Untold Portlanders have gazed at the artwork of Isaka Shamsud-Din — they just might not have known it.
From Dawson Park in the heart of Albina, to the Oregon Convention Center and Portland State University student union, Shamsud-Din’s murals and portraits depict many of the Pacific Northwest’s pioneering Black figures, as well as friends and family from his own life.
The artist — whose activism in the Civil Rights movement began with his childhood in the South and continued in Oregon, where he spearheaded art education programs in local schools and prisons – died on June 16 after a long battle with cancer.
He was 84.
Shamsud-Din’s most well known work might be “Rock of Ages,” a portrait of his father that became the centerpiece of a Portland Art Museum exhibit that ran from 2019 to 2023. The painting features many of the artist’s signature touches, including technicolor hues and a quiet warmth that captures the dignity of his subjects.
“His work honors Black presence, honors Black life and Black love, connection and community,” said Intisar Abioto, a fellow artist who met Shamsud-Din by chance while working on a street photography project in 2013. “He really laid a foundation for us.”
[WATCH: Isaka Shamsud-Din on Black representation in art]
Born in 1940 in Atlanta, Texas under the name Isaac Allen, Shamsud-Din left for Oregon with his family after his father was beaten and left for dead by a white mob.
They landed in Vanport, just in time for the 1948 floods that destroyed the lost city, and then moved to Guild’s Lake Courts, another large housing project that was later demolished. Even at that early age, Shamsud-Din had already started his career as an artist, inspired in part by the illustrations in his schoolbooks, which featured only white characters, he told The Oregonian/OregonLive in 2020.
He won several national competitions as a young person, but by the 1960s had returned to the South, where he served as a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and worked with many of the Civil Rights movement’s luminaries.
Shamsud-Din went on to help launch the Black Studies program at San Francisco State University. He returned to Portland in the 1970s and created the Albina Mural Project, which adorned countless exteriors and employed more than 40 young Black artists over two decades. He also worked with students throughout the Portland Public Schools system.
Jalil Shamsud-Din, now 49, recalls that as a young teen, he helped his father paint a mural on the side of a nonprofit building on Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard near Shaver Street.
“He had it all done out, utilizing a grid system,” Jalil Shamsud-Din said. “Working from a piece of paper, to something being on a wall — to me that was amazing.”
The work, titled “Now is the Time, the Time is Now” and featuring a large portrait of King, still graces the street that bears his name.
Isaka Shamsud-Din said the mural project was an exercise in solidarity for many in the city’s blossoming Black artist community.
“I wanted to hold the whole of MLK (Boulevard) and many other spots around to have these murals,” Shamsud-Din told Abioto in a podcast recorded last year. “It was really claiming the territory.”
In 2003, Shamsud-Din established the African American Visual Arts Scholarship at Portland State, and later held residency at more than a dozen prisons in Washington.
Alongside the Portland Art Museum, he credited the late philanthropist Arlene Schnitzer as one of his first collectors, and also received support from the nonprofit Don’t Shoot Portland, which has worked to preserve his archives and sponsored a calendar of his work several years ago.
“He was so aware, even as a child, of the racism and challenges that he had faced,” said Portland Art Museum curator Grace Kook-Anderson. “Despite it all, I think he ultimately was such a generous, positive person. And if you spend time with the paintings, that is really his truth and his hope.”
Shamsud-Din was preceded in death by his parents, Isaac and Geneva Allen, and two of his children, Yasmin Shamsud-Din and Mikal Steen. He is survived by seven other children and their families.
—Zane Sparling covers breaking news and courts for The Oregonian/OregonLive. Reach him at 503-319-7083, zsparling@oregonian.com or @pdxzane.
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