The Oregon arts world lost several key players to death in 2024, across a broad spectrum of disciplines.

In theater, those whose work and lives are remembered and honored include actor Joseph R. Cronin, stage and voice actor Sam A. Mowry, musical director and cabaret empresario Darcy White, director John Dillon, playwright and poet W.S. “Sam” Gregory, and actor/director/writer Tobias Andersen.

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2024: A Year in Review

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Academy Award-winning animated film director Mark Gustafson, dance legend Sahomi Tachibana, celebrated chef Naomi Pomeroy, pianist Janet Coleman, multi-instrumentalist Gerardo Calderon, and arts advocates Gary Ferrington and John T. Montague (both of whom also were photographers) died in 2024.

The world of words lost novelist and teacher Tom Spanbauer, poet Harold Johnson, and literary journalist Jon Franklin. In the visual arts, 108-year-old collage artist Eunice Parsons, satiric artist and advertising man Jim Riswold, and the painter and teacher Jay Backstrand died.

Read more on each of them below, where they are listed in chronological order of their deaths:

Gerardo Calderon, master of Latin American Music

Gerardo Calderon, a multi-instrumentalist living in Portland who specialized in performing traditional music from Mexico and other Latin American countries, died Jan. 21 in Mexico. Born in Mexico City, “he grew up surrounded by music, dance and culture,” Stage and Studio host and producer Dmae Lo Roberts wrote. “Gerardo was the musical director of Grupo Condor and Nuestro Canto, and pursued his interest in learning about traditional Mexican music, Latin American folk music and Pre-Colombian music. He performed with folk music ensembles in Mexico, Canada, New England, and the Pacific Northwest, and also toured with choir and world music ensembles through out the USA. Gerardo composed music and designed sound for contemporary ballet companies, documentaries, short films, commercials, theater companies, and cultural organizations.”

“For years Calderon also was a musician in residence at the Portland International Airport,” Roberts added. “It was a welcome respite for travel-weary passersby to hear his beautiful guitar compositions.” During the pandemic, she wrote, he created nearly daily videos, sharing performances of his music at a time when live performance had stopped. In 2020 Roberts interviewed Calderon for an episode of her podcast Stage and Studio, and he added some of his music to it. You can listen to their conversation here.

Jon Franklin, literary journalism master

Jon Franklin, a trailblazing figure in literary journalism who in the words of his former student Brett Campbell had “one of the great careers in nonfiction writing and produced some of the most moving and memorable true stories in American journalism,” died Jan. 21 at age 82. He had taught at the University of Oregon for many years, and before that headed the journalism department at Oregon State University and several other universities, as well as reporting for several major newspapers.

In his long and illustrious career Franklin won two Pulitzer Prizes, wrote several books, and inspired generations of writers. Campbell, an ArtsWatch writer and senior editor, moved to Oregon from Texas 30 years ago to study with Franklin, and told his teacher’s story in his ArtsWatch appreciation Jon Franklin and the art of nonfiction.

Mark Gustafson, Oscar-winning animator

Mark Gustafson, the Portland stop-motion animation master who won an Academy Award in 2023 as co-director with Guillermo del Toro of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, died of a heart attack Feb. 1, 2024 at age 63. “I admired Mark Gustafson, even before I met him,” del Toro said. “A pillar of stop motion animation — a true artist. A compassionate, sensitive and mordantly witty man. A legend — and a friend that inspired and gave hope to all around him.”

Gustafson was beloved in Portland’s animation community, which includes some of the world’s best animators. His work upheld a tradition of craftsmanship at a time when CGI, or computer-generated imagery, was sweeping the animation industry with its relative ease of production. He began his animation career decades ago working with Portland’s old Vinton Studios, now known as Laika. Over the years he worked as a writer, director, or animator on such projects as The Adventures of Mark Twain, Mr. Resistor, Claymation Easter, Claymation Comedy of Horrors, The California Raisin Show, and the TV special Meet the Raisins! He also directed two episodes of the TV series The PJs, and was an animator on 2011’s A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas.

