CULTURE

Things begin to stir at the Coast

In Newport, films will be shown outdoors and symphony members play online, while the Lincoln City Cultural Center has reopened to the public

June 4, 2020 // COAST, CULTURE, FAMILY, FILM, MUSIC, OREGON, THEATER, VISUAL ART //

The Newport Performing Arts Center remains dark, but that doesn’t mean nothing is going on.

Friday, June 5, marks the start of the PAC Picture Show. Due to licensing restrictions that I don’t quite understand, the Performing Arts Center cannot reveal what the coming films are, beyond describing them as nostalgic, but you can find the titles by going to the website.

The films will be shown outdoors in socially distanced “Parking Lot Theatre style” at the Performing Arts Center on Friday and Saturday nights. The sound is broadcast via FM radio, so you’ll need a working FM radio if you want to hear the film. A $15 donation is requested for admission, which guarantees a parking spot. Space for SUVs, trucks, vans, and minivans is very limited, organizers say, so best if you can drive a smaller vehicle.

The picture show is sponsored by the Oregon Coast Council for the Arts, which is also sponsoring the ongoing online art show at the Visual Arts Center.  

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Ren Faire: Same time, next year

A historic plague knocks the Renaissance Faire off its horse. K.B. Dixon pictures last year's gathering as the bards and jugglers look ahead.

June 2, 2020 // CULTURE //

TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY K.B. DIXON

“April is the cruelest month,” said T.S. Eliot. This year we have had several Aprils, and we are poised to have several more. June, for instance. It is one of the busiest months in Oregon for festivals and fairs, and this year it is one of those most obviously affected by the pandemic. Together with the Rose Festival and Portland Pride’s Waterfront Festival and Parade, the extravagant costume party that is the Oregon Renaissance Faire has been “postponed” (the euphemism du jour for “cancelled”).

The photos collected here are from last year’s trip through the medieval looking-glass. The knights, dragons, jugglers, magicians, artisans, pixies, bards, and musicians are scheduled to return to the Clackamas County Fairgrounds in Canby on June 5-6 & 12-13, 2021; find details here.

Tournament, 2019

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Final call for a Newport original

Art by the late Juergen Eckstein is included in an online sale and show at the Newport Visual Arts Center

May 28, 2020 // COAST, CULTURE, OREGON, VISUAL ART //

A three-month online art exhibit at the Newport Visual Arts Center will showcase Oregon artists and raise money for the artists and the center. It also is likely to be one of the last opportunities to buy a piece of art by the late Juergen Eckstein, who died Oct. 31 at age 77, following a stroke.

“Juergen’s art is just stacked downstairs,” said his wife, Dianne Eckstein. “He has so much work. It seems to me it should be in a good place.”

Juergen Eckstein invited all of Newport to join “The Yellow Umbrella Project” in 2004. “First individuals, forming trickles as others join creating streams of yellow umbrellas as they move closer towards the center of Nye Beach where they gather as a sea of yellow,” he wrote on his website. Photo courtesy: Gary Lahman
Juergen Eckstein invited all of Newport to join “The Yellow Umbrella Project” in 2004. “First individuals, forming trickles as others join creating streams of yellow umbrellas as they move closer towards the center of Nye Beach where they gather as a sea of yellow,” he wrote on his website. Photo courtesy: Gary Lahman

Eckstein, who is considering a move, gave two paintings and one sculpture to the city to be displayed in Newport City Hall.

Juergen Eckstein was a German native who traveled the world before settling with Dianne in Newport in 2000. A familiar presence around Newport, he co-founded the For ArtSake artist co-op and created the driftwood sculptures that stand outside the Newport Performing Arts Center and the Visual Arts Center. He was self-taught and worked in almost all mediums, including oil wash, wood, and pottery, his wife said.

“If he found a stone or piece of wood, he’d see something in it and go from there. He’d find something on the beach and make something of it,” she said. “He was always seeing something in an object that I wouldn’t. I think he just had a very wonderful imagination.”

The Oregon Coast Online Art Show, open to artists who have shown previously at the center, who live on the coast, or who are members of the Oregon Coast Council for the Arts (OCCA), received more than 120 submissions. All of the work has been organized and presented remotely. The show goes live Friday, May 29, and continues through Sept. 7.

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A chance encounter and a flood of memories

A conversation on a train takes a writer on a ride into Portland racial history and one woman's life of beauty, elegance, and endurance

May 24, 2020 // CULTURE, FEATURED //

By STEPHEN RUTLEDGE

Oregon, and Portland, its biggest city, are not very diverse. Many white people may not even begin to think about, let alone understand, the inequalities faced by the city’s black and brown citizens. Many people who live here in Portland have never had to directly, physically, emotionally, interact with people of color. As the city becomes more popular and housing prices rise, Portland’s tiny African American population (at 6.3 percent, Portland‘s Black population is still more than three times the state figure of 1.9 percent) is being displaced to far-flung fringes of the city, leading to even less diversity in the city’s core.

