CULTURE

Exquisite Gorge 7: The Explorer

Printmaker and teacher Molly Gaston Johnston follows Lewis & Clark's westward path to make her mark on Maryhill's Columbia River project

August 15, 2019 // CULTURE, NEWS & NOTES, VISUAL ART //

Molly Gaston Johnson and her river of wood.

STORY AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY FRIDERIKE HEUER

Maryhill Museum of Art’s planned print day of its Exquisite Gorge project is approaching fast. Hopefully there is a chance to portray each and of the participating artists and their work before August 24. Let me introduce today another one of the print makers who I had a chance to talk to in the last several days.

Molly Gaston Johnson, Printmaker and Educator

THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECT

“…a collaborative printmaking project featuring 11 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence to create a massive 66-foot steamrolled print. The unique project takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”


– Louise Palermo, Curator of Education at Maryhill Museum

Imagine being told since the time you sat on your father’s knees that you are a descendant of Lewis & Clark. Lewis AND Clark! Being regaled with lively tales of hardship and adventure, what is a little girl to do but fall in love with the outdoors and embrace most forms of risk-seeking ventures – it is practically written into your DNA. Well, perhaps not practically, but theoretically. Who knows about the factual truth of the family lore?

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Coast calendar: Cool diversions for summer’s dog days

Late August is the time to apply to teach a workshop, audition for a play, or just beat the heat by visiting a gallery

August 14, 2019 // COAST, CULTURE, MUSIC, THEATER, VISUAL ART //

It’s been a hot, muggy summer here on the Coast, which for those of us fond of the more moderate, 60-ish temperatures makes a visit indoors to a gallery or theater all the more inviting.  Luckily, there’s something cool going on pretty much all up and down the Coast.

A new exhibition of linocut printmaking by Marit Berg is up in the Imprint Gallery in Cannon Beach. Berg’s work frequently features animals with “a subtext that expresses the delicate balance of life within the natural world and how animals develop particular traits to thrive in their habitats,” said gallery co-owner Jane Brumfield. The artist has been drawn to portraying hares, which are included in this show, and has also turned her attention to foxes.

“Waiting Fox,” by Marit Berg (linocut print, 26 x 34 inches) is one of the fox and hare series on display in Cannon Beach’s Imprint Gallery.
“Waiting Fox,” by Marit Berg (linocut print, 26 x 34 inches) is part of Berg’s fox and hare series on display in Cannon Beach’s Imprint Gallery.

“Natural selection rewards survival through adaptation,” Berg writes. “These adaptations reveal themselves in interesting and varied forms, particularly in animals. They may evolve as competitive display; to warn off a predator; or as camouflage in the surroundings. These traits have also informed myth and symbolism in many cultures. I investigate these traits and contrast them to exemplify the diversity and specialization of the species, in separate works.”

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Local literary talent blooms in ‘Paper Gardens 2019’

More than 50 Yamhill County writers of poetry and prose are featured in the collection that recently hit bookstore and library shelves

August 13, 2019 // CULTURE, LANGUAGE ARTS, YAMHILL //

Over the past couple of decades, Yamhill County writers and arts advocates have developed an infrastructure to assist their own, and the most visible of those efforts — a published volume of local prose and poetry — recently hit the shelves in libraries and bookstores.

Paper Gardens 2019 is a 116-page collection featuring work by more than 50 writers of all ages. They were among hundreds who submitted work in the categories of traditional poetry, free verse, haiku, fiction, and nonfiction. Two professional judges (one for poetry, one for prose) narrowed the field, and the book featuring their selections was released at a ceremony at the Chehalem Cultural Center earlier this year.

More so than live theater, music, or visual art, a region’s literary scene can be tough to track. The work is produced largely in isolation, often by those who are disinclined to call attention to themselves, and only a few of whom reach a level where the resources of a major publisher or magazine are brought to bear in nudging an author’s work into full public view.

