Isaka Shamsud-Din, 84 an artist, activist and educator known for his rich murals, paintings, community projects and civil rights activism, has died after a long battle with cancer. Many of his murals are in North Portland and celebrate the culture of African Americans and people of the African Diaspora. His studio was located in the Workshop St. Johns building at 6635 N. Baltimore Ave. Click here to see an interactive map of Shamsud-Din’s murals in North Portland from PDX Today.
Shamsud-Din became a pivotal figure in the city’s art world and a distinguished chronicler of the breadth and vigor of Black American life. His works, especially his murals, are narrative adventures. He looked on the Black experience and saw determined survival, joy in everyday pastimes, and pride in creation.
He reported that he decided to become an artist when he noticed, at an early age, the absence of representations of African American people in visual culture. As a second-grader, he was asked to trace a coloring book using glass slides. “I was never consciously aware of wanting to be an artist until then,” he said. “That project had an impact on me because I became aware that all the human characters were white—and I wasn’t.”
Shamsud-Din has created murals and large-scale paintings portraying African American history with a special focus on the Northwest. He collaborated with five other artists on the Albina Mural Project, which hung on the exterior walls of the Albina Human Resources Center in Northeast Portland from 1978 to 1983. (It was removed to protect it from further damage from the damp climate). The mural depicted different points in African American history: the African slave trade, the migration of Black settlers to the Northwest, the movement of African American workers and their families to Portland in the 1940s to work on the war effort, the disastrous Vanport flood of 1948, and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
