TBA Review: Anna Martine Whitehead’s ‘Force!: an opera in three acts’
Staged as part of the return of PICA’s Time-Based Art festival, Whitehead’s impressive opera explores embodied and emotional experiences around incarceration.
Our visual arts coverage is made possible in part by support from The Ford Family Foundation’s Visual Arts Program.
For stories published before 2018, visit our archive site.
Visual Art Subcategories
Photography
VizArts Monthly
Staged as part of the return of PICA’s Time-Based Art festival, Whitehead’s impressive opera explores embodied and emotional experiences around incarceration.
The mural tells the story of the community that has grown up around the Northeast Portland center run by the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization.
The gallery, in an industrial park, is a sprawling nexus of beautiful, high-end art, savvy entrepreneurship, state-of-the-art technology, and light industry.
Summer is going out with a confusing bang: The last two weeks of August were cool and rainy but September is starting with a heat wave! Fortunately the gallery scene is heating up, too.
An adjacent restaurant fire Aug. 5 poured smoke and soot into the blue-chip gallery, coating everything. Now restorers are beginning to clean 1,500 artworks, and the gallery hopes to reopen in December or January.
PICA’s TBA:24 festival, spreading across the city Sept. 5-22, boasts a busy lineup including Linda K. Johnson’s “PASTfuture,” presented in part by her ongoing “Mycelium Dreams” project.
A job layoff inspired the Albany man to get back to photography. He found a subject in his daughter’s childhood.
“Never an Even Folding” features twelve paintings that confirm the painter’s deep knowledge of her medium and engagement with the Modernist tradition.
Photographer K.B. Dixon continues his series of cultural profiles with portraits of choreographer Jessica Wallenfels, visual artist Ryan Pierce, poet and book editor Valerie Witte, actor/director Isaac Lamb, and choral leader Katherine Fitzgibbon.
The artist’s second solo show at One Grand Gallery, “Unseasonably Warm,” features an identifiable lexicon of shapes. The story that unfolds in the works manages to be both intensely personal and universal.
How best to replace Portland’s busy east-west span? Bridge designer Keith Brownlie of Britain’s BEAM Architects parses the best choice from a sextet of arches and cable-stays. Now the bridge committee has selected an inverted “Y” cable stay design.
The designers of the Portland airport’s new terminal, opening Aug. 14, create an environmentally friendly, technologically innovative space that feels like a “first walk in an Oregon forest.”
Despite July’s theme of slowing down, I still feel like it came and went so fast! Even so, my efforts did yield some results: I started noticing small details of my everyday life. One of those previously overlooked details was the vibrant
August shows also include a family of ceramicists at Linfield University and stories from the forest at the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde’s cultural center.
Finnish photographers Ritva Kovalainen and Sanni Seppo create a stellar thicket of visual and environmental images on view at Portland’s World Forestry Center.
Belluschi found a mentor in Anderson, an acclaimed artist who divides her time between Carrara, Italy, and Nehalem on the Oregon Coast. The two are among more than a dozen artists participating in the July 20 tour.
The design team proposes a new welcome center, colorful paint jobs, bold signage, and justice-oriented collaboration to transform the university campus and help revitalize downtown.
Lloyd DeWitt’s first shows as curator of European and American Art Pre-1930 at the Portland Art Museum offer crowd-pleasing beauty and deep questions about what museums and audiences look for in art.
A retrospective of the Seattle artist’s work ranges from artifacts of Fluxus-inspired performance art to encaustic/mixed media pieces that conflate ideas, stories, history, and cosmology.
Exhibits of a major Surrealist artist getting her due and a photographer known for his images of children amid war give rise to a host of cultural connections.
As the deadline for public comment approaches, a stagehand at the 3,000-seat downtown performance hall argues that a vital voice has been largely left out of the conversation.
As we head into July, art offerings around Oregon offer opportunities to slow down and contemplate memories, ancestors, and landscapes (among other things). Raylee Heiden rounds up some strong options.
‘Mel Bochner: Words Mean Everything’ is on view in the new gallery space at NW Yeon. Angela Allen sits down with Jordan Schnitzer to discuss the new show, the gallery space, and his vision for his art collection.