Read Gustafson’s ArtsWatch obituary here, and S.W. Conser’s ArtsWatch appreciation of Gustafson’s life and work here. Conser also conducted an illuminating interview here with Gustafson and animation supervisor Brian Leif Hansen, on the occasion of the June 2023 opening of the exhibition Guillermo del Toro: Crafting Pinocchio at the Portland Art Museum.

John T. Montague, arts advocate and photographer

John T. Montague, who died Feb. 15, 2024 at age 74, was a high-tech software engineer who, upon seeing the 1982 movie Koyaanisqatsi and especially hearing its musical score by Philip Glass, embarked on a lifetime trip devoted to contemporary classical music. As Brett Campbell wrote in his ArtsWatch appreciation, “With his wife, prominent Portland artist Linda Hutchins, the Puget Sound native became one of Portland’s most quietly reliable supporters of new music, one of those exceptionally devoted arts patrons whose passion helps sustain so many of Oregon’s smaller arts institutions,” including Third Angle New Music and other contemporary-music organizations. 

More quietly, as Brian Libby wrote for ArtsWatch, Montague pursued another passion, for shooting film and video, by himself, a great deal of the time from the same spot on the west bank of the Willamette River between the Steel Bridge and the Broadway Bridge in Portland. His capturing of those moments and their subtle differences resulted in a posthumous exhibition, Willamette Greenway 45.525951° N, 122.67341° W,, in October 2024 at Portland’s Nine Gallery.

W.S. “Sam” Gregory, playwright and poet

W.S. “Sam” Gregory, Portland playwright and poet, died March 7, 2024, in Mesa, Arizona, of a heart attack. He was 55 years old. Gregory attended South Eugene High School and began writing plays in 1990, after graduating from Southern Oregon University with a degree in theater.

As a playwright, Gregory was fascinated by the people and cultural situations of historical figures. His 1999 play Mary Tudor, produced at CoHo Theatre, won three Drammy Awards for excellence in Portland theater. He also had plays produced in theaters including Milagro, Triangle Productions!, and Portland Center Stage’s JAW Festival of new works, and he collaborated often as a writer with Willamette Radio Workshop.

“I write as though I were taking dictation,” he once said of his playwrighting process. “I think each of the characters reflects an aspect of my personality. But I don’t tell them what to say. He tells me.”

In a 2010 interview with dramaturg Mead Hunter about his play Necessity, set in the rural American South in 1919, Gregory commented that it was set in “an aural culture that places a premium on skill in what we might call linguistic performance: the sermon, the storyteller, the gossip. … I was inspired to write Necessity by my desire to create theater of tremendous power that has a visceral effect on the audience. Theater today must be astounding: hit the heights of human experience, plumb the depths of our souls and situations. I looked to the Greeks and to the glorious and terrible experience of Americans in the First World War as fertile ground for stories and situations of extreme passion that can move and touch the audience.”

Diane Englert, Gregory’s longtime friend and theatrical collaborator, remarked at his memorial service: “To me, conversations, collaborations, performances with Sam always felt akin to the salons of old, stimulating, enlightening, joyful forays into art, fashion, history. … Sam had a curious mind, a hunger for knowledge, coupled with a keen intellect and a way with words unrivaled by most modern writers. Those of us who were privileged enough to speak his words onstage luxuriated in his respectful use of language; the cadence, the rhythm, the passion. … When Sam was 3 he told his father Bill that he wanted to be a poet. He had no recollection of that, but his father remembers.”

The possibilities of language were of extreme importance to Gregory. He liked limericks, haikus, and the rhyming cadences of classic poetry, and he regularly sent out new poems to a following of friends and fans. On Feb. 21 of this year, shortly before his death, he sent a poem he titled What Shall We Do?:

The Writer who once wrote the song is dead
The Singer who once sang the song is dead
And only we who heard the song
Remain alive.  What shall we do?

