After a three-year process, the complete set of ten portraits of Black Oregon ancestors by Jeremy Okai Davis is on view at the A.M. Bush Gallery at the Salem Art Association through February 22. The portraits are a key element of the “reimagining” of the historic Bush House, an intentional consideration of alternative historical narratives. The Salem Art Association commissioned the portraits in direct recognition of Bush’s racist rhetoric and actions against Oregon’s Black community during his lifetime (1824-1913). The size and composition of Davis’s portraits consciously parallel a formal 1880 portrait of Asahel Bush painted by Thomas Cogswell that hangs in the library of the historic house. 

I wrote about this project in June of 2023 on the occasion of the delivery of the third and fourth portraits and accompanying rechristening of the America Waldo Bogle gallery inside the historic Bush house. That story provides background on Bush and the impetus for the portrait project. I framed the project in terms of the subjectivity of history:

“History is never an objective record of the past, it is always a story, and as such, subject to the whims and interests of the teller and their intended audience. The components and details are pulled out from a multitude of potential alternatives to create a coherent narrative. The old story of Asahel Bush was the result of a series of choices too. It’s just that those choices were made to present Bush as a benevolent elder statesman and SAA has now changed its approach to include Bush but to take issue with his supposed benevolence and to let his story be one among the many worth telling and repeating. 

Davis’s portraits broadcast their facture with faces fractured into brushstrokes, strata of paint, layers of colors, stenciled letters, and applied patterns. The portraits are painted from photographs of the sitters but they don’t claim objectivity; rather they highlight that they’re made, and therefore, subjective things. They’re the result of a series of choices, just like the historical record. SAA could have chosen to put up the photographs of Oregon’s Black pioneers in Bush House. The choice to instead commission Davis to make these portraits shows a higher level of intention and acknowledgement of history’s precarity.”

The six new portraits are unmistakably Davis’s work, with faces rendered in large pointillist daubs, brightly colored backgrounds, and the graphic flourishes described above. Each portrait is accompanied by a wall tag with a narrative written by the Director of Bush House Museum Exhibits and Programming, Tammy Jo Wilson. The wall tags include reproductions of many of the photographs Davis used as reference points for each portrait. I was able to speak with both Davis and Wilson about the completion of the commission. 

When I spoke to him in 2023, Davis expressed some trepidation about painting portraits of sitters for whom he had no photographic reference. The photographs are part of the interpretive process and, though Davis didn’t frame it in exactly this way, it seems that the presence of a photograph affords a sort of implicit permission to be portrayed. Having a photograph taken in the 19th century was not the throwaway endeavor it is today; it was a conscious and deliberate undertaking. As a result, 19th century photographic portraits are almost always formal. 

I spoke with Davis again in January of this year about the completion of the next six portraits and closure of the project. Davis recounted that he relinquished his hesitancy to paint a portrait of Leticia Carson, even without an extant photograph, because her story was so compelling. As explained in Wilson’s summary, Carson was “the first Black person to file a land claim in Oregon under the Homestead Act of 1862. She successfully homesteaded at Soap Creek, establishing a thriving homestead that included a home, barn, granary, smokehouse, and hundreds of fruit trees.” She is also the namesake of the Leticia Carson Project at Oregon State University. 

Davis created the portrait’s reference photograph of Carson by using a photograph of her daughter, Martha Carson Lavadour, as an older woman. He used an AI image-generator to “reverse age” the photograph in order to create the three-quarter length likeness. (Wilson included a portrait of Carsons’s sister with her husband and child as the illustration for the wall tag, but the daughter’s photograph is used in the OSU Project and visible on this page.) 

The fact that Carson’s photograph is invented explains the more informal nature of her portrait. As opposed to the other sitters in the series who are all wearing formal attire, Carson is shown in a straw hat with white blouse, dark vest, and red skirt. She clasps a bouquet of flowers: a multitude of textures including a goldenrod spray of circular blooms and a peach magnolia. In an interview, Davis explained this as “wanting to give her her flowers as a way to honor her.” 

The magnolia is especially prominent in Carson’s portrait. The peachy color and precise edges propel it to the front of the composition, clearly the star of the bouquet. Magnolias feature in all ten of the portraits in various guises, usually rendered as a brooch or a pattern on fabric. This is a consistency that Davis started with in the earliest portraits in the series. In The Blacksmith (Benjamin Davis), the magnolia appears as an oversized button on the sitter’s waistcoat. In The Advocate (Beatrice Morrow Cannady), a magnolia pendant is suspended on a black ribbon at the sitter’s neck. The level of detail of the magnolia varies: in both The Midwife (Sybil Harber) and The Hostess (Louisa Sewell), the shape is the fabric pattern motif. In The Homesteader (Thomas King), the magnolia inspires the background pattern, two geometric renderings in blue just above the sitter’s shoulder. 

There’s remarkable variety in the consistency – which initially sounds like an oxymoron but raises an interesting parallel to the experience of Oregon’s Black pioneers. All were affected by Oregon’s Exclusion law, which was part of the state’s 1857 Constitution. The clause remained part of the Constitution when Oregon joined the Union in 1859, and wasn’t formally repealed until 1926. All were affected by the laws, and the repercussions run through all ten stories. 

