Art Is a Force for Political and Cultural Revolution Jennifer Rabin Willamette Week
What a yr, correct? End of the teens, start of the '20s, and who knows if they'll rattle or roar?
Just today we're looking back, not ahead. Let'southward commencement past getting the big bad news out of the way. One thing's sure in Oregon arts and cultural circles: 2019's the year the land'due south once-fabled arts and crafts scene took another staggering punch square on the chin. The death rattles of the Oregon College of Art and Arts and crafts – chronicled deeply past ArtsWatch's Barry Johnson in a barrage of news stories and analyses spiced with a couple of abrupt commentaries, Democracy and the arts and How dead is OCAC? – were heard far and wide, and the higher'southward demise unleashed a flood of anger and complaining.
The crashing and called-for of the venerable craft higher early on in the year followed the equally fatigued-out and lamented closure of Portland'due south nationally noted Museum of Contemporary Craft in 2016, leaving the state's lively crafts scene without its 2 major institutions. In both cases the sense that irreversible decisions were beingness made with scant public input, let lonely input from crafters themselves, left much of the arts and crafts community fuming. When, after the closure, ArtsWatch published a slice by the craft college's quondam president, Denise Mullen, the fury hit the fan with an outpouring of outraged online comments, virtually by bearding posters with obvious connections to the school.
MUCH HAPPIER Art NEWS came in the fall with the birth of a bouncing baby museum in Portland: The Hashemite kingdom of jordan Schnitzer Museum of Fine art at Portland State University. The PSU museum, with 7,500 square feet of gallery space, joins ii other Schnitzer-named university museums in the Northwest – at the University of Oregon in Eugene and Washington State Academy in Pullman – and although it has no permanent collection, it has Schnitzers' big collection to draw on for many shows, with other programming to be determined by its eventual permanent manager. The museum, which has free admission, opened with a boffo installation of contemporary art called by the veteran curator Linda Tesner from the Schnitzer collections. And the museum's downtown location merely a few blocks from the Portland Fine art Museum makes it hands accessible not but to students just to a broad cross-section of the public as well.
IN ASHLAND, THE OREGON SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL picked a new creative director, Nataki Garrett, who had been acting artistic director at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. This was large news in several ways. With a $44 million annual budget, OSF is Oregon's biggest cultural institution. Garrett is the second woman creative director (Libby Appel was the first) and first person of colour to pb the festival in its almost 85-yr history. And she arrives at a time when climatic change and the possibility of heavy fire and smoke during peak visiting times presents the festival with a claiming that has cypher to do with what's on stage. Garrett leaped right in, directing the festival's summer production of How To Catch Creation fifty-fifty before she officially began her new job. Meanwhile, ArtsWatch's theater editor and columnist Marty Hughley wrote a fond farewell to the era of Garrett'due south predecessor, Beak Rauch, who among other things greatly broadened the festival's cultural base, making the company itself and the shows it produced much more inclusive.
PORTLAND OPERA, STUNG BY A STRING of financially weak seasons, made some major changes in 2019. Christopher Mattaliano, general director since 2003, stepped down and was replaced by the team of Sue Dixon as full general manager and Palm Beach Opera'south Daniel Biaggi as interim creative director. Only equally substantively, the company scrapped its experiment with a mostly summer season of productions and went dorsum to a fall-through-spring season. Mattaliano, a expert director of operas, had been peppering smaller and more adventurous pieces amidst the company's war horses, only the shift to summertime shows didn't work: The timing changed, but by and big the programming didn't. Successful summer opera companies tend to be in smaller, destination towns such every bit Santa Fe. What might take made a splash – and would accept been extraordinarily risky and costly – would have been the cosmos of a semi-rural summer festival forth the lines of Northern Virginia's Wolf Trap, shared past the opera and perhaps the symphony and other performing groups, in Yamhill County vino land or rural Washington or Clackamas canton. Only no 1 we know of was talking almost such a affair, permit alone putting greenbacks on the barrelhead.
A Tranquillity CHANGE IN HOW TAX Coin FOR THE ARTS is distributed was appear in February, and it could take an event on cultural organizations large and small in the greater Portland area. The Regional Arts and Civilization Council, which oversees government arts programs in Washington, Clackamas, and Multnomah counties, voted to shift a larger chunk of its operating grants away from large organizations such as the Oregon Symphony and Oregon Ballet Theatre, and toward modest-budget groups, many of which serve diverse communities. RACC hopes the effect will be a healthier arts scene that amend reflects the cultures and demographics of the region's population, and there'due south little question that the increased funding will help audacious small companies survive. Larger companies will need to rely more on corporate, foundation, and individual donations. Authorities funding is limited, and no matter how the pie is sliced, some groups will experience left out. It won't be easy for big groups to fill their gap, and the cuts come at a time when the Portland Fine art Museum, for instance, has never been more agile in its diversity, inclusion, and outreach – programs that take money to aggrandize and maintain.