The artist’s letterpress works lean into language’s incomplete capacity to describe feelings. Hannah Krafcik reviews “To know what we say we know,” on view through June at Well Well Projects.
Try your luck at this art-themed crossword puzzle that’s sure to leave a lasting impression.
Artist Phyllis Yes’s paintings of a man doing housework in the buff, banned from a church gallery, find a new home – and after a half-century, her nude model comes clean.
With a June show at Astoria’s Imogen Gallery, the Oregon encaustic painter from New Jersey comes full-circle.
What began with doormats made from discarded maritime gear has grown to include baskets, wall art, and jellyfish. A fiber arts show at the Lincoln City Cultural Center features her Gypsea Weaver work.
The Forest Grove artist uses images from old maps and nearly a century’s worth of American magazines to create pieces that range from overstuffed to exuberantly symbolist.
The shoes in ‘Future Now: Virtual Sneakers to Cutting-Edge Kicks’ are visually intriguing and push the boundaries of what constitutes a shoe. Laurel Reed Pavic has questions about arch support.
The urban university intends to create a stronger sense of campus identity — and become a leader in revitalizing downtown Portland.
June brings new beginnings with warmer weather and an array of art opportunities. Raylee Heiden rounds up both indoor and “plein air” options.
“Improbable Springs” at Elizabeth Leach Gallery features large-scale paintings that juxtapose the exuberance of nature with human-made discards.
Photographer K.B. Dixon continues his series of cultural profiles with portraits of visual artist Chris Chandler, Miller Foundation leader Carrie Hoops, Caldera leader Kimberly Howard Wade, and writers Evan Morgan Williams and Steven L. Moore.
Blake Andrews interviews Prudence Roberts about the photographer and curator’s work, approach, and legacy. Toedtemeier’s photographs are featured in shows at JSMA in Eugene and PDX Contemporary Art in Portland.
The four-gallery show opens June 1 and includes photography, videography, installation, painting, and basketry.
Casey Campbell, a licensed professional counselor, opened Elemental Studios after discovering the therapeutic relationship between craft arts and mental health and well-being.
Three Oregon artists were selected for the 2024 Annual Smithsonian Craft Show, the country’s most prestigious juried show and sale of contemporary American craft.
The three Indigenous artists say family, tradition, and education are currents running throughout their work.
The artist-operated downtown institution’s closure after 16 years deprives Oregon of an important visual arts hub.
The university’s revised design proposal for a Keller Auditorium replacement offers two venues in one: a Keller-sized 3,000-seat hall and a versatile 1,200-seat companion space.
A pair of “sister shows” at Elbow Room and ILY2 showcase a talented group of artists and the ingenuity of the close-knit community of the Portland art scene. The artists all work out of Elbow Room’s SE Portland studio and gallery.
Buildings by Portland’s two greatest midcentury-modern architects – Belluschi’s Central Lutheran Church and Yeon’s wooded Jorgensen House – face uncertain futures.
As a Vancouver show tells multiple tales, an inspiring exhibit at California’s Huntington Library concentrates on a single artist: the chronicler of Black life Sargent Claude Johnson.
The exhibition at the Oregon Historical Society features Horsfall’s meticulous illustrations of birds from the Pacific Coast. Horsfall was a member of the Oregon Audubon Society and inspired by the artistic endeavors of the organization’s namesake, John James Audubon.
May ushers in a shift in seasons (hopefully!) and the opportunity to shift perspectives. Jason N. Le offers, for the last time, a selection of not-to-be-missed art occasions and events.
From the destruction of a fire sparked by hatred, musician Jennifer Wright and fabric artist Bonnie Meltzer weave a new beginning of collaboration and hope.
With their caricatured grins and exaggerated growls and grimaces, Murton’s works defy the notion that serious art needs to be … well, serious. Get ready to smile.
Famed performance artist Annie Sprinkle and her collaborator Beth Stephens were in residence at the college in early April. Their work, ‘The Forest as Lover,’ is in the college’s EAR (Experimental Art Research) Forest through the end of June.
At the clifftop museum overlooking the Columbia Gorge, two new exhibitions follow the river’s flow for 300 miles to create art of the land, water, and Northwest cultures.
Give to our GROW FUND.