Shortly after 8 p.m. on the first Saturday of September, a tuxedo-clad Sean Andries stood on the stage of the Chehalem Cultural Center’s new LaJoie Theatre to welcome an invitation-only crowd of supporters, financial backers, artists, and staff filling the 250 plush seats.

“For 20 years people have been dreaming about this brand-new theater,” said Andries, the center director, his infectious enthusiasm ramped up to 11. “When was the last time you saw a dream come true? For 20 years, people have been wondering what this would look like, what this would sound like; for 20 years, people have been dreaming about how it would feel tonight. So how does it feel?”

Whoops and applause from the audience.

“Those seats are brand new,” he continued. “Really, how does it feel?”

More applause, laughter.

“That’s great,” he smiled. “They were very expensive.”

Expensive, and a long time coming. As recently as 2018, the second floor of the Depression-era school building was a hollow shell, strewn with rubble and sawdust from demolition work. The chaos in the auditorium destined to become the LaJoie was particularly impressive: a hot mess of shredded carpet, seats shoved into an uneven pile of wood and metal.

The cultural center, which took up residence in the building in March 2010, regarded the space as their “diamond in the rough.” Even years later, when Andries showed me conceptual drawings of the lush digs planned for the second floor, accessible by a magnificent curving staircase, it was hard to see how a rural community of around 20,000 people could marshal the resources to do it — but they did.

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OREGON CULTURAL HUBS: An occasional series

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With the theater’s completion, the Chehalem Cultural Center is one of the largest cultural centers in Oregon. Andries said they serve about 85,000 visitors each year, who come for classes and workshops in art, dance, and theater; attend youth summer camps or view gallery shows; or attend events such as the Willamette Valley Lavender Festival, the Terroir Creative Writing Festival, or the annual Día de los Muertos celebration.

It’s the sort of  “everything-for-everyone” center that Oregon Arts Commission Executive Director Brian Rogers says thrives in smaller cities outside the Portland area.

Many cities and towns around Oregon — including Pendleton, Joseph, La Grande, Corvallis, and Salem — have “smaller but mighty art centers,” he said. With the second floor finished, the Chehalem center rivals nonprofit centers run by the Oregon Coast Council for the Arts in Newport and the Lincoln City Cultural Center, arguably the two other largest regional cultural centers in the state. At 44,000 square feet, Chehalem is larger than the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts that opened in Beaverton a couple of years ago.

“The new space is amazing,” said Rogers, who attended the gala opening. “It was clear to me that the center serves more than just Newberg. It has a wide reach.”

The LaJoie, which is booked for the rest of the year with dance, music, holiday-themed vaudeville, a children’s show, and a production by Newberg-based Gather Repertory, is now a diamond. But the rest of the center has plenty of gloss, too.

The center, located 150 feet north of the Newberg Public Library downtown, is fronted by more than 6,700 square feet of patio where outdoor events and festivals are staged. On the east end, there’s a playground and seating for parents to keep an eye on their children.

The building has two theaters. Besides the LaJoie, there’s a 50-seat black box where Gather Repertory has staged a few shows. With the $5 million completion of the second floor, the center boasts six art galleries, the largest being the Parrish — the first diamond to emerge when phase one of construction was finished in 2010. Currently, the Parrish contains the annual Art Harvest Studio Tour of Yamhill County preview show, while the second-largest Central Gallery features A Break in the Clouds: A Solo Exhibit by Krystyny Vandenberg, based on her residency at a local winery. Later this fall, Pastel Artists of Oregon will occupy the Parrish into 2025 with a juried exhibition. Between these two spaces alone, around a dozen exhibitions are shown annually.

The ground floor also contains a kitchen and culinary arts studio, a recording studio, several music practice rooms equipped with instruments, a ceramics studio, two meeting rooms, and the 5,200-square-foot Grand Ballroom, which has a capacity of 320 and has hosted everything from weddings and quinceañeras to the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day commemoration.  

The grand staircase to the second floor from the lobby, built a few months ago, leads directly to the doors of the LaJoie, where artists will perform on a stage named after the late Jim Halliday, fondly described by friends as a Renaissance man who was a huge backer of the center and served for a time as executive director. This is now the largest public theater in Yamhill County, exceeding Gallery Theater’s main stage capacity in McMinnville by 10 seats. The staircase, along with the spacious, sun-drenched lobby upstairs, eliminated the center’s mezzanine gallery, but a far larger space was gained by making the wide, building-length hallway available for visual art display — more than twice the length of the Central Gallery downstairs.