Should we write what was written then?
Should we sing what was sung back then?
Should we listen again to what
We heard before?  What shall we do?

Sponsor

Are new songs to be scribbled now?
Are new voices to carol now?
Are new ears to enjoy what we
Might not enjoy?  What shall we do?

John Dillon, theater director

John Dillon, who was raised in Portland and spent a long career as a nationally known director, lived in Seattle at the time of his death on May 13, 2024, at age 78, following a long period of illnesses. Perhaps best known for his long tenure as artistic director of Milwaukee Repertory Theatre from 1977 to 1993, he worked with many contemporary playwrights and directed several world premieres, including his friend Larry Shue’s comedy The Nerd.

Dillon returned to work on occasion in his hometown, including directing William Hurt in a 2011 production of Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land. Allen Nause, at the time artistic director of Portland’s Artists Repertory Theatre, hired Dillon to directNo Man’s Land in a production that also featured Nause, Tim True, and Hurt’s son Alex Hurt. “Working with John Dillon on No Man’s Land was such a joy,” Nause said. “The play was a great challenge, and John was the perfect guide.”

See ArtsWatch’s appreciation of Dillon and his career here.

Joseph R. Cronin, actor

Joe Cronin, known onstage as Joseph R. Cronin, died in Eugene on May 15, 2024, at age 81. He was a founding company member of Artists Rep in Portland and a leading actor on Portland stages for many years, especially in the 1980s. He also spent several seasons at the Oregon and Utah Shakespeare festivals and on stages in Salem and in Eugene.

Cronin  brought wit and a dry intelligence to productions by playwrights as diverse as Brian Friel, Harold Pinter, William Shakespeare, Ted Tally, Noel Coward, Michael Hastings, Alan Ayckbourn, and Christopher Durang, in whose short play The Actor’s Nightmare, about a fellow who finds himself onstage not knowing his lines or even what play he’s supposed to be in, he was memorably splendid. He could also slip almost imperceptibly into deep wells of emotion and insight, exploring the tragic in the comic and the comic in the tragic. He acted mostly onstage but also did some film and television work, most notably in the Gus Van Sant movie Elephant and TV’s Nowhere Man and The Haunting of Sarah Hardy. He also became involved in slam poetry; he and his friend John Dooley won the Northwest championships a couple of times.

See ArtsWatch’s appreciation of Cronin’s life and work here.

Janet Coleman, pianist

One of Portland’s finest classical pianists, Janet Marie Coleman, died July 6 at age 56 following a long hospitalization with liver complications. Born in Medford, Oregon, in 1968, she worked with hundreds of instrumentalists and singers in her lifetime, contributing with her piano accompaniment to top awards in national and international competitions. She earned an M.A. in Piano Performance from the University of Oregon, where she was named Outstanding Chamber Musician, and was part of a musical family, married to violinist Adam LaMotte, founder of the Amadeus Chamber Orchestra in Portland.

Among Coleman’s many musical affiliations were Willamette, Linfield, Portland State and Pacific Universities; Portland Opera; Portland Chamber Orchestra; Portland State University Opera Workshop; Eugene Opera; Astoria Music Festival; Beta Collide; Pacific Youth Choir; Oregon Symphony; and Oregon Bach Festival. She was also the regular accompanist for Miss America 2002, singer Katie Harman.

Sam A. Mowry, stage and voice actor

Sam A. Mowry, a beloved Portland actor and director known both for his personal gentleness and generosity and for his deep, profoundly captivating onstage speaking voice, died July 20, 2024, after suffering massive cardiac arrest while being prepared to undergo emergency surgery for severe blockages in his arteries. He was 64.

