Sa’rah Melinda Sabino is healing through making art in Portland

For Portland artist Sa’rah Melinda Sabino, her show last summer at the Portland Art Museum’s Aux/Mute Gallery felt like a big risk. “It was a very personal journey,” she said. “I was quite scared because it was my first time even talking about being mixed race, like out loud outside of my journal.” But it was a risk that paid off. At the opening reception, people of color repeatedly told her “thank you for making this work — I finally feel seen.” And for Sabino, “it was sort of an indescribable feeling because I had never felt seen myself before. So to know that other people shared the journey … it just felt like I was doing the right thing and that the work needed to continue to happen.”

The show, Away/Home, ran August 7 to November 14, 2021. It featured more than a dozen pieces, many looking at Sabino’s life through the lens of basketball. Growing up mixed race, struggling to figure out where she fit in, basketball “made me feel like I belonged.” In several of the pieces Sabino mixes sports imagery with iconic visuals from Moroccan culture (Sabino’s father is from Morocco), creating rich, provocative work. “I really wanted to explore the concept of two worlds coming together,” she said.