Fourteen Oregon artists and cultural groups will split more than $1 million in the latest round of Creative Heights grants announced Monday morning, Aug. 25, by the Oregon Community Foundation. The grants, among the most eagerly sought in Oregon’s nonprofit arts and cultural world, range between $24,000 and $100,000 each, and total $1,034,000. Most of the grants went to Portland artists or organizations, but others went to Otis, Wallowa, Dayton, Salem, and Beaverton.

This year’s grants — honed down from more than 200 original letters of interest — are headed not to the state’s large arts organizations but to smaller groups and individual artists for specific community-based projects, ranging from an imagining of the future of Portland’s Old Town Chinatown to the creation and curation of a biennial of contemporary Indigenous art.

The balance between large and small companies ebbs and flows, Jerry Tischleder, the Oregon Community Foundation’s senior program officer for arts and culture, said: Bigger organizations such as the High Desert Museum in Bend and Portland Center Stage, among others, have won Creative Heights grants in the past.

“It’s really more about innovation and how a project’s going to move the creative needle in Oregon,” Tischleder said. “What’s really interesting is artists who are approaching dream projects they’ve had in their back pockets.”

The Oregon Community Foundation’s Creative Heights grants began in 2014 and have distributed roughly $1 million each year since. The grants have supported 151 projects ranging, in the foundation’s words, “from visual art (to) performance, folk and traditional arts, film and media, literary arts, museum exhibitions, humanities, music, theater, dance, opera, history, cultural heritage, and multidisciplinary works.”

With the collapse of federal support for arts and cultural organizations, privately funded programs such as Creative Heights take on even more importance than they’ve had in the past. The Trump Administration has radically slashed budgets for the national endowments for the arts and the humanities, eliminated the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and radically cut funding for libraries, among other things. This in turn puts the squeeze on regional, state, and local governments, which have had their federal allocations for arts and culture cut to the quick, and so in turn are forced to radically reduce their own funding of artists and cultural groups.

Further, with the Administration’s war on diversity, equity, and inclusion, nearly all of this year’s Creative Heights awardees likely would have been ruled ineligible for federal money. Foundations and individual donors including the Oregon Community Foundation are not bound by such strictures. And those areas where art and culture overlap, OCF’s Tischleder said, are what artists in the past several years have found interesting: “That’s what people are responding to.”

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The complete list of grantees, with descriptions from Creative Heights of the projects:

Allie Hankins, Portland, “for an experimental dance project embracing multiplicities within Queer experiences and interrogating the idea of a singular essence in our identities.” $75,000.

CETI, (Creative and Emergent Technology Institute), Portland, “to create a series of multisensory experiences, remembering the past and imagining the future of Old Town Chinatown.” $100,000.

enTaiko, Portland, “to support a multisensory taiko performance that creates an inclusive experience for deaf, blind, neurodivergent, and physically disabled artists and audiences.” $66,000.

Jason Hill/Albina Music Trust, Portland, “to produce an episodic docuseries exploring the history of Black music and culture in Portland’s Albina neighborhood.” Filmmaker Hill expanded in a press statement: “The history of Portland’s Black music scene is pretty amazing and yet most know little about it. This series with the Albina Music Trust is an effort to honor these amazing artists and the legacies. Plus, we have the opportunity to do this when many of them are still here and we can capture their stories in their own words.” $100,000.

Lamiae Naki, Beaverton, “for Abaraz ⴰⴱⴰⵔⴰⵣ Gateway to the Sahara, a tribute to Southern Moroccan music, uniting Oregon and international musicians for a creative residency and world premiere in 2026.” $40,000.

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Licity Collins, Otis, “to complete and premiere a collaboratively composed, spoken-sung opera exploring the collective impact of grief.” $74,000.

Luke Wyland, Portland, “to expand the Library of Dysfluent Voices through community engagement and listening workshops.” In a press statement from the foundation, pianist and composer Wyland, who is also a person who stutters, explains that his project “centers my commitment to the stuttering community by expanding the Library of Dysfluent Voices, an audio archive of people with speech differences, through in-person interviews collected in partnership with SPACE, a stuttering nonprofit. Contributors share reflections on life and their relationship to their speech, which are then transformed into immersive ‘voice portraits.’ These portraits will form the foundation for a multimedia installation and performance series that celebrates the richness and complexity of dysfluency.” $65,000.

Masami Kawai (Portland Art Museum), Portland, “for VALLEY OF THE TALL GRASS, an independent feature film project exploring Indigenous identity and cinema’s language through an Indigenous worldview.” In a press statement, Kawai elaborated: “I’m telling a story of Indigenous people who lost ties to their land and found themselves in Oregon, a place I call home. We don’t always have our traditional ways intact and sometimes we’ve lost our language. But we carry connections to family and value ways to sustain life and forgotten objects, like the TV/VCR at the center of the film.” $100,000.

Nez Perce Wallowa Homeland & Oregon East Symphony, Wallowa, “for Oregon East Symphony to present an original, outdoor performance blending the works of Native composer Jerod Tate with Indigenous drumming, dance, and visual storytelling.” Nancy Crenshaw, longtime board member for Nez Perce Wallowa Homelands, commented: “When the drums beat, and the spirits come to life, I am overwhelmed. To see this project underway is like a dream.” $100,000.

North Pole Studio, Portland, “to support a new solo exhibition by non-verbal artist Doug Wing, curated by Kristan Kennedy at Oregon Contemporary.” $45,000.

Patricia Vázquez Gómez, Portland, “for Lengua materna, an experimental choral ensemble composed of maayat’aan (Yucatec Mayan) speakers from the U.S. and Mexico about the relationship between language, migration, nature and ritual.” $100,000.

Steph Littlebird, Salem, “to create and curate the second contemporary Indigenous Art Biennial, an exhibition of Native people’s ongoing contributions to both traditional and contemporary art culture.” It will feature Pacific Northwest artists and be sponsored by the Salem Art Association. “We cannot wait for everyone to learn more about the Native creatives and innovators carrying culture forward through contemporary art,” Littlebird, an artist, curator, writer, and book illustrator and a member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde who has written several stories for Oregon ArtsWatch, said in a press statement. $55,000.

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Stephanie Craig, Dayton, a member of the Grand Ronde Confederated Tribes, “to create a digitally-based traditional basketry curriculum, featuring instructional videos teaching the art form.” $24,000.

Tim Burgess, Portland, “for Walking On, a short documentary film and album of music showcasing Karrie Young playing the traditional wooden flute for those who are Walking On.” $90,000.