ARTISTS REP, FACED WITH Financial CRISES and a home space turned into a massive structure site, hit the road in 2019. Portland's second-biggest theater company is taking its reduced flavor to other spots effectually the city, and will be itinerant at least 1 more season while its habitation space is being cut in half and rebuilt. Strapped for money, the company sold half of its West End belongings to a real-estate developer and planned to reconfigure the remaining one-half to include two performances spaces and shop, rehearsal, and office room. Barry Johnson talked with J.S. May, Artists Rep'due south executive director, about money realities, how the project'south shaping up, and the radical shift's effect on resident companies Contour Theatre and Portland Actors Solarium, which have also had to take their shows on the road, and the dozen or so small companies that had been using the Artists Rep space for offices and support in the Arts Hub.
TRENDS & IDEAS
BUT ENOUGH OF THE BIG NEWSY STUFF. Let's move on to the fun and challenge and controversies of 2019's big trends and audacious ideas.
Exquisite Gorge: It'due south a print! Surely ane of the year's almost adventurous and fascinating undertakings was the Maryhill Museum of Art's Exquisite Gorge project, a g plan to create a 66-foot-long steamrolled print reflecting the life and state along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River between the confluences of the Willamette and Snake rivers. The project, which involved artists from effectually the country working with communities along both the Oregon and Washington sides of the river, took many months and emphasized the river as a uniting rather than a dividing strength: To borrow the title of i of the year's most meaning visual art exhibitions (run into the Visual Arts section beneath), the map is non the territory. Friderike Heuer followed the project from beginning to finish for ArtsWatch in a serial of illuminating photographic essays.
Is Portland the newest dance destination? Beth Whelan, herself a relatively recent addition to the urban center's dance scene, said an emphatic yep. To show her point, she talked with half a dozen new creative Portlanders who've moved here to make their marks in the dance world.
In an attention economy, the critic'southward virtually powerful tool is silence. Sure, it can be satisfying to slice a mediocre work of art to shreds in print. But in a media atmosphere where whatever kind of attention – even excoriating attention – is good considering it amplifies the artmaker'southward work, Jennifer Rabin argues, sometimes the best matter for a critic to practice when encountering bad art is simply to write aught at all.
"Aladdin": Middle Eastern plenty? Iranian American writer and theater artist Melory Mirashrafi took a sharp look for ArtsWatch at pop-cultural attitudes toward the Middle East through the lens of phase and flick versions of Aladdin and other historical depictions of fantasy Arabians from the musical Kismet to the movies Back to the Future and Prince of Persia. Most of the action seems to take identify in Stereotype City, and while at that place's been comeback, there'due south a long way to go.
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The Right Brain for Learning. How exercise we learn? What do music and art have to do with information technology? Why is providing integrated art programs in its curricula one of the all-time things a school commune can do for its students? Danielle Vermette takes a deep expect at the fine art and science of learning and how it'south playing out in the Portland metropolitan area through the Right Brain Initiative, an innovative plan to spur learning for all kinds of students. Watch for more than as Vermette follows arts integration specialist Shannon McClure from classroom to classroom.
Notes from Eastern Oregon: Fine art centers go on civilisation alive. It'southward not all big-urban center, big-proper noun stuff. Culture is everywhere, and equally David Bates writes, devoted people and organizations are keeping information technology thriving in small-town Oregon. He tours former Carnegie Libraries-turned-cultural centers in Pendleton, LaGrande, and Baker City to learn how it's done.
The fine art of giving, large and modest. In an essay that travels from artist Sara Siestreem's procedure of creating Coos weaving to a pupil'south challenge at the Newport Visual Arts Center to a heroine of a school librarian, Laura Grimes writes about the complex human activity of giving as a procedure, and what art has to exercise with it.
UFO Festival: Keeping McMinnville weird for 20 years. Sometimes, a town just wants to accept fun. And sometimes, ArtsWatch followers love reading almost it. Information technology helps if in that location's a genuine UFO mystery cached in the surface area's lore, and Yamhill County has that. It also has this annual commemoration of otherworldly wackiness. David Bates gets to the bottom of what's up in the sky – or not.
PHAME and friends rock out. Writer Brett Campbell and photographer Friderike Heuer follow the fascinating collaboration betwixt Portland Opera and PHAME, which serves adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities, to create and perform an original rock opera, The Poet's Shadow.
At Store La Famiglia, hip hop digs in. In a city with a hot real-estate market, affordable spaces for whatsoever sorts of arts use are difficult to come by. So sometimes you lot've merely got to do it yourself. Christen McCurdy writes about the hideaway space on Due north Lombard Avenue that rapper Swiggle Mandela has transformed into a retail shop and a gathering place for Portland's hip-hop scene.