The shapes of their stories, however, their lived experiences – those are all unique, and celebrated as such in their portraits. Wilson’s wall tag narratives give the sitter’s details, the outlines of their stories, and how Oregon’s Exclusion laws shaped their experiences. Davis’s portraits amplify their lives, giving each sitter his or her due with the monumentality lent by the scale and attention of the painted portrait. 

Louis Southworth was brought to Oregon as an enslaved person but was able to raise enough money to purchase his freedom by playing the fiddle. The portrait (The Fiddler (Louis Southworth)) is based on a photograph of Southworth in which his fiddle rests on his lap. Davis paints Southworth with his fiddle poised under his chin, set off against a vermillion background. 

Rose Jackson was smuggled into Oregon in a wooden box by her enslavers, who later stole her earnings. She later married a stagecoach groom and had two children. In Davis’s portrait, she is self-assured in a green dress with a contrasting white collar. Two circular whorls of paint articulate the painting’s background. She rests her right hand on a frumpled gray pile; it could be laundry but it’s not central to the story. 

Thomas King was likely born enslaved; he fought in the Civil War in one of the regiments of African American soldiers. He arrived in Oregon and ultimately purchased 160 acres of forest in Tillamook County. Davis’s portrait shows him as confident and dapper, his pocket square jauntily askew. What matters is steely resolve. 

Of the new portraits, the one that has captivated me the most is The Hostess (Louisa Sewell). Sewell sits sharply upright with a baby on her lap. One hand loosely wraps around the child. (I fully admit to loving any “Madonna and Child” update and I’ll spare you my musings on this as a 19th-century theotokos inspiration.) Two things immediately struck me: the three vertical stripes on the right of the composition and the look of utter disdain on the baby’s face.

The rectangular stripes, in bubble gum pink, white, and a deep brown, stand out from the rest of the composition, particularly from the deep orange red backdrop. The color scheme begs comparison to Neapolitan ice cream – strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate. Their presence is a charming reference to part of Sewell’s biography – she was known in her Central Oregon community for her ice cream. Davis uses stripes as graphic elements in other portraits (diagonal stripes feature in both The Blacksmith and The Advocate) but in those cases, they’re incorporated into the background, a hue darker than the background and a graphic element. Sewell’s stripes are a visual shorthand, a way to tell her story. 

There’s another layer to the stripes, though – one that links directly back to Davis. The flavor of Sewell’s ice cream isn’t part of the historical record. Like many other details, that information is lost. When I asked Davis about the choice, he explained that Neapolitan ice cream was the standard choice in his childhood home – Davis liked strawberry ice cream and his brother liked chocolate, so Neapolitan was his mom’s middle ground solution (if only all sibling management/negotiation were so straightforward!). She bought a brand of ice cream that came in a rectangular box, the visual parallel unmistakable in the rectangular stripes at Sewell’s elbow. This isn’t a falsehood, just evidence of interpretation – like anyone’s, Davis’s telling reflects his own experience. 

I thought that Sewell’s baby’s scowl could possibly be another reflection of personal experience,  and honestly, I probably latched onto the baby’s expression in the first place because I had my own judgment-faced baby at one point. I know Davis has young children, so I thought maybe he had had a similar withering-stare-baby experience, but he demurred when I asked. He said that the baby looked dour in the source photo. 

I can’t see that baby’s expression as anything but challenging. I want to see Sewell’s portrait hung directly across from the Cogswell portrait of Asahel Bush in the library of the historic house, a direct intervention challenging Bush’s intention to keep Oregon white. A staring contest between Bush and the scowling baby would be acknowledgment of resolve and generational change. This approach is shaped by my familiarity with and admiration for projects like Fred Wilson’s 1992 Mining the Museum, in which he challenged the dominant narrative of the Maryland Historical Society by intervening on the permanent collection. I bring my own perspective to the portraits and this project too. 

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The act of telling stories, and by extension writing history, is a collaborative and iterative process. The story morphs each time it is told, not because the hard facts of what transpired change, but because the vantage point of the “teller” and the intended audience change. Different aspects or angles of what is known of the past become relevant, worth telling and learning from. 

In February of 2025, I look at these portraits and read the stories of the sitters and see individuals resisting an outwardly racist and unjust system not by loudly proclaiming their objections but by living their lives and engaging with their communities. Quiet resolve – moving through the world with integrity, authenticity, and care – can be resistance, too. 

Asahel Bush and others lobbied heartily against the Black community in Oregon. The state’s exclusion policies are a direct reflection of these attitudes. The racist rhetoric and policies couldn’t stop Leticia Carson from growing flowers. They didn’t stop Louis Southworth from playing the fiddle or Rose Jackson from caring for her family. They didn’t stop Louisa Sewell from hosting parties and making ice cream and having a baby that maybe scowled in photos. Bigotry made things difficult, far more difficult than they should have been, but it didn’t prevail in the long run.

Davis’s portraits, accompanied by Wilson’s wall tags and research, tell stories that had been previously overlooked. They equally offer the opportunity to reflect on the stories we tell, how we tell them, and how to tell them in ways that matter in the current moment. Especially resonant today is the reminder that hate doesn’t win. 

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ReEnvisioned: Contemporary Portraits of our Black Ancestors is on view at the Bush Barn Art Center through February 22nd. Bush Barn Art Center is located at 600 Mission St. SE in Salem and is free and open to the public noon to 4 pm, Thursdays through Saturdays