Turning the page: Looking back on ’24 and ahead to ’25

From construction projects at the Portland Art Museum and elsewhere to tight budgets and uncertainty about money to tales about Portland's Black music history and a puppet museum and a giant pumpkin regatta, Oregon's arts world presses ahead.
Architectural rendering of the Portland Art Museum's new Mark Rothko Pavilion, connecting the museum's north and south buildings. The redesigned museum campus will open in late 2025. Hennebery Eddy Architects and Vinci Hamp Architects.
Architectural rendering of the Portland Art Museum’s new Mark Rothko Pavilion, connecting the museum’s north and south buildings. The redesigned museum campus will open in late 2025. Hennebery Eddy Architects and Vinci Hamp Architects.

It’s the first day of a new year, and here at ArtsWatch we’re having double vision, looking back (as we’ve been for the past week) on the triumphs and challenges of 2024 in Oregon arts and culture, and ahead to what might be significant in 2025. Warning: Our crystal ball is a little fuzzy, and our rear-view vision might not be entirely 20/20. Still, we’ve seen the sights, and are confident more are on the way.


2024: A Year in Review (and the Year Ahead)


To kick things off, let’s look back and ahead at the Portland Art Museum, which has been a construction zone for several years now and is looking to at last unveil its $111 million rehab later in 2025. Although the museum closed down briefly during the early months of the Covid pandemic, it’s mostly stayed open during construction, although many of its galleries have been off-limits. The new, 24,000-square-foot, glassed-in Mark Rothko Pavilion will connect the museum’s north and south buildings as well as adding gallery space, and the entire remodel will add almost 100,000 square feet to the campus, much of it for new galleries. Access will be greatly improved, with more elevators, ramps, and a much better flow from gallery to gallery, eliminating the rabbit-warren feel of the north building, where it’s been all too easy to get lost amid the twists and turns.

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Portland Opera The Shining Newmark Theatre Portland Oregon

While construction crews have been hard at work, the museum has brought in potentially crowd-pleasing exhibits ranging from arty shoes (we’re in Nike/Adidas Land, after all) to the current shows of early-Beatles photographs by Paul McCartney (closing Jan. 19) and psychedelic rock posters and hippie fashion from the 1960s, plus Throughlines, a show that gathers pieces from the museum’s many collections, discovering connections between works of different genres.

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THE UNVEILING of the museum’s fresh face is also being anticipated as a major step in the slow recovery of Downtown Portland from the pandemic years and their spinoffs of emptied office buildings, political discord, open drug marts and houselessness. And the freshened-up museum will join the spiffed-up Multnomah County Central Library a few blocks away, which reopened Feb. 23, 2024, after being shut down for a year for $15 million worth of major upgrades and renovations.

Central Library, the downtown Portland core branch that was built in 1913, reopened Friday, Feb. 23, after being closed almost a year for renovations. Photo courtesy Multnomah County Library.
Central Library, the downtown Portland core branch that was built in 1913, reopened Friday, Feb. 23