Donovan Scribes at the Black Gallery

The offices of Don’t Shoot Portland include an art gallery, and tonight there was an opening of a new show featuring a protest photographer and a digital artist, both introduced by Donovan Scribes (FKA Donovan M. Smith). Scribes is the author of “A Five-Year Retrospective on Portland’s Racial Justice Movement,” published by Portland Mercury.

The main blip is Donovan Scribes. Extras are the digital artist who made the posters behind them and the photographer who made the protest photographs on the opposite wall. (Thanks to Stevvi, I now know the photographer's name is Devin Boss. Unfortunately the digital artist's name isn't on the website yet. I didn’t hear either of their names and the crowd was so dense that I couldn’t get close to the cards with their names on them.)

Donovan is the author of the following untitled poem:

Flags got waved.
Prayers got prayed.
Streets got took.
Police sprayed mace.
Speeches got spoke.
Whites got “woke.”
Revolution was the rage. 
Quieted with a vote.
Bread got crumbed…
Souls back numb…
Hello new world!
Same as we’d begun!
20.20
—May 25, 2022.


My favorite sentence in the Retrospective: "The unapologetically progressive (and absurdly accomplished) Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty was replaced by law-and-order conservative (and mostly absurd) Rene Gonzalez."

His bio, included in his Retrospective: “Donovan Scribes is an award-winning writer, producer, and owner of the communications consulting firm D Scribes LLC. The former VP of the Portland NAACP, he’s secured major policy and investment victories throughout his career.”