Field of Vision. Brett Campbell takes a deep look at the 2019 National Field Network Conference, hosted by Portland arts laureate Subashini Ganesan'south New Expressive Works, and the touch that the New York system The Field had on about 200 Oregon artists and arts advocates who showed up to hash things out and look for fresh ways of thinking virtually things.
WORDS ON PAGES: LITERARY LIGHTS
SOMETIMES Y'all Simply Want TO Roll UP WITH A Skillful BOOK. Or knuckle down to an intense writing workshop or prowl around an encyclopedic writers' conference. Or talk to a memoirist or a poet. In 2019 nosotros did that stuff, besides.
The family unit that vanished. At that place's nothing in the book world quite similar a well-turned mystery, and for ArtsWatch readers it seems there's aught quite like a folio-turner real-life mystery with local roots. Portland writer JB Fisher'southward Echo of Afar Water: The 1958 Disappearance of Portland's Martin Family tells the tale of a family that drove out the Columbia Gorge to become a Christmas tree and was never seen again. David Bates's interview with Fisher was ArtsWatch's second-about-read story of the yr, after only the news break of the Oregon College of Art and Craft terminating its degree program.
The Hillsboro Story: Weaving a web of memories. Longtime Oregon writer and performance artist Susan Banyas grew up in the 1950s in the little town of Hillsboro, Ohio, where she witnessed an unlikely affiliate in the American Ceremonious Rights Movement unfold. She's been incorporating those memories into her work for many years, and in 2019, after much research and many conversations with people who were part of the story, published it in kaleidoscopic book form. Marty Hughley interviewed her on the process, commenting: "The Hillsboro Story is Banyas' own Soul Story, on paper and writ large."
Playing chicken at the book bash. This twelvemonth's national AWP Conference – that'southward the Association of Writers and Writing Programs – dropped downward on the Oregon Convention Middle in Portland in March, and Danielle Vermette was on paw for ArtsWatch for a trivial literary March Madness of her own. It had more writers and panels and discussion sections than you could milkshake an iambic pentameter at, and it fifty-fifty had the terrific novelist Colson Whitehead as its keynote speaker, peppering his talk, if you volition, with chicken recipes, which Vermette enjoyed, even though she neither cooks nor eats the beasts herself.
"It's not my poesy that matters. It's poetry that matters." David Bates talked with Oregon Book Awards finalist José Angel Araguz, a passionate abet for work by writers from marginalized communities. "I tin't stress enough how important this shift is," he told Bates. "Without a platform for one'southward work, without representation and visibility of one's culture and identity, and without a feeling that there is a space for you somewhere in the earth, writers can be sent downwardly a discouraging path, questioning the worth not merely of one's words but of one's being. Things aren't perfect, just skilful piece of work is being done, and practiced piece of work is being honored."
Tin Firm: vulnerability & take chances. Ben Bartu arrived at his first Tin Firm Summer Workshop on the Reed College campus at an odd juncture in the historic Portland publishing house'south history – correct about the time that the terminal Tin House Quarterly journal was rolling off the presses. Unlike the literary journal, Bartu wrote, the workshop showed no signs of ending any time soon. Information technology seemed in major ways to be keeping upwardly with the times. Bartu asked workshop coordinator Lance Cleland if he'd noticed a theme emerging from the calendar week's events: "He answered without hesitation.'Vulnerability,' he said. 'Vulnerability, and risk'."
ARTS PEOPLE: PROFILES
PEOPLE Brand Fine art, AND PEOPLE CREATE AN ARTS CULTURE. ArtsWatch sat down with a lot of Oregon artists in 2019, and told a lot of their stories. Here are a few:
Darnell McAdams: "It started with poetry." "Those of us who write about the arts at some signal trot out 'visual verse' to describe something other than actual verse — a painting, a film, fifty-fifty a bout de force staging of a dance or scene in a play," David Bates began his profile of the Oregon photographer. Turns out, that's not far off the marking. "Poetry sparked my interest from the first time I learned nearly a haiku in uncomplicated schoolhouse," McAdams told Bates.
Darrell Grant: jazz master & more. When the Portland pianist and composer was named 2019's Portland Jazz Principal by PDX Jazz Festival early in the year, Brett Campbell set out to show why – and to show that in addition to his jazz chops, Grant is a composer, instructor, and social force of note.
Barbara LaMorticella: a woman of her words. Nosotros sat down with LaMorticella, winner of the first Soapstone Staff of life and Roses Accolade, and took notes as she told usa the tale of her life in poetry, from the early days of the San Francisco Mime Troupe and handing out gratis nutrient with the Diggers in Golden Gate Park to creating her ain verse and becoming the voice of poetry on Portland radio.