The Vanport Mosaic 2020 Virtual Festival, which commemorates the 1948 flood and celebrates Vanport’s historical connection to the drive in Portland to “amplify, honor, present, and preserve the silenced histories that surround us in order to understand our present, and create a future where we all belong,” continues through Saturday, May 30.
See the schedule of online events here.

From its very beginning, Oregon was an inhospitable place for Black people. In 1844, the provisional government of the territory passed a law banning slavery, and at the same time required any African American in Oregon to leave the territory. Any Black person remaining would be flogged publicly every six months until he left. Five years later, another law was passed that forbade free African Americans from entering Oregon.

As Cora Smith was growing up, Portland’s African American culture centered on the city’s Albina district. Above, children helping with the Albina Neighborhood Improvement Project, 1962. Photo: City of Portland (OR) Archives, A2010-003

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Starting Over: The value of crisis

Societies change and the arts are at the center of how we understand both the societies and the change

May 20, 2020 // ARTSWATCH FOCUS, CULTURE, FEATURED, NEWS & NOTES //

Nearly every day during my particular version of shelter-in-place, I sift through articles and essays (not to mention tweets) from likely sources, hoping to find out what in the blazes is going on out there. Or in here. Surely, I think, somebody has figured this stuff out, and so I search. 

I’ve been productively edified and instructed, pleasantly amused and delighted, annoyingly frustrated and aggravated, and alternatingly filled with dread and anxiety. You have to love the cycle that starts with anxiety, leads to dread, and then ends up back at anxiety. We’re all Kierkegaardians now!

Last week I ran into science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s essay, “The Coronavirus Is Rewriting Our Imaginations” in the New Yorker’s excellent feed. Robinson opened his argument with a reference from the late culture critic Raymond Williams, who argued in “The Long Revolution” that each historical period has its own, distinct “structure of feeling.” Robinson neatly paraphrases Williams’ observation about cultural difference as “a distinct way of organizing basic human emotions into an overarching cultural system. Each had its own way of experiencing being alive.”

Robinson then goes on to argue that we are (or maybe it’s “we should be”) entering a new cultural system through the door of the pandemic. That’s good: We need to turn the page on our current system if we are going to mitigate the disaster of climate change in a meaningful way.

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Rose Festival: A fond look back

This year's big parades and carnival are gone with the pandemic wind. As scaled-back "Parading in Place" begins, we salute the way it was.

May 20, 2020 // CULTURE, FEATURED //

TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY K.B. DIXON

A Rose Festival by any other name may not smell quite so sweet, but this abbreviated retrospective, this “Virtual Rose Festival,” will have to do this year as Portland’s annual celebration of the genus rosa has, like so many other essential celebrations, wilted in the heat of this global pandemic. In place of parading there is parading in place. The photographs here are collected from past years of sporadic attendance, and are offered as a reminder of what many may be missing today, but almost certainly will be enjoying again in the not too distant future.

This year’s festival, the 113th, was to have opened on Friday, May, 22, and continued through June 7, complete with its showcase parades: The Starlight Parade, the Junior Parade, and the culminating Grand Floral Parade. Holding their place will be the Rose Festival’s Parading in Place: Check the link for details.

2013: Hitched

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A little ArtSpark in Eugene

As schools stay shut down, arts teachers in Lane County shift their studio classes online and take the art to kids across 16 districts

May 19, 2020 // CULTURE, ED, NW, OREGON //

As Covid-19 shuttered schools across Oregon, limiting access to in-person learning of core curriculum and electives alike, arts organizations like Lane Arts Council pivoted on a dime, reinventing program delivery models to meet the changing needs of students in Lane County.  

“ArtSpark Online has been created so that every student across Lane County can have free, flexible access through open-access video tutorials teaching a variety of art forms,” says the county arts council’s arts education program manager, Eric Braman. “We have reached out to every school district in hopes of encouraging teachers, parents, and students to stay creative with the tools around them – whether that is turning dandelions into dye or an old sock into a new puppet! Each video provides clear instructions, guiding students to engage directly with the ‘making’ of art, exploring both visual and performance art.”

THE ART OF LEARNING: An Occasional Series

Lessons vary in length, depending on the art-making process, Braman explains.

“Our goal was to create 15-20 minute videos that guide students through approximately 45 minutes of viewing/art making,” Braman says. “We wanted to avoid “lecture-style” arts instruction, and instead always have the video directing students toward the ‘making’.”

The videos provide clear direction for students to follow and regularly instructs them to pause the video and go do.

“In the observational drawing videos, this translated to the artist showing the students how to begin a sketch, then instructing them to pause the video and take some time sketching on their own. In puppetry, the lessons were much shorter, but the unlimited potential between the crafting of the puppet and the performing of the puppet are unlimited! Our hope is that each video will encourage approximately 45 minutes of active engagement with an art form,” Braman says.

Alex Ever, demonstrating on Vimeo how to make natural dyes. Photo courtesy Lane Arts Council

Lane Arts’ teaching artists are learning new ways of doing things, too. Before quarantine measures, artist Alex Ever primarily taught students about natural dyes.

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