The Arts Alliance of Yamhill County has published Paper Gardens 2019, featuring the prose and verse of more than 50 Yamhill County residents. The cover art is by Jeanne Cuddeford.
The Arts Alliance of Yamhill County has published “Paper Gardens 2019,” featuring the prose and verse of more than 50 Yamhill County residents. The cover art is by Jeanne Cuddeford. Photo by: David Bates

Paper Gardens, sponsored by the Arts Alliance of Yamhill County and made possible with sponsorships by McMinnville Kiwanis and McMinnville Noon Rotary, has (with other events) helped raise the visibility of such writers.

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Exquisite Gorge 6: The Guardian

Greg Archuleta, artist and cultural policy analyst for the Grand Ronde tribes, links past and future in Maryhill's Columbia Gorge print project

August 12, 2019 // CULTURE, NEWS & NOTES //

STORY AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY FRIDERIKE HEUER

Last week I met a guardian of both the past and the future.

Greg Archuleta, Artist and Cultural Policy Analyst for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde

A conversation with Greg Archuleta, artist, educator, and now Cultural Policy Analyst for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, made his calling abundantly clear. On the one hand, as an artist and educator, he is focused on preserving the traditions and knowledge of the past. On the other hand, he is also intensely engaged, both as an educator and a community activist, in protecting conditions needed to extend that past into the future.

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Chalk up another win for art

In Beaverton, the two-day La Strada dei Pastelli Chalk Art Festival draws evanescent images and crowds to a place where the people are

August 12, 2019 // CULTURE, NEWS & NOTES, VISUAL ART //

Look down. No, really. On the pavement. Suddenly that big gray sea of asphalt and concrete connecting parking lots and buildings is a free-flowing splendor of shape and color, a vibrant surface of spectacle, an instant outdoor gallery of art – in, of all places, a shopping mall. And why not? Art for the people ought to go where the people are.

On Saturday and Sunday at Cedar Hills Crossing in Beaverton, chalk art arrived big-time in greater Portland in the form of the first La Strada dei Pastelli Chalk Art Festival, organized by the Beaverton art producers 2D4D (whose board president, Raziah Roushan, is herself a chalk artist) and continuing an Oregon mini-season of sidewalk artistry: Next up, the Valley Art Association will throw its 29th annual Sidewalk Chalk Art Festival in Forest Grove on Sept. 21.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOE CANTRELL

It’s all part of a worldwide movement: You can find chalk-art festivals all across Europe, from Germany to England to Italy (where they’re purported to have begun in the 16th century, outside cathedrals, as sketches for the curious crowds of the frescoes and murals being painted inside); in Canada, Australia, and Asia. In the United States they happen from Knoxville to Baltimore to Denver to San Diego to Georgia to Florida and beyond.

Part art and part event, chalk art has family ties to mural painting and graffiti art, decorative bike-lane paintings at street intersections in urban neighborhoods, and also, in festivals like these, to performance art: Crowds gather to watch the artists create their pastel drawings on the spot. It offers the thrill of creation and the bittersweet knowledge of impermanence: Chalk artists usually plan their designs well in advance, often even making small studies in anticipation of hitting the streets, yet street chalking is a fleeting art, fading and disappearing with the scuffle of feet and the inevitability of rain. At Cedar Hills Crossing, the street sweepers are due to wipe away the evidence on Wednesday, so catch it while you can.

Sarah Flores sitting and chalking, in the midst of it all.

Photographer Joe Cantrell took his cameras and his curiosity to La Strada dei Pastelli to check out the action as a talented group of professional chalk artists, several of whom travel from chalk festival to chalk festival creating fresh art, gathered to transform Cedar Hills Crossing’s pavement. It was a big undertaking – an $80,000 event, said Roushan, with significant contributions from the mall, other Beaverton businesses, and government cultural underwriting – and plans already are being made for a 2020 festival. “It was fantastic,” Roushan said. “A great turnout.”