Celebrating Schiff. Brett Campbell profiles David Schiff, the hugely talented Portland composer whose influences range from jazz to opera to klezmer and Broadway and the spiky music of his teacher Elliott Carter, and who is likewise a graceful and insightful author who's done biographies of Carter, Duke Ellington, and George Gershwin.
Ed Asner: on politics and performing. Lori Tobias chatted with the legendary actor, who was on his fashion to the Oregon Coast to star as God (really!) in a play being staged equally a fundraiser for the Newport Performing Arts Heart. Anything he'due south withal hoping to accomplish? she asked the 89-year-old actor and political activist. "Have they picked the Nobel Peace Prize this year?" he replied.
Stan Foote, at the acme. On the twenty-four hours in May when he stood on a phase in Atlanta to have a top honour at the national Theatre for Young Audiences/USA festival and conference, we told the tale of Foote's ascension in the theater world and how, every bit artistic director, he helped build Oregon Children's Theatre to national prominence. Foote retired this year later on 28 years with the company.
Dani Baldwin forges her own path. Bobby Bermea talks with Baldwin virtually how she'south helped turn Oregon Children's Theatre's innovative Young Professionals Visitor into a artistic hot spot for teen theater, and why she didn't want to supersede Foote every bit head of the parent company.
Storm Big: Deadly Sins to Holiday Ordeal. Matthew Neil Andrews talks with the Portland diva about life, singing, Miriam Makeba, the White Album, the differences between classical and pop/stone audiences, and branching out as an orchestra vocalist on Kurt Weill's Seven Mortiferous Sins and a slightly twisted holiday show with the Oregon Symphony.
Roady Trip: Ortega in Prague. Bobby Bermea talks with in-demand sound designer and theater composer (and commercial pilot) Rodolfo Ortega about his booming career and his invitation to exhibit his work at the prestigious Prague Quadrennial.
IN THE FRAME: PICTURE THIS
IN 2019 SEVERAL TALENTED PHOTOGRAPHERS took the lead on stories for ArtsWatch, telling their tales in words but likewise, and for the most office primarily, in visual images. All take distinctive styles that are their own. They are artists, adept in the art of visual storytelling.
Joe Cantrell turned his lens on projects and events as varied equally the Waterfront Blues Festival; the blueprint and building of Mozart'southward garden for PSU Opera'due south La Finta Giardiniera, a chalk art festival in Beaverton; Beaverton's starting time little night marketplace of the summer; and the 2nd Saturday night in the international market, which on one August evening provided a sterling counterpoint to the day's invasion of white supremacist demonstrators a few miles away in downtown Portland.
Chiliad.B. Dixon's images in black and white included, amongst several other hitting visual stories: a Day of the Dead celebration at the Portland Art Museum; Portland coffeehouse culture; the Portland Womxn's March; Tuba Christmas in Pioneer Courthouse Square; and portraits of Oregon writers, Role ane and Part 2.
Friderike Heuer, in addition to her striking reporting on Maryhill'south Exquisite Gorge project and several Art on the Road stories, from the Whitney Biennial in New York to Käthe Kollwitz in Los Angeles, wove themes of justice into visual stories about a 20th ceremony commemoration of the advocacy newspaper Street Roots; an inmate video art projection inside a minimum-security prison; and a soldier's journey from armed forces life to an art academy.
Dee Moore's photo essay Profiles in Gender looked at the stories of ten genderfluid artists, including herself: "For me it all ended when I was eight years onetime and screaming that I was a male child and begging to be allowed to get to the boys' bathroom at a posh eating house."
Angela Allen followed the route of the late Indian photojournalist Raghubir Singh, who proclaimed that "its unique sense of colour" was his land's biggest cultural contribution, and came back from a journey across the subcontinent with a bulging portfolio of color, turning seventeen of her images into the photograph essay Art on the Road: Colors of India.
PASSAGES: Saying OUR FAREWELLS
IN 2019 ARTSWATCH AND OREGON SAID Farewell to several arts figures who died during the year. Each left an enduring legacy on the culture of the country.
Isabella Chappell. For many years Isabella (she would not have liked to be called just "Chappell") was the prime government minister of Portland theater, a onetime dancer from New Jersey who became a legendary leader of the old Portland Borough Theatre and something of a female parent figure for all sorts of theater people in all corners of the city. "People talk about the magic of theater, and for many years Per centum thrived on a fly and a prayer," we wrote. "Isabella was the magician, keeping the wing airborne and making sure the prayers were practical enough to exist answered." She died on February 1, at 95.
Bonnie Merrill. "Merrill kept her Portland trip the light fantastic toe card full for shut to xl years," Heather Wisner wrote. "She worked with modern and ballet companies, public schoolhouse students, and collegiate dancers from Portland State, Lewis and Clark, and Reed. She created more than than 100 works that were performed on flick, onstage, and in city streets. Along the way, she forged creative alliances with musicians and visual artists, and earned accolades including the simply Oregon Governor's Award for the Arts given to an individual dance artist." Built-in in 1935, Merrill died on Valentine'south Day.
