to investigate this paradigm for myself and present that investigation to others in the form of an audit of my actions and what their economic and carbon foot prints are.

Work ongoing

The objects selected to be in this body of work were collected, protected, and carried with me throughout my time at Oceti Sakowin, the prayerful resistance camp in Standing Rock North Dakota. I chose each carefully as it spoke to me during the moment of collection.The body of work practically made itself, as I slowly unbundled each piece they spoke to me once more. They told me their names and how they wished to be shown to the world. I made not the objects but merely helped them feature themselves.

I worked on this show in March of 2017 at Signifier Signs, a friend George Vidas’ neon studio. While working on the show I saw a stencil he had for packaging things to ship out. PLEASE HANDLE WITH CARE the stencil read. I took a moment to reflect on my managing of these objects, and how what I was doing was sharing these pieces as part of an experience that was shared with many. The name of the collective work is meant to remind viewers that this content reflects upon a single experience within the larger shared experience of over a thousand water protectors.

The works are referential to a culture that is not mine to claim, however I was encouraged to bring my experience home in order to share it with others. So, be reminded, handle this experience carefully, as it is meant to last for many generations beyond our own. Mni Wiconi.

Artist project made possible with generous support from George Vidas, Jane Orr, Thick Air Studios, and Signifier Signs.