Without End: Recent Work on Grief by Cara Levine

November 9, 2025 — May 31, 2026

Celebrated multidisciplinary artist Cara Levine explores themes of absence, empathy, and equity through a practice encompassing studio-based artmaking, social engagement, and curatorial projects. Levine’s art offers profound emotional resonance, inviting visitors into a contemplative space where loss, memory, and healing converge, and the sense of grief becomes tactile and visible. What does a memory look like? How do we touch what is no longer there? Can absence take form? These questions reverberate throughout the exhibition, asking us to consider the shape of a feeling, the weight of remembrance, and the possibility of connection after loss.

As part of this exhibition, she unveils Silverlinings, the inaugural presentation of a participatory, site-specific installation right within the museum’s space: an artistic meditation on grief inspired by the Los Angeles wildfires of January 2025, during which Levine lost her childhood home as well as the homes of several other family members. Utilizing sand to represent a boundless sense of the infinite, and a sandbox to contain all types of losses, including climate loss, Levine invites visitors to trace a drawing that represents loss in the sand. The act of kneeling at or bowing towards the sand evokes humility, ritual, and devotion, and offers potential for restoration and catharsis.

This exhibition is generously supported by the Judy Margles Education and Culture Fund and the Craig E. Wollner Exhibition Fund, which continue to make it possible to bring compelling contemporary art to our audiences.

Image Above: Cara Levine, Silverlinings, 2025

ARTIST IN RESIDENCY

In This Sand: Seven Days of Collective Care with Cara Levine

A weeklong series of public and private community events that will take place in the Main Gallery at OJMCHE. In This Sand invites Portland religious leaders, healers, artists, and activists to utilize Cara Levine’s exhibition Without End as a site for grief processing and embodied healing. 

May 18 – 24 | Learn more

About the Artist

Deeply rooted in Jewish ritual, storytelling, and the act of making, Levine’s work explores how the pain of loss permeates our lives, bonding us through shared experience and quiet interconnection. Through sculpture, participatory installations, and communal acts of making, Levine showcases grief as a cyclical, boundless force that ripples through individuals, communities, and landscapes. Her work is simultaneously solitary and collective, intimate and expansive, grounded in personal memory and shaped by global events.

Central to Levine’s process is a ritual of replication informed by her longstanding interest in Jewish mysticism and meditation practice, where the recreation of a form has the power to hold and transform suffering. Visitors are invited to move beyond passive observation and step into the role of collaborator: to pick up a dowel, share a story, and name the weight of loss with their own hands. In this space, grief is not resolved; it is held. 

Although based in California, Cara’s ties to Portland include former teaching at Lewis & Clark College, and organizing the city’s first annual Self-Taught Artists Fair with Public Annex in 2017. She is an inaugural Cultural Leadership Fellow with the Mandel Institute for Nonprofit Leadership, with her recognition as a creative artist marking a groundbreaking moment in the fellowship’s history.

About the Exhibition Curator

Yaelle Amir is a curator and educator currently based in Portland, OR. Her writing and curatorial projects focus primarily on artists whose practices supplement the initiatives of existing social movements—rendering themes within those struggles in ways that both interrogate and promote these issues to a wider audience. She has independently curated exhibitions at Artists Space (NY), CUE Art Foundation (NY), Franklin Street Works (CT), ISE Cultural Foundation (NY), The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (NY), Marginal Utility (PA), the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University (NY), and HOLDING Contemporary (OR), among other institutions. Her writing has appeared in numerous art publications including Art in America, ArtLies, ArtSlant, ArtUS, Beautiful/Decay, and Sculpture Magazine, as well as several exhibition catalogues and artist monographs. She has also worked at major art institutions, such as the International Center of Photography (NY), the Museum of Modern Art (NY), and NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts. Yaelle is the recipient of several curatorial fellowships and awards by regional and national organizations from the Regional Arts and Culture Council in Portland to The Luminary in St. Louis and the Art & Law Program in New York. Her programs have taken place in art institutions throughout the U.S., including Portland’s Newspace Center for Photography, where she was Curator of Exhibitions & Public Programs from 2015 to 2017. She curated the 2019 Portland Biennial (along with Elisheba Johnson and Ashley Stull Meyers), and was the 2020-2021 Curator-in-Residence at University of Oregon’s Center for Art Research (CFAR). She served as Commissioning Editor (2022-2025) for Critical Conversations, a publishing platform spearheaded by the Ford Family Foundation and University of Oregon. She recently taught curatorial studies and professional practice at Lewis & Clark College.

Exhibition Related Events

• Without End: Exhibition Opening

  Join artist Cara Levine and exhibition curator Yaelle Amir for the public opening of  Without End: Recent Work on Grief by Cara Levine. 

  November 9 | 2 – 4pm | OJMCHE Auditorium | Free to attend. RSVP encouraged but not required

• Without End: Artist and Curator Talk with Cara Levine and Yaelle Amir

  Join artist Cara Levine and exhibition curator Yaelle Amir in the gallery of Without end: Recent Work on Grief for a discussion about the exhibition and its themes of loss, memory, and healing.

  November 9 | 11am – 12pm | OJMCHE Auditorium | Included with museum admission; free for members. RSVP encouraged but not required

• Artist Lecture with Cara Levine – Presented in Partnership with PNCA

  Join artist Cara Levine at Pacific Northwest College of Art for an artist lecture on her work and practice.

  November 10 | 6-7:30pm | PNCA (511 NW Broadway)| Free with RSVP to PNCA

• This Is Not A Gun: A Participatory Ceramic Workshop

  This Is Not A Gun is a socially engaged artwork led by Cara Levine whose purpose is to open space for healing and creative activism while cultivating an increased awareness of racial profiling, police brutality, and societal trauma in America. Join us for a participatory workshop sculpting objects mistaken as guns while in conversation with fellow community members.

  November 11 | 12:30-2:30pm | PNCA (511 NW Broadway) | Free with RSVP

• Public Curator-Led Tour of Without End: Recent Works on Grief by Cara Levine

  Join exhibition curator Yaelle Amir for a guided tour of Without End: Recent Works on Grief and enter into a space where loss, memory, and healing converge. 

  February 1 | 12-1pm | OJMCHE | Included with admission, free for members. | RSVP preferred but not required
  April 12 | 12-1pm | OJMCHE |Included with admission, free for members. | RSVP preferred but not required
  May 3 | 1-2pm |OJMCHE |Included with admission, free for members. | RSVP preferred but not required

• A Letter to Uncle Bruce: Grief Processing Through Letter Writing

  An underutilized coping mechanism, letter-writing is a gentle therapeutic tool. Join Jenn Director Knudsen and Laura Cohen, LCSW for a grief processing through letter writing workshop.

  Sunday May 3 | 11:30-1pm | Free | RSVP required

• Silverlinings Casting Sessions

  Those who have experienced loss due to climate disaster are invited to private artmaking sessions with Cara Levine. Participants will work with Levine to recreate a lost object from memory.

• In This Sand: Seven Days of Collective Care with Cara Levine

  A weeklong series of public and private community events that will take place in the Main Gallery at OJMCHE. In This Sand invites Portland religious leaders, healers, artists, and activists to utilize Cara Levine’s exhibition Without End as a site for grief processing and embodied healing. 

  May 18 – 24 | Learn more