Russ Fast. The longtime Portland stage and film actor died from cancer on February twenty at age 71. "He was a sometime musician – a drummer and backup singer – and made an early proper name for himself as a tap-dancer and lip-syncher," nosotros wrote. "He was a man of the theater, performing, by his own count, in 143 productions in Portland, New York, Seattle, and elsewhere. He sometimes made his living as an accomplished vox role player, and worked regularly in film: movies, telly, commercials, industrials. He directed, and taught acting. And with his friend, the actor B. Joe Medley, and Jeanne Medley he opened Graphic symbol Actors, one of the first talent agencies in the Pacific Northwest."
Jim Mesi. The "stone brilliant," in writer John Foyston's words, blues guitarist died on March 4 from complications of emphysema, at historic period 69. "He was universally respected for his inventive and exuberant style, which could range from an achingly sweet, subtleSleepwalk played with volume-knob swells and chiming harmonics to the speed-pickingsturm und drangofMiserlou," Foyston wrote. "It wasn't just locals who revered the human being, either: He counted guitarists such as ZZ Tiptop'south Billy Gibbons as fans, and the Jim Mesi Band web site shows him onstage with Les Paul, backstage with B.B.King.
D.E. May. May died of cancer on February 27, at age 66. A legend in his native "island Salem," he was known far more widely for his meticulously geometric, blueprint-like abstract paintings. "When we met him in person, nosotros immediately liked the homo as much as the things he made," his artist friends Anna Grayness and Ryan Wilson Paulsen wrote. "We felt refreshed by his matter-of-fact arroyo to fine art making, every bit if being an artist was no more mythic than being a carpenter or steel-worker, no less necessary than being a bartender or a cab driver. His humility, dedication, and sureness of purpose were reflected in the things he created. It is as if his drawings and modest constructions weren't made, merely evolved over time without the overly witting intervention of an artistic manus. Because of this, his meticulous abstractions hold a subtle magic."
Carola Penn. The longtime Portland painter died April 2 of cancer, at 74. Her assuming paintings oft broke free of rectangular expectation, as critic Randy Gragg once noted: "She slices up her paintings, as she puts it, using the 'jigsaw as a cubist weapon.'" Her urban landscapes often felt like disruptions or deliberately clashing juxtapositions, peradventure reflecting on her time in the Ceremonious Rights movement, including an abort in Washington, D.C., for participating in a demonstration to unseat the Mississippi delegation during the 1964 Autonomous National Convention. During the Vietnam War she and her husband headed for Canada, stopped in Portland, and never left: Here is where she too her stand and made her marking.
Lyndee Mah. "Every civilisation needs at least ane Lyndee Mah—an indomitably positive source of energy, compassion and commitment to art, a connector and facilitator, an advisor and advocate, someone to console us when that is necessary," Barry Johnson wrote of the talented vocalist, a founding member of Pink Martini. "A gifted artist, Mah was possibly fifty-fifty more than gifted at the creation of customs, in her case, a community that included many artists." Mah, who was born in 1958, died in her sleep of a heart assail on April one.
James B. Thompson. Born and raised in Chicago, Thompson lived for many years in Salem, teaching at Willamette Academy and building his own career as a printmaker, painter, and fused-glass creative person. He possessed a restless mind that found the material for his art in, as nosotros wrote, "medieval books of hours and their free-floating sense of infinite, the mysteries of Neolithic stone art, the techniques and possibilities of fused glassmaking, the game of golf game, the act of mapping, geological shifts, the ways in which science and nature and human beings collaborate, the human being bear on on the changing mural, the fading of traditional cultures in a modern world, the cultural and creative implications of the fragmentation of the universe, the liberating breakup of Renaissance perspective in gimmicky art." Thompson died on October 27 from furnishings of the cancer mesothelioma, at 68. "I'm still making things," he said in 2016, on the occasion of a xx-year retrospective of his work at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art. "I am still using my hands and my mind. You accept such a brusque time on this planet. Yous actually want to try to figure out a few things before you go."
Juergen Eckstein. Eckstein, a fixture in Newport who founded the coast city'southward co-op For Artsake, died October 31 from complications of a stroke, at 77. His work cropped up most anywhere: public driftwood sculptures in Newport, a parade of yellow umbrellas on Nye Embankment, a 20-human foot sculpture at Burning Human in the Nevada desert. "The German native liked beer, was passionate virtually the environment, eschewed medicine, and traveled the world with his family," Lori Tobias wrote. She quoted his friend and fellow artist Cynthia Jacobi: "I think he was just a actually free spirit. He always liked to say he was an unschooled autodidact. He had a unique manner of looking at things."