Born in Pittsburgh, Mowry moved to Portland in the late 1970s and quickly became an important figure in the city’s theater scene, acting, directing, and leading theater companies, including the old Heart Theatre. He was also a leading figure in radio drama, cofounding and leading Willamette Radio Workshop. And he was known and loved internationally for his voice work in video games such as League of Legends, Defense of the Ancients 2, and Amnesia the Dark Descent. He also for many years played an endearing Santa Claus in Portland’s annual Singing Christmas Tree performances.

His versatility onstage saw him play roles as diverse as King Lear, Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, a prisoner in the drama Short Eyes, the lion/god Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and the title role of Brecht’s The Life of Edward the Second of England.

See ArtsWatch’s appreciation of Mowry’s life and career here.

Gary Ferrington, arts advocate and writer

Gary Ferrington, a longtime arts supporter, photographer, and writer who was a regular contributor to ArtsWatch of stories about music, dance, and other arts in Eugene, died July 21, 2024 in his home city. He was 83. “A photo artist himself, he was also one of Eugene’s most valuable arts boosters, one especially devoted to expanding opportunities for young composers,” Brett Campbell wrote for ArtsWatch in this appreciation of Ferrington’s life and work. “As both journalist and advocate, in his retirement years after a three-decade career as a University of Oregon faculty member, Ferrington did more for arts and artists than most will do in a lifetime.” 

Born in Portland and raised on a family farm in Springdale, Oregon, he taught Instructional Systems Technology and Cinema Studies at the University of Oregon. His early passion for music, Campbell wrote, “converged in later years as Ferrington participated in a Eugene photography club, and found himself especially drawn to soundscape music — a modern combination of music and nature that’s especially prominent in the Pacific Northwest. That in turn led Gary, a capable writer, to edit the Journal of Acoustic Ecology and contribute to its parent World Forum for Acoustic Ecology as webmaster, video coordinator, secretary and board member.”

“Ferrington contributed his most bountiful beneficence to young composers at the University of Oregon, where he gave young creative musicians the kind of encouragement his own college music teacher denied him,” Campbell continued. “During his teaching career, he’d hear their music emanating from the music school practice rooms and concert halls, and started attending concerts featuring original student music. After he retired, UO student concerts became his principal pastime, and then more.”

Naomi Pomeroy, chef

Naomi Pomeroy, one of Portland’s, and very likely the nation’s, finest artists as a professional chef, died in an inner-tubing accident on July 13, 2024, drowning after her inner tube and two others were snagged in the Willamette River. She was 49. A cookbook author, James Beard Award-winning chef, and veteran of television food shows including Iron Chef and Top Chef Masters, she was revered for her creative cooking at such restaurants as Beast, Clarklewis, Gotham Tavern, and her custard shop Corner Custard.

In his ArtsWatch story A time of art, cuisine & making hay, Brian Libby remembered her involvement in an audacious and celebrated exhibition in 2000 at the American Institute of Architects, “Taking Space, Making Place.” “This group show—featuring a visual artist, dancer, filmmaker, architect and chef—prefigured by more than a decade the quirky, iconoclastic spirit that TV’s Portlandia would both celebrate and gently parody,” he wrote. “Yet there was an earnest desire underscoring their efforts: to cultivate community.”

“Before the opening party in the gallery’s back-of-house kitchen,” Libby continued, “I remember a pregnant Pomeroy who was also personable, enjoying our astonishment at how much better her food was than what we normally had catered. Though [her then-husband Michael] Hebb did a lot of the talking, ‘she was approachable and clearly the mastermind behind the food,’ recalls Amy Sabin-Logan, my former coworker at the AIA, now the executive director of My Voice Music, a nonprofit empowering kids to write and record songs.”

Jim Riswold, satiric artist and ad man

Jim Riswold, the Portland artist and longtime advertising executive whose campaigns for Nike at the Weiden+Kennedy advertising agency helped boost the athletic apparel company’s international image, died Aug. 9, 2024, at age 66. Cause of death was interstitial lung disease; he had battled various cancers, and sometimes made art about the process, for about 25 years.

