HIGHLIGHTING THE BEAUTY OF CULTURAL DIVERSITY

Sometimes, all it takes is a small reminder in our day-to-day lives to reinvigorate old memories. For artist Erin M. Price, that reminder was uncovering a box of photos from her time living in the foothills of the Himalayas.

Price is a longtime artist, educator, and mother of three currently showing in Mt. Hood’s Fireplace Gallery in the Student Union. Called “Mountain Memories: Glimpses of Asia,” her series is an ongoing one that she says is “a tiny fraction” of what she plans to create.

“I could probably spend most of the rest of my life just documenting so many different aspects of the richness of their (Asian) culture,” she said.

According to Price, the part of the Himalayas her and her family lived in was on the Tea Horse Road, which was a network of trade routes through the mountains of Sichuan, Yunnan and Tibet in Southwest China. Her family came to that area so that her husband could study Chinese at a local university, and Price often spent her time visiting with the locals – usually photographing them.

“Being an artist and a former world history teacher, I’m just so enamored by all of the different cultures [in that area],” Price said of the crossroads of cultures and people groups on the Tea Horse Road. She would befriend many of the locals and took many photos, photography being her main creative outlet for the majority of her adult life.

It wasn’t until she came back to the States and moved to the coast of Oregon that she stumbled upon these photos of her time in the foothills.

“While I think about the people and those experiences fairly regularly, just seeing so many of them literally all together brought back this flood of memories,” Price recalled. What spurred her to create a series around the memories of her time in Asia was a desire to commemorate the people and the experiences that made an impact on her and her family’s lives.

The actual process of creating the Mountain Memories series was a family effort. At the time that Price took on this new endeavor, she was working as an art teacher where she was “starting programs from scratch,” she said. She recalled coming home from 12-hour workdays, setting up her canvases on a drawing board in the family living room and painting each night while her family “lived life around her.”

It became her stress relief. “It was really special,” Price said of the creation process. “I think we were all more emotional than expected when that first show came about. Not just my memories, but their memories (too) were encompassed in those works.”

Now living in Missouri, Price will continue to work on her Mountain Memories series. She says that she’s committed to heralding the cultures she portrays in her artwork. More than that, she hopes that her work encourages people to appreciate the beauty of diversity.

She also says it’s been just over five years since her last visit to Asia, and she’s starting to get that itch again.

“Most of the people that are portrayed in [my artwork] haven’t had photographs or had access to any portrait of themselves,” Price said. “I would love to go back and share some of my artwork with them.”

Her series, Mountain Memories: Glimpses of Asia, will be displayed in the Fireplace Gallery on Mt. Hood’s Gresham campus through June 8. Gallery hours are 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Friday.