Michael Bowley. Paul Sutinen pays homage to his longtime friend, who died in the fall at age 72. Bowley worked on big pieces as a studio assistant for sculptor Mel Katz, actually enjoyed art theory, and taught for some years at Marylhurst University, in add-on to being a handyman. "In March last twelvemonth Michael had a testify of 'napkin drawings' at 9 Gallery," Sutinen wrote. "These were little sketches on restaurant napkins—maybe as notes for himself or when he was explaining something, like he did back in the '70s when we were having coffee. He'd been saving them for years. They have the kind of intriguing modesty that I identify with Michael. He never sought the limelight, never had a show in a commercial gallery. Only he was THERE when needed over the history of art in Portland during the past four decades. He was the kind of artist that artists know about."
MUSIC: 365 DAYS OF STRUCTURED Sound
FROM ROCK CLUBS TO CABARETS, CONCERT HALLS to outdoor festivals, Oregon is in a perpetual state of playing and listening to music. Information technology might be hip hop, information technology might be Mozart, it might exist punk, it might exist Gregorian dirge: From January through December, music's everywhere. Here's just a small-scale gustatory modality of the sounds we found compelling in 2019:
How-do-you-do from Bali! – Regular contributor Matthew Neil Andrews took over equally Artswatch's music editor and columnist in 2019 (replacing Brett Campbell, who moved to a senior editor position) and almost immediately took off for a pre-planned half-dozen weeks in Bali to immerse himself in Indonesian gamelan orchestra practices and learn from the masters. During his heady residency he sent back illuminating dispatches.
A century of Leonard Bernstein. The Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education opened a traveling exhibition of mementos, film clips, and and other artifacts celebrating the peachy composer/conductor/musical popularizer's centennial, and Evan Lewis put it into perspective for ArtsWatch readers. Having worked for the Leonard Bernstein Office in New York as a young man, Lewis knew the territory.
"As 1": due east pluribus unum / Kimberly Reed: e'er in transition. Matthew Neil Andrews reviewed Portland Opera's premiere product of the transgender chamber opera, and Brett Campbell interviewed Reed, the co-librettist and video project designer, and not coincidentally the inspiration, for the new work.
Florence Price'southward compelling musical world. 80-six years after the Chicago Symphony Orchestra premiered Price'due south Symphony No. ane in Due east modest, Portland'due south Metropolitan Youth Symphony performed its West Coast premiere. Singer and writer Damien Geter talks virtually why this performance, and the pioneering African American woman composer, are important.
Music in the wineries: a fine pairing. Angela Allen braved the barrels in Yamhill Canton wine country to observe out what was up with the 4th summer Willamette Valley Sleeping accommodation Music Festival. She also interviewed featured composer and violinist Jessie Montgomery, a "rising star – or risen constellation."
Loving the chaos: Hunter Noack in the wild. Brett Campbell contemplated the 30-yr-old pianist's summer adventures equally he took "a 9-pes Steinway piano and 300 pairs of wireless headphones to some of Oregon's most cute outdoor spaces." The headphones were for Noack's audience, which eagerly followed him into the wilderness.
Music Scout: How to make up one's mind. "I know what you lot're thinking. 'Hey Mr. Music Editor Guy, how the [redacted] am I supposed to pick 1 of these million shows y'all're always telling us about?' Adept question, dear foul-mouthed reader. The brusk answer, every bit ever, is: follow your elation!" Matthew Neil Andrews kindly helps yous sort it out.
Meaning and quality on a shoestring: the Woody Guthrie opera. Angela Allen considered the many charms and accomplishments of Opera Theater Oregon'southThis Land Sings: Songs of Wandering, Love and Protest, Michael Daugherty's radio-prove-style bedroom opera.
The meanings of music 3: community grooves. In the concluding chapter of a three-role series, Matthew Neil Andrews writes about music and its meanings through the lens of Third Angle New Music's Back in the Groove, which mixed some hot gimmicky "classical" flute-playing with references to Jethro Tull.
Percussion's vast instrumentarium. Charles Rose thinks rhythmically nearly the Portland Percussion Group and the vast multifariousness of shakes, rattles, rolls, snaps, and bangs that make upwardly the percussive world.
Embracing creativity: Gabriel Kahane and the Oregon Symphony. Matthew Neil Andrews talks with the composer about his new creative chair post with the orchestra. Kahane: "This is a vital art course, and this living fine art form connects to older pieces, just similar you lot enter a museum and encounter Renaissance paintings next to conceptual video pieces from the present. You lot can walk through and meet how these ideas evolved."
Makrokosmos Project: expansive vision. Brett Campbell considers the glories of Stephanie Ho and Saar Ahuvia's fifth annual "5-hour, come-and-go-as-you-please music marathon": "The festival started considering Ho and Ahuvia, a married couple who live in New York City, visited Ho'due south native Portland each summertime to take hold of up with family unit — and nature. Their friend Harold Gray, the Portland State Academy professor and pianist who founded Portland Piano International, suggested that 'instead of only doing so much hiking, we should do something musical, likewise,' Ahuvia recalled."
Shape-annotation singing across the centuries. Daniel Heila visits Portland Sacred Harp and discovers a earth – nay, a wondrous time warp – of music open to anyone.
VISUAL ARTS: A YEAR OF CHALLENGE & SURPRISE
Lucinda Parker'due south force fields. "Lucinda Parker is the premier Portland painter of her generation," Paul Sutinen began his insightful review of the Portland artist's half-century retrospective at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, and so proceeded to make his persuasive case.
"The map is not the territory": Whose edge is information technology? Laurel Reed Pavic, ArtsWatch's visual arts editor, reviewed the Portland Art Museum's fascinating and challenging bound exhibit: "You lot—with your personal history, your anxieties, hopes, and dreams for the present and future—you are more than than your driver'due south license. Identity is more complex than that, and in the same manner, a region is more than complicated than its borders and topographic elevations."
A history of Portland women artists. Sometimes the artists are also the fine art. ArtsWatch joined a packed house in June at Froelick Gallery to hear a grouping of women talk about a giant painting in which they "starred": "The crowd, many of whom were as well artists, packed the identify to get a close look at9 Portraits, artist Katherine Ace's ten-foot-wide diptych group portrait of nine prominent veteran Portland women artists, and to hear those artists talk most the painting, their careers, and the ofttimes difficult path of making information technology as a woman in a traditionally male-dominated field." Collector Arlene Schnitzer bought the painting and donated it to the Portland Art Museum, where it becomes a office of the city's art history.
Hank Willis Thomas: How to unmake race. "The neon higher up the main archway of the Portland Art Museum reads 'LOVERULES.' Illuminated in dissimilar combinations, it reads both 'dear overules' and 'love over rules.'" Laurel Reed Pavic reviewed Thomas's retrospective addressing the complication of race in America.
Warp, weft, in between and beyond. Martha Daghlian took in the woven wonders of the Textile Connections Symposium during Portland Textile Month and constitute a corking deal of forward-looking energy: "(T)he most of import work seemed to exist happening already. But connecting cobweb and cloth artists with each other – sharing their piece of work, traditions, and opinions – might have the greatest impact on the futurity forcefulness and development of the community."
A rare look at the Yunnan School. David Bates dove into the background of a show of Chinese paintings at Newberg's Chehalem Cultural Eye that "emerged from the wreckage of the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s." It was, Bates wrote, "the quintessence of 'melting pot' art. The paintings were produced by urban, university-trained Chinese artists who left familiar surround to alive in an isolated rural area, bringing with them European influences, New Age perspectives and, of course, a knowledge of traditional Chinese art, which dates back thousands of years. Far from the scrutiny of Beijing, the artists constitute themselves working in a rural region with its own traditions of folk and indigenous art."
The view from Portland2019. Laurel Reed Pavic reviewed Disjecta'southward 5th biennial: "The art can't be described as pretty nor escapist nor timeless. Perhaps timeful is a better characterization—a snapshot of where we are in 2019 in all its messiness."
"What Needs To Be Said." David Bates defenseless this fascinating show of work by thirteen recent winners of the Hallie Ford Fellowship – information technology's been touring the state – at the Hallie Ford Museum of Fine art in Salem. "There was no directive, overarching conceptual theme to the show," curator Diana Nawi told Bates. "I remember it is more generally a bear witness that evidences the range of ways these artists work and puts an emphasis on the idea of creative practice."
Monica Setziol-Phillips, carving her own path. Weaver and woodcarver Setziol-Phillips is the daughter of legendary Oregon carver Leroy Setziol, a relationship that has sometimes hung heavily on her as she's fabricated her own way in the fine art globe. Only her newest works, at Salishan Resort, sit next with her father'southward. "They come from the energy of the ocean, the abstruse patterns that class in the sand, the weather," she told ArtsWatch's Lori Tobias.
A cityscape in crochet. Sebastian Zinn considered the allure and sheer brazenness of a new and highly unusual mural made from parachute chord and adorning the facade of the Slingshot Lounge in Southeast Portland: "Scottish fiber creative person and Portland transplant Jo Hamilton endows yarn with the representational properties of pigment. Using a traditional crochet technique learned from her grandmother, Hamilton creates staggeringly colorful portraits and whimsical cityscapes."
FAST & FURIOUS: THE YEAR IN Trip the light fantastic toe
AND OF Course, IN 2019 We DANCED THE Nighttime Abroad. All sorts of dances, in all sorts of places. A sampling of some of the year'south highlights:
Minh Tran'south journey to rebirth. When does the personal get the universal? Martha Ullman W constitute the moment in the veteran Portland choreographer'due south start new piece of work in 8 years, a deeply felt and considered response to the loss of his parents.