Riswold was best known for his advertising prowess, creating campaigns featuring Michael Jordan, Spike Lee, Bo Jackson, Tiger Woods and others. But in artistic circles he was known for his sharply pointed satiric works that brought an ad man’s powers of persuasion to political and cultural targets ranging from abusive strong men such as Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Putin to the racial underpinnings of the United States Civil War: He used mockery as a highly effective artistic weapon.

Often, when aimed at notorious characters or events, his works turned on the pin-prick of psychological deflation, as in “Beer Hall Putsch Hitler (1923),” his 2015 digital-print portrait of a pompous Adolf Hitler wearing a lavishly decorated women’s dress. Nothing’s subtle about the mockery, and perhaps that’s the point: This blowhard of a murderous strong man is someone to be brought down, at least in retrospect, by laughter.

See ArtsWatch’s appreciation of Riswold’s life and art here.

Tom Spanbauer, novelist and “Dangerous Writing” teacher

Tom Spanbauer, author of the novels The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon and I Loved You More, died Sept. 21, 2024, in Portland, following a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. He was 78. The beloved writer, as Amy Leona Havin wrote in her ArtsWatch appreciation of his life and work, “was celebrated for his poetic novels, which depicted the beauty of living in a messy and unfiltered world.”

Spanbauer’s other novels include Faraway Places, In the City of Shy Hunters, and Now Is the Hour. His books, Havin wrote, explore issues of race, sexual identity, and making a family of choice.

“In Portland,” Havin continued, “he founded the Dangerous Writing workshop from his home. The workshop, which spanned three decades, left a line of enthusiastic students, including Chuck Palahniuk, author of the novels Fight Club and Choke.

“’It is a terrifying thing to bring your inner life out of the closet and read it aloud to a group’,” Spanbauer wrote about teaching workshops. ‘I must listen for the heartbreak, the rage, the shame, the fear that is hidden within the words. Then I must respect where each individual student is in relation to his or her broken heart and act accordingly.’” 

Tobias Andersen, actor and writer

Tobias Andersen, a giant among Portland actors who had a professional career that spanned almost 60 years, died Oct. 8, 2024, at his Gresham home. He was 87, and had survived a bout of cancer several years ago that had weakened him.

Andersen came to town in the early 1990s trailing a successful Hollywood career and appearances on the stages of major regional theaters, among them Seattle Rep and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. He was long and lean, and he cut through space with relaxed clarity, looming both large and intimate whether onstage or in conversation, in which he could be both droll and quietly commanding, listening intently to whoever he was talking with and often smiling broadly, in love with life and the theater.

One of Andersen’s first stage appearances in Portland was playing the writer C.S. Lewis in William Nicholson’s Shadowlands, at the old Portland Rep. From there he branched out memorably, performing everything from Shakespeare’s Lear and Prospero to classic American and British plays by the likes of Tennessee Williams, Caryl Churchill, Sam Shepard, Pozzo in Waiting for Godot, Henry Stamper in Sometimes a Great Notion, Charlie in Edward Albee’s Seascape, Richelieu in The Three Musketeers, and much more. He also founded Mt. Hood Repertory Theatre, which ran in Gresham for 13 years.

Andersen was also a writer of grace and insight, often sending fresh essays to friends. In 2023 he published the memoir Treading the Boards in Pakistan, relating his adventures with director Allen Nause when they took their production of David Rintels’ one-man play Clarence Darrow in 1997 to Lahore, Pakistan’s,  Second International Theatre & Dance Festival at the invitation of the United States Information Agency. And his appearance in the stage version of Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 led to a working relationship with Bradbury and a new solo play, The Illustrated Bradbury, which the writer and actor co-wrote, and which is based on 10 of Bradbury’s tales.

See ArtsWatch’s appreciation of Andersen’s life and work here.

