ArtsWatch Weekly: Doubling down
January 16, 2020
In Oregon this week, the arts go marching two by two (and sometimes to the beat of a different drummer).
In Oregon this week, the arts go marching two by two (and sometimes to the beat of a different drummer).
Vision 2020, new/old Five Oaks Museum, Second Winter music, blood sweat & fears onstage, storm of the (last) century.
A look back at the ups and downs and curious side trips of the year in Oregon culture.
Stories keep reinventing Oregon culture and art. Looking back, and peeking ahead to 2020 and beyond.
Stuck in an impeachment funk? Liberace, Liza, and a whole lot of holiday shows to reset the mood.
It’s year-end donation time. Help us keep the arts clock ticking. Also: Whole lotta holiday shows goin’ on.
Hip-hop haven, profiles in gender, museum Loverules, a new opera, un-holiday tunes, gibassiers & more.
After 23 years the Pearl Bakery’s ovens are shutting down, and a vital slice of Portland’s culture with them.
Giving, receiving, and digging in to Oregon’s lavish cultural banquet: the arts beat goes on.
An invitation to be a part of ArtsWatch, plus what’s new with centenarians Lenny and Merce.
Work begins on the $51 million Patricia Reser Center for the Arts, a long-held dream for the city’s center-in-the-making.
Portland Book Fest turns the page, downtown gets a new museum, and it’s beginning to feel a lot like … already?
The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art gives Portland a new center for contemporary art – and it’s free.
Frankenstein, Día de Muertos, tribute bands, dinosaurs, warps & wefts, a Dope Elf: Welcome to the art week.
Remembering the wide-ranging and distinguished Oregon artist and teacher, who has died at 68.
At Portland Playhouse, Tina Packer and Nigel Gore dive deeply into the world of women in Shakespeare’s plays.
A critic’s voice is human, fallible, individual. It will sometimes please you, sometimes amuse you, sometimes infuriate you.
Women & Shakespeare, Roger Kukes’ stories in paint, Día de Muertos, prison tales, “Butterfly” time.
In the Northwest, images of horror and hope – plus a West Side story and a divine voice.
From Scheharazade spinning stories to a 6-year-old spinning a galaxy, a whirl of Oregon creative life.
Shaking the Tree’s ravishing new version of Euripides’ ancient Greek tragedy ripples nervously down the centuries.
Same old story? Brash new wave? In Oregon this week, old and new and always mix it up.
The company kicks off its 16th season with works by a trio of European choreographers.
The mirror crack’d: Art ripped from the anxieties and tensions of an unruly world at large.
A few friends drop by to tell tales at the Waterstone Gallery artist’s show “Things That Don’t Float.”
Autumn settles in swiftly across Oregon, and with it the rhythms of a new cultural season.
From Eastern Oregon to a paint-out on the coast to queer opera and TBA in Portland to the New York streets, art is where you look.
As the contemporary arts festival surges onto an already bulging calendar, that is the question.
As the labor movement faces new challenges, art that reveals the highs and lows of work and its significance in life.
The opera abandons summers and returns to a fall-spring season. PSU’s new museum taps a proven leader.
Plus: It’s a print in the Gorge, a paint-out at the coast, dance for a prince, a Woody Guthrie opera. The week in Oregon arts.
Tigard’s Broadway Rose launches a $3 million expansion. Portland theater artists throw a party to buy a house.
Past and present tumble together in the vintage musicals “South Pacific” and “Footloose.”
In Maryhill’s Year of the Print, an exhibit of contemporary printmaking cuts from urban realism to the rhythms of the natural world.
If the best news from July 4 came from the many hilarious reactions to President Donald “The Rain Made Me Do It” Trump’s historical conflation of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Age of Flight, the worst news –
It’s all about the art, of course. But it’s also about the artists and the viewers, and how and why the art came to be. So on a sunny Saturday morning at Froelick Gallery off Northwest Broadway in Portland, a standing-room-only crowd
The funk and sweat and desperate seediness of New Orleans are so thick in the air above James Canfield’s new dance Sketches of Connotation that you can almost smell them rising from the stage of Lincoln Performance Hall. It’s an intoxicating aroma.
One of the things about Joan Mankin was, she was always a surprise: always in the moment, rarely the same thing twice, an improvisational spirit whose free-form antics could throw her fellow performers for a loop, delight her audiences, and send her
Walk into Museo du Profundo Mundo presents: THE ASCENT OF MAN, Lauren Carrera’s remarkable gallery-sized installation at Blackfish Gallery that closes Saturday, and you’ll find yourself in another world – very like the one you’ve just left on the street outside but
Seventy-one years ago next Thursday, on May 30, 1948, a railroad berm on the Columbia River gave way and the waters swept in, wiping out the city of Vanport in an overwhelming flood, killing at least 15 people and leaving roughly 17,500
How are you feeling? Been to the doctor lately? How’s your health insurance? Uncovered emergency bills draining your wallet and shooting your blood pressure through the stratosphere? Go to the closest hospital instead of the in-network hospital for that medical emergency, and
A good play ought to grab its audience from the very top and take it for a ride. The way it grabs an audience can be as varied as a cowboy crooning from the wings about a beautiful morning (Oklahoma!) or a
Sometime today, Stan Foote will be standing on a stage in Atlanta, accepting one of the highest honors in the tight-knit creative world of American children’s theater. Foote, artistic director of Oregon Children’s Theatre in Portland, will receive the Harold Oaks Award
A good piece of theater transports you to a different place, and in the case of Love, Loss, and What I Wore, the sentimental comedy by Nora and Delia Ephron that’s traipsing the metaphorical runway at Triangle Productions, that place is a
This Saturday, as it turns out, is World Naked Gardening Day, and don’t worry, neighbors, I’m not taking part: I’m not really much of a gardener. The revelation, however, makes me think of another spot of news I got a few days
A bit of banter between a couple of young indigenous protesters at Standing Rock drills down wryly and comically on one of the key issues in Mary Kathryn Nagle’s new time-hopping play Crossing Mnisose: the way that many white people either venerate
Photographs by JOE CANTRELL Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was 18 years old when his opera La Finta Giardiniera (The Pretend, or Fake, Gardener) debuted at the Salvatortheater in Munich in 1775. When it opens Friday evening at Lincoln Performance Hall in Portland it’ll
WHAT DO WE DO WHEN A CULTURAL TOUCHSTONE GOES UP IN FLAMES? We watch with fascination, and dread, and a sense of helplessness. And then, apparently, we begin to argue. After Monday’s catastrophic fire broke out in the heart of Paris, social
Irish playwright Sonya Kelly’s How To Keep an Alien, which took the best-production award when it premiered at the Tiger Dublin Fringe in 2014 and is now enjoying its West Coast premiere from Corrib, Portland’s all-Irish theater company, isn’t about flying saucers
Creativity is a mysterious beast. We try to lasso it and stick it in separate corrals: Writers here. Painters here. Composers here. Actors here. Dancers here. Git along, little dogies, but stay in place. Except creativity can also be a stubborn beast,
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