John Goodwin

A popular Portland figure puts a spotlight on the black American experience with his own personal art collection.

- Richard Speer

There’s a haunting montage at the end of director Spike Lee’s 2000 film “Bamboozled” showing archival clips from Hollywood movies in which black Americans are depicted in viciously racist caricature. It’s shameful, enraging, and wholly impossible to look away from. Rewatching the sequence today, in the aftermath of a presidential campaign and election that gave alarming sanction to white supremacists, one can’t help but think that the more things change, the more they stay the same. This same feeling permeated “The Soul of Black Art: A Collector’s View,” a riveting exhibition last fall at UPFOR Gallery in Portland, Oregon. Commingling artwork across an array of media with historical racist memorabilia, the show was startling both for its formalist rigor and its brutal, thematic gut-punch. Curated by Portland-based collector John Goodwin, it consisted largely of artworks that Goodwin and his partner, Michael-Jay Robinson, have amassed during their 34-year relationship. The story of this remarkable collection suffuses the couple’s soaring loft in the Pearl District of northwest Portland.