A new Movement Studio can accommodate dance rehearsals or yoga classes and the like. Already completed upstairs are two art classrooms, each with a capacity for 40 people.

The emotionally charged opening night began with the dedication of the Tri Family lobby upstairs, where the west wall is adorned with Hope Beginning — nearly 100 porcelain platters fired over the past year by Benjamin Cahoon, who has taught pottery classes here over the years.

Tracie Myrick-Meyer and her family read in both English and the Native American Chinook Wawa dialect a poem, Embrace. She is a member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and a Kalapuya tribal elder.

The double doors to the new theater were then opened to the crowd that packed the lobby by Sandy and Merlin LaJoie, long-time center supporters, and patrons got a sampler of what’s to come this fall: a cello duet by the 45th Parallel Universe chamber music ensemble; a scene from Gather Repertory’s production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, which opens Friday; contemporary dance by the Portland company push/FOLD; and a vaudeville bit by Newberg’s Scott Parker and his 11-year-old daughter, Veronika.

Alana Stubbs of push/FOLD recalls taking positions with two other dancers and feeling a twinge of guilt stepping out on the pristine Marley floor for a mesmerizing dance that highlighted grace and athleticism in equal measure.

“The space felt fresh,” Stubbs said. “You can see how much hard work went into the creation of this beautiful theater that allows artists and the community to come together in celebration of the arts.”

ORIGIN STORY

The school building, a 1935 Works Progress Administration project, replaced a wood structure dating back to 1900. It served as Newberg’s Central School until 1995, when, clearly in need of major renovations, it was closed. Two years later, the school district sold the property to the Chehalem Park & Recreation District for one dollar to keep it in the public domain. According to the Arts Commission’s Rogers, that’s a crucial step in converting such buildings to cultural centers — maintaining some link to the public sector.

“Community members have a level of sentimentality and probably romantic ties to the school they attended,” he said. “Community leaders don’t want to see the spaces turn into for-profit or low-public-access buildings. People like to know that the building they knew for years is still accessible to them.”

The goal from the beginning was to keep the facility public, but it wasn’t immediately obvious what would or could be done with it. A new home for Newberg’s city hall and a family resource center were among the ideas kicked around during open houses and public hearings held as the 21st century dawned.

Turning it into an arts center was floated and championed by a group of local women led by Loni Parrish, who owns ART Elements Gallery in Newberg. Rick Lee, a Chehalem center board member whose institutional knowledge of the project is vast, calls her the center’s “patron saint” and recalls how it went down.

“That very determined, very audacious group began to lobby the CPRD to let them lead an effort to raise the money and create a cultural center,” he said. The board finally gave in, passing on what he said was a more lucrative offer to demolish the building and sell the brick to a local contractor. “She and others began promoting their idea to anyone who would listen, even holding events inside to show its potential, like Halloween haunts and Christmas markets. This went on for several years.”

They formed a nonprofit in 2005 and landed $1.2 million in federal funds for seismic upgrades and exterior improvements. Although the idea of a community arts center received support in community surveys, subsequent efforts to pass a bond measure for further work were unsuccessful. That left organizers to rely on private donations, large and small, and public grants from familiar names including the Oregon Cultural Trust, the Ford Family Foundation, the Collins Foundation, and the Meyer Memorial Trust.

Five years and $9 million later, the center opened to much fanfare in March 2010, but it would take a couple of years before it found a viable financial model.

“People did not come running to take art classes, and they barely broke even if they filled up,” Lee said. “Our treasurer would remind us at every meeting that we were burning money much faster than we were earning money.”

They started thinking of bigger revenue streams. The center rented space to Portland Community College while it built a Newberg campus, and the board launched a Night of the Moon gala that brought in deep-pocketed donors — both to bid on wine-country packages and to become part of a growing base of support.

“We did a run of those from 2011 to 2023, and in our best years netted over $300,000 for operations,” Lee said.