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Beloved Festival: decolonizing music

Oregon music festival includes music from many cultures, addresses issues ranging from terminology to privilege

August 8, 2019 // COAST, CULTURE, DANCE, MUSIC, NEWS & NOTES //

For eleven years, Oregon’s Beloved Festival has embraced multicultural musical diversity, environmental sustainability, a peace-and-love vibe. In a sylvan setting on private forestland in the Coast Range, about 3,000 attendees could dance, meditate, practice yoga, eat vegan, and celebrate secular spirituality in a “spontaneous village.” But while many of its invited performers were musicians of color, its audiences were overwhelmingly white.

It’s an issue common to blues, jazz concerts and so-called “world music” concerts. (Oregon has other events that feature music from many cultures, most notably the Salem World Beat Festival.) Beloved founder/director Elliott Rasenick decided to do something about it — “to really ask why is it mostly white people here? And to take responsibility. The lazy way is to say ‘we’re in Oregon.’” Last year, he led a discussion from the main stage and promised changes. This year’s festival, which runs August 9-12, shows the festival beginning to respond. 

The reform effort got off to a rough start. “Last year I really wanted to start to talk about racism and white supremacy,” Rasenick recalled, envisioning an on-stage discussion between him and an activist of color. “I started asking black women who did anti racist work and kept getting these subtle ‘I’m not comfortable with that’ vibes.” Finally, Portland activist Teressa Raiford “made me understand how difficult that is — to ask a black person to teach white people about white supremacy, and to ask someone I haven’t worked with to build trust to work with me. That showed me that I need to show up and demonstrate I’m worthy of trust before I ask for things that require trust.”

Photo by Jess Stewart Maize.
Trust demonstrated at Beloved Festival 2018. Photo by Jess Stewart Maize.

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Exploring the epistolary art

Participants in a Sitka Center workshop may discover how letter-writing can survive the digital age, keep people connected, and restore deep focus

August 7, 2019 // COAST, CULTURE, LANGUAGE ARTS, VISUAL ART //

Tucked in the back of my closet is a small, blue suitcase I’ve hauled around with me since I was 18. Inside are bundles of letters, handwritten to me in the first years after I moved from Pennsylvania to Alaska.

Letters from my mom address my plans to move to France (“I don’t think France cares for us right now,” she wrote in 1979 on lined legal-pad paper) and eventually to study for my real-estate license. Letters from the musician I’d agreed to marry seem aimed at inspiring guilt, as in “I thought you were coming back.” Letters from my older sister detail, in her near-perfect penmanship, the mundanity of our small town – whom she ran into, where she applied for a job, how her daughter was (or was not) behaving.

Back then, unless you could afford the long-distance bills (my phone was frequently disconnected, thanks to my inability to keep-it-short), letters were how you kept in touch.

Laura Moulton will teach a workshop Aug. 17 and 18 on "The Art of the Letter" that will include making collage envelopes to deliver students' missives into the world.
Laura Moulton will teach a workshop Aug. 17 and 18 on “The Art of the Letter” that will include making collage envelopes to deliver students’ missives into the world. Photo courtesy: Laura Moulton

In recent years, I realized how much I missed writing – and receiving – personal letters, and I decided I was going to start writing them again. I even bought “fine parchment paper” and matching envelopes found on a clearance rack.

But after years of hurriedly filling reporters’ notebooks day after day after day after month after year, my  handwriting is illegible. It takes huge concentration for me to form an “ing” — the three letters have morphed into a hump with a loop. Likewise, the word “every” looks like an e with a wave and a loop. So while I was drawn to the idea of handwriting letters, I never quite got there. Sure, I could probably sit myself down and write a bit more nicely, but frankly, I’m not sure I have the patience.

Then, I saw the description for the upcoming class on The Art of the Letter: Writing, Collage & Mail Art at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology:

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