Sahomi Tachibana, Japanese dancer and teacher

Sahomi Tachibana, a revered dancer and teacher of the traditional Japanese dance form Nihonbuyo and of Japanese regional folk dances, died October 10, 2024, at age 100. Over the years she taught thousands of students, and continued giving lessons in her Portland home until she was 95.

“She worked with taiko groups and professional arts organizations as a consultant and performer, and her work can be seen in the 2016 Laika Studio film Kubo and the Two Strings,” Chisao Hata wrote in her entry on Tachibana in The Oregon Encyclopedia. “’It is a lifelong study, and I am trying to teach my students whatever I have so it will enrich their lives,’ she said. ‘Dance has been my life.’”

Born Doris Haruno Abe to recent Japanese immigrants who farmed in California, she traveled to Japan at age 11 to study dance in Fukushima and Tokyo, and as Hata relates, returned to California in November 1941, on the last ship to leave Japan before the attack on Pearl Harbor. She and her family were incarcerated during World War II at a camp in Utah. Hata’s essay notes: “There was no teacher at camp, so I went from being the student to being the teacher,” she told Discover Nikkei in 2018.

After the end of the war she moved to New York City to study modern dance and ballet, beginning an acclaimed international career in which, among other things, she was an assistant director with the Metropolitan Opera and performed on Broadway in A Majority of One and Rashomon. She and her husband, Frank Hrubant, moved to Portland in 1990 to be near their daughter, Elaine Werner, and Tachibana spent many years here teaching dance, often at the Oregon Buddhist Temple, where, as Hata writes, “her repertoire included classical kabuki dramas and folk and semi-classical dances, many of which are National Treasures of Japan.” The Tachibana School that she co-founded in New York City in 1966 is still operating.

See Hannah Krafcic’s memorial appreciation for ArtsWatch here, Chisao Hata’s Oregon Encyclopedia essay on Tachibana here, and Nora Tree Newhouse’s obituary for The Oregonian/Oregon Live here.

Eunice Parsons, visual artist and teacher

Eunice Lulu Parsons, a prominent collagist, painter, printmaker, and teacher who moved from Chicago to Portland in about 1940 and stayed here for the rest of her life, died in Portland on Nov. 16, 2024. She was 108 years old.

Parsons was a rare link to an earlier generation of Oregon artists that helped form the region’s aesthetic personality. “Encouraged by a neighbor who noticed Parsons drawing at every opportunity,” curator Bonnie Laing-Malcomson wrote, “she enrolled at the Museum Art School (now Pacific Northwest College of Art) in 1950. There she was introduced to artists who would influence her development, especially Kurt Schwitters, Robert Motherwell, and Clifford Gleason.” At the school she took classes from a Northwest who’s-who of mid-20th century artist/teachers, among them Charles Voorheis, William Givler, Louis Bunce, and Jack McLarty.

For many years Parsons balanced her own artwork with a teaching career: She was on the faculty of the Museum Art School from 1957 until she retired in 1979, and she was a founding member in 2005 of the Portland artist-run 12×16 Gallery, which continued until 2017.

Parsons was attuned to such arts world shifts as the arrival of abstract expressionism, and although she worked in several media she eventually gravitated to collage, for which she remains best known. “Edges are the story of my life,” Jennifer Antonson quotes Parsons in her entry on the artist in The Oregon Encyclopedia. Antonson continues: “A painter, tilemaker, and printmaker, she is best known for collages, the art form ‘where we see edges and relationships’ come together. Her artwork might include posters, silkscreens, ticket stubs, packaging materials, or old magazine covers that demonstrate the interplay of words and phrases. ‘Collage lets me use my love for words, concrete and abstract,’ she said. ‘The detritus of our contemporary culture, posters picked up in my travels, are all grist for the mill.’”

See ArtsWatch’s appreciation of Parsons’ life and work here.

Harold Johnson, poet and teacher

Harold Johnson, a much admired Portland poet, teacher, and novelist, died Nov. 27 at age 91.