Big donors from the wine industry and from Newberg’s industrial powerhouse A-dec, which manufactures dental equipment, continued to open their wallets. The 2014 opening of the Grand Ballroom – formerly a gymnasium added in the 1960s — gave the center a large rental venue for public and private events and is widely regarded by supporters as a game-changer. In hindsight, hiring Andries — then Portland Center Stage’s operations manager — in 2017 to come aboard as executive director took the fundraising component to the next level.

It wasn’t entirely clear to Andries from the get-go that he would preside over a major capital campaign.

“I think it may have come up, but I don’t remember it being a focus of things then,” said Andries, who also chairs the board for the Oregon Cultural Trust. “I do remember it coming up at my first board meeting and how everyone was excited I was going to find millions and build a theater. It all seemed so impossible, I didn’t sleep for a week.”

Andries “stands out as a force of nature,” Lee said, a sentiment echoed by others who work closely with him. “Sean is an incredible fundraiser, cultivator of supporters and a great steward of their gifts. This most recent building project cost us in the neighborhood of $5 million, and all of that money can be attributed to his leadership.”

It’s a tribute to Andries, his staff, and the broad community support that the Chehalem center survived the pandemic, unlike many other art and culture venues. Carissa Burkett, the former gallery manager who was hired around the same time as Andries, had deep connections in the regional arts community and typically booked exhibitions several months out.

During the pandemic, a few of the Parrish and Central gallery exhibitions were available for online viewing only, such as one on artists responding to COVID. The spaciousness of the exhibition spaces made social distancing’s 6-foot rule easy to follow, and the shows kept coming, including one featuring the work of the late Michael Gibbons and a sampling of work by artists who had been booked for the Art Harvest Studio Tour of Yamhill County.

“People at all levels were really galvanized by the idea that CCC might slip away, and we were really buoyed out of the darkest depths by that spirit,” Andries recalled. “We were lucky enough to never need to lay off any staff and were able to open our doors as soon as it was OK to do so. Truthfully, we emerged from that period of shut-down stronger than ever with a clearer sense of purpose than ever before.”

NEW THEATER, NEW POSSIBILITIES

If bringing the ballroom into the venue mix a few years ago was a turning point — in 2019, the center hosted 40 live public performances, 20 weddings and three quinceañeras — the LaJoie Theatre is surely another. As Andries noted, Yamhill County has been lacking a mid-sized performance space for public use. Gallery Theater and Linfield University in McMinnville and George Fox University a few blocks from the center have multiple stages but do virtually all their own programming.

Chehalem intends to use the new facility for a mix of local, regional, and possibly even national touring acts if the fit is right. Local groups that stand to benefit include Chehalem Valley Dance Academy and theater companies Penguin Productions and Gather Repertory Theatre, the latter founded a few years ago by JeanneAnn Faris Comisky.

“The LaJoie Theatre completely alters how we think about our possibilities for performance as a theater company in Newberg,” said Comisky, who in June joined the center’s staff as performing arts manager. “It’s bigger than any other space we have used and makes larger shows with ensembles that are onstage together for long periods more possible for us. It makes dreaming bigger a reality for us, something I would not easily have been able to say in Newberg beforehand.”

Samuel Hobbs, artistic director for the dance company push/FOLD, goes so far as to say that it “feels like a major turning point for the Oregon arts scene in general, especially coming from the last four years.”

“To see the transformation into what we witnessed for the opening is nothing short of magical,” he said. “As a performer, I’ve been to many venues that did not have a fraction of the polish that the LaJoie has, or the good energy cultivated by those working there.”

And more people will be working there. For the past few years, the Chehalem center has had a full-time staff of four complemented by part-time and seasonal employees, not to mention scores of volunteers who log hundreds of hours annually. Two positions have been added, and Andries said he expects an FTE of about 15 in 2025, up from the eight or so on staff when he started.

The center operates on a budget of roughly $1 million annually, a 70 percent increase from 2017, Andries estimates. When he started, the split between earnings and contributions was about 30/70; now it’s closer to 60/40.

Intriguingly, the building still contains undeveloped space — three old classrooms on the west end remain unfinished. I asked Andries the question all artists face: What next?

“We do have ideas about finishing them into a conference center or more classrooms at some point,” he replied. “We figure it’s best to hang tight for a bit and grow into our new spaces before we decide exactly what to do.”