Front Page > Issues > 2003 > January

Red & Black Café features Bette Lee exhibit

Southeast Portland’s worker-owned Red & Black Café will be featuring the works of artist Bette Lee during the month of January. The Singapore-born photographer is best-known for documenting the progressive movement in Portland and other cities, including some of the movement’s most exciting and dangerous moments. The January exhibit will feature images from the Aug. 22, 2002 protest against George W. Bush that was marked by a violent police response.

A well-known figure in Portland’s activist community, Lee has been documenting radical political activity since the anti-nuclear movement of the early 1980s. In the 1990s, Lee’s photographs captured the rebirth of militant labor in Portland and the growth of the city’s anarchist com-munity. Alliance readers and others are probably most familiar with Lee’s coverage of the anti-globalization movement. She extensively covered the protest in Seattle against the World Trade Organization in Dec. 1999 and other anti-globalization protests in Los Angeles and Washington D.C. in the following two years.

As recent small showings of Lee’s work demonstrates, it isn’t only political protest that interests the artist. Lee has made a study of sex industry workers, creating a body of images that are erotic while respecting the humanity of the worker.

Lee is not an artist you’ll find in Portland’s market-driven galleries, so take this opportunity to see her remarkable work.

—Dave Mazza