“Johnson grew up in Yakima during World War II and attended the University of Portland, where he graduated with a degree in English,” Amy Leona Havin wrote in her ArtsWatch memorial. “He was drafted into the U.S. Army, where he played trumpet in the 62^nd Army Band at Fort Bliss, Texas. Upon his return to Portland, he pursued a master’s degree in teaching art from Portland State University. In addition to writing poetry and prose based on his experiences, he taught English and visual arts in high schools and colleges around Oregon, including Portland Night High School, an outreach program for teens who did not thrive in conventional schools.”

He often read his poetry at public readings around Portland, and spent time as editor of the journal Fireweed: Poetry of Oregon. His work was published regularly in journals and anthologies, and in two book collections: Citizenship, which he wrote to “reflect the experience of one African-American male Pacific Northwesterner,” and Article.II. The Gallery. His novel The Fort Showalter Blues was based on his Army experience.

Johnson’s poetry, Havin wrote, “also touched on the story of his family during 20th-century America. In My Father’s Life, he describes the struggles of his father as a Black man in America:

“Thirty years after the Proclamation, black men
and boys still got snatched, bought and sold for labor
where he was born, but understanding he wasn’t the kind
to survive that unkindness, he fled at age fourteen.“

Darcy white, pianist, musical director, cabaret queen

Darcy White, longtime Portland musical-theater music director and piano accompanist and the creative force behind the popular Cabaret White musical series, died in Portland on December 4, 2024, following a third round of cancer. She was 65.

White, who won several Drammy Awards for excellence in Portland theater and several PAMTA Awards during the years that those musical-theater awards existed, was immensely well-liked among her fellow theater and music artists, respected for both her sharp wit and her ability to work with other artists and help bring out their best.

White’s vivid backstage personality came out to the forefront especially in her cabaret shows, in which she was a sparkling and funny host, and which spotlighted the talents of many musical-theater and other singers in a relaxed nightclub atmosphere.

“Family, community, and music were at the heart of who she was,” Liz Bacon, White’s longtime fiend and Cabaret White’s marketing director, said. “Through Cabaret White, Darcy gave singers a unique space to refine their craft and share deeply personal stories. She had this incredible gift for trust in collaboration—she believed in you and brought out the best in you. But she wasn’t afraid to hold you accountable, doing so with a blend of gentleness and her signature saltiness. That honesty, paired with her warmth, is something artists truly valued.”

See ArtsWatch’s appreciation of White’s life and art here.

Jay Backstrand, painter and teacher

Jay Backstrand, the longtime Oregon artist and teacher who among other things co-founded the ground-breaking Portland Center for the Visual Arts, died on Dec. 2, 2024. He was 90 years old.

Born in Salem, Oregon, in 1934, Backstrand studied at various schools, among them the University of Oregon, Oregon State University, Pacific Northwest College of Art (where he also taught from 1975 to 1986) and, on a Fulbright Scholarship, the Slade School at the University of London.

“Backstrand was firmly an Oregon-based artist, spending most of his life here and contributing heartily to the state’s artistic community,” Kyera Lutton wrote in her appreciation for ArtsWatch. “He helped to co-found the Portland Center for the Visual Arts alongside his friends and other popular local artists Mel Katz and Michele Russo. This center was one of the first alternative spaces for artists in the country at the time of its founding and was instrumental in introducing contemporary artistic practices on a more democratized level to artists in Portland and surrounding areas.”

Backstrand’s bold blends of abstraction and realism pop off the walls, and he counted among his influences artists and ideas ranging from Francis Bacon, Rene Magritte, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Susan Sontag,  psychoanalyst Alice Miller and cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker to coffee houses and cigarettes. “He incorporates this mix of film, stage, and real life into his works, which merge different visual elements to create a cohesive whole,” Lutton wrote. “Truly, his works bear his unique mark.”