Allison Grant and Evan Baden, Within the Bittersweet
October 15 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
FreeAllison Grant and Evan Baden, Within the Bittersweet
Portland Art Museum Photography Council Lunchtime Talk Series
Wednesday, October 15, 2025, 12:00pm to 1pm
1119 SW Park Ave.
Portland, OR 97205
In the Trustee Room,
4th floor in the Mark building
www.portlandartmuseum.org / 503 226 2811
Cost: Free to the public. (People are welcome to bring their lunch.)
Within the Bittersweet: Artist and Publisher Talk with Allison Grant and Evan Baden
Photographer Allison Grant will discuss Within the Bittersweet, her
long-form photographic project that explores the emotional weight of raising
her daughters in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, against the backdrop of climate crisis and local industrial pollution. Drawing on a long tradition of socially
conscious photographers who make political work laden with the personal, her images negotiate pressing new concerns as our planet undergoes rapid and irreversible change.
Grant will be joined by Oregon State University professor and publisher Evan Baden, who oversees Composit Press. Composit is a student-run press that recently published a monograph of Grant’s project. Baden will share insights into the publication process and evolving landscape of photo book publishing.
Allison Grant is an artist, writer, curator, and Associate Professor of
Photography at The University of Alabama. Her artworks have been widely
exhibited and are held in collections at the Bainbridge Island Museum of
Art, Birmingham Museum of Art, High Museum of Art, DePaul Art Museum,
Columbia College Chicago, King County Portable Works Collection and several private and corporate collections. Grant was named on the Silver Eye Center for Photography’s 2022 Silver List. She received the 2020 Portfolio Purchase Award from the Atlanta Photography Group, the 2019 Developed Work Fellowship from the Midwest Center for Photography and was shortlisted for the 2019 FotoFilmic Mesh Prize. Editorial photographs by Grant have been published in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
Evan Baden earned his MFA from Columbia College in Chicago in 2014. His bodies of work include The Illuminati, Technically Intimate, Under the Influence, A Conversão de São Paulo, and The _______ High School Yearbook Project. They have been widely exhibited internationally with museums and galleries throughout Europe and the United States. His work is held in public collections such as the Walker Art Center, Milwaukee Art Museum, FOAM Amsterdam, the Finnish Museum of Photography, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and the Kinsey Institute. Evan’s work has been featured in numerous publications including TIME, The Guardian, FOAM, New York Magazine, Le Monde, D della Repubblica, Geo, and DIE ZEIT and many others. Baden has been the recipient of the Jerome Fellowship for Emerging Artists, the Stuart Abelson Graduate Research Fellowship, and Artist in Residence at the Oregon College of Art and Craft. He has been a finalist for the Betty Bowen Award, The McKnight Fellowship for Photography, the Outwin Boochever, as well as nominated for the Baum Award for Emerging American Photographers and the PDN 30. He is currently an Instructor at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon.
The Lunchtime Talk series is a presentation of the Portland Art Museum’s
Photography Council.
The Portland Art Museum Photography Council offers its members unique
opportunities to learn more about the history of photography with Julia
Dolan, Ph.D., the Museum’s Minor White Curator of Photography. Council
membership dues support the acquisition of photographs for the permanent
collection. The members’ annual print share meeting, private tours with Dr.
Dolan, and special invitations to lectures by renowned photographers are
just some of the benefits of Council membership.