
The Oregon Arts Commission announced on Tuesday $260,000 in “Arts Build Communities” grants to 52 arts and cultural organizations across the state “for projects that address community issues or needs through the arts.” Each group will receive $5,000.
The awards range across a wide swath of interests and disciplines, from museums to theater companies to dance, music, literary, and cultural groups, in a program that the arts commission describes as being “committed to promoting arts access for underserved audiences and [to target] broad geographic impact throughout the state.”
“This program demonstrates the power of the arts in transforming lives and communities,” Arts Commission Chair Subashini Ganesan-Forbes said in a press statement. “The funding supports creative thinking and a collective response to strengthen and enrich communities.”
The majority of grantees are in the greater Portland area, but several are based around the state, among them the Albany Regional Museum (to underwrite a photo exhibition on Oregon’s Trail of Tears), the Ashland New Plays Festival, the Cave Junction Farmers Market (to help pay for a theater class and performance at the market site of a play about climate issues), Centro Cultural Del Condado De Washington in Cornelius (to underwrite events that celebrate Latino cultural heritage), Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts, in Pendleton (to help rebuild youth education programming disrupted by COVID-19 at Nixya’awii Community School), the Eugene Springfield Youth Orchestras, Huitzilopochtli in Woodburn (“to promote indigenous Mexican cultural traditions and inspire underserved youth and their families to engage in creative expression”), Newport’s Oregon Coast Aquarium (to support “an exhibition of marine life sculptures made from plastics found on beaches”), the Sitka Center for Art & Ecology, in Otis (for a photography project in K-8 schools across Clatsop, Tillamook, and Lincoln counties), Scalehouse, in Bend (to support an exhibition, artist talk and workshop by Melanie Stevens), the Keizer Creative Art Association in Salem (to support this year’s Keizer Riverwalk Art Fair), and the Lane Arts Council, in Eugene (to expand cultural programming for First Friday ArtWalks).
Greater Portland groups awarded grants range from Corrib, Bag & Baggage, Artists Rep and other theater companies to Literary Arts, enTaiko drumming group, Friends of Noise music group, the art group Gather:Make:Shelter, The Immigrant Story, Lan Su Chinese Garden, the Latino Project (to support Ballet Folkórico’s youth programs), North Pole Studio (to support its two-year touring exhibition featuring 50 artworks created by artists with autism and I/DD), p:ear (to help underwrite a new black and white film photography program), and Theatre Diaspora (to help pay for a series of staged readings to “showcase new theatrical works from local Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander artists”).
Oregon ArtsWatch received a grant to help fund its ongoing Cultural Hubs series of stories that highlight cultural centers around the state, many in rural and underserved areas, that provide arts and cultural opportunities for their communities. At least 25 such stories will be published in 2025.
See the complete list of grantees and their projects here.
Artist Takahiro Yamamoto awarded $50,000 national grant

Meanwhile, on Tuesday the New York-based grantmaking organization Creative Capital announced $2.45 million in 2025 grants for new works across the nation, and Oregon artist Takahiro Yamamoto is one of the 49 project grantees, receiving $50,000 to advance his work-in-progress Hollow Center.
Yamamoto, a multidisiplinary artist and choreographer, is basing Hollow Center on his experience as part of an Asian diaspora and “on the Zen Buddhist ideals of erasure and existence,” Creative Capital said in a prepared statement.
The project consists of three parts, the release continues: a short film, dance, and publication. “The experimental short film is developed in collaboration with filmmaker Roland Dahwen, and uses footage of Takahiro Yamamoto’s physical movement practice and visual/audio experiments with exposure, noise, and animation to explore the concept of opacity (what to implicitly keep abstracted without making it legible and translatable for the sake of understanding by the dominant culture).
“The dance portion will be placed in two settings: 1) A four-hour performance installation performed by Yamamoto in a gallery setting for three days; 2) A sixty-minute dance that sequences a solo, performed by Yamamoto with set choreography and structured improvisational scores, alongside a duet consisting of Yamamoto and a local performer at each venue, which will be collaboratively created; and 3) a book comprised of his essays based on dramaturgical research as well as contributions (visual image, poetry, transcription of conversation) from his community members who identify with the phenomenon of living in a diaspora.”
See the full list of awardees — 49 projects and 60 artists — here.
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