Linda Austin's "Ordinary Devotions". Elizabeth Whelan constitute deep meaning in the work of some other veteran Portland dancemaker, whose "peculiar playground" was "meant to exercise 2 things: find glamour in everyday objects and honor the ordinary—and extraordinary—qualities of the crumbling body."
Chauncey Parsons' concluding bow. Martha Ullman West wrote a deep appreciation of the Oregon Ballet Theatre dancer, who retired from the stage at 37.
Pole disclosure: Acrobatics meets #metoo. Jamuna Chiarini talked with the contemporary circus duo Kate Police and Amaya Alvarado about "climbing upwardly the pole, supporting each other in various death-defying, off-heart feats of remainder, hanging off of each other in mid-air, and sliding downward the pole towards the floor at breakneck speeds and stopping just inches from catastrophe."
A new festival addresses dance / Union PDX: making the case for dance. Jamuna Chiarini talked with choreographer Samuel Hobbs about why he thinks Portland's dance scene is in dire straits and needs a new festival. Elizabeth Whelan looked dorsum on how the festival all came together.
At Eugene Ballet, Suzanne Haag plays with fire. Gary Ferrington talked with the old Eugene Ballet dancer almost her transition to choreographer and her new version of The Firebird for the company.
The unkindness of strangers. James Canfield's evocation of Tennessee Williams and A Streetcar Named Desire was a winner for NW Dance Project: "The funk and sweat and drastic seediness of New Orleans are then thick in the air above James Canfield's new trip the light fantastic toeSketches of Connotation that yous can almost smell them rising from the stage of Lincoln Performance Hall."
THEATER: THE Curtain NEVER DROPS
FOR SOME PEOPLE, Whatever Yr ARRIVES IN STAGES. Large stages, small stages, fancy stages, stripped-down stages, all across the town. It'south been a busy, fruitful year for theater lovers. Hither are just a few highlights – not a "best-of" list – from 2019.
Within Fertile Basis: Six Tales. Bobby Bermea got down to the nitty-gritty with the creators of half a dozen shows at Portland'southward sprawling annual festival of new works. How do they do it, and why?
Jane Austen, upended. DeAnn Welker came to sing the praises of Portland Center Stage's adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, with a few caveats.
Boom! Big changes as season ends. TJ Acena followed the fortunes of the adventurous presenting company Boom Arts from beginning to finish. Some big surprises came along the way.
Crossing Mnisose: Standing on a rock. Kathryn Nagle's time-hopping new play at Portland Center Stage leaped from the Lewis & Clark Expedition to the Standing Rock anti-pipeline movement, and back again. "Time warps in Nagle's plays, or rather, overlaps. The past is prologue to the present, an enduring chord within a freshly written song, the sins of the fathers visiting generations to come."
ZooZoo, direct from the polar bear's mouth. Want the real lowdown on the lives and times of Imago's fabulous costumed critters in its hit ZooZoo? Danielle Vermette tells tales from a decade of traveling with the menagerie, inside the suits.
Musings on behavior, blackness, and what shows to see. Theater editor Marty Hughley's far-reaching column ranged from the etiquette of watching a bear witness (eating craven? really?) to awareness of race and what information technology ways within the theater.
The homesick and the haunted. A pair of Thai-American ghostbusters did the haunting at Prince Gomolvilas's The Brothers Paranormal at Theatre Diaspora. Bennett Campell Ferguson declared that information technology "grips you like a not bad horror motion picture, simply it succeeds considering it cares nearly both the earthly and the unearthly—the anguish of the living and the dead."
OUTwright: a Booty Candy tale. Bobby Bermea went backstage at Fuse's almanac festival of queer theater to become the lowdown on one of its hits, Robert O'Hara's Haul Processed.
"Queens Daughter": a colorful, complicated coming of age. Marty Hughley writes nigh the black dot syndrome, the reality of race, and Lauren Steele'southward gorgeous performance in Caleene Sinette Jennings' play Queens Girl in the Globe at Clackamas Rep.
Bakkhai to the future. "Don't aggravate the gods." The age-quondam message came through loud and clear in Shaking the Tree's visually ravishing contemporary update of Eueripides' 405 B.C.East. Greek tragedy.
THE Concluding BITE
Cheerio, my sugariness gibassier. Who'd've thought an ode to a lost pastry would be ane of our virtually read and almost widely shared stories of the yr? That's what happened with our tale of the sudden closure of the Pearl Bakery – a Northwest cultural zone standby, near Powell's City of Books, The Armory, and several major art galleries – and in particular the loss of one of the city's finest, most artistic pastries, the Pearl's anise-and-orange-inflected gibassier. Information technology was a bittersweet yr, indeed.
Source: https://www.orartswatch.org/going-going-gone-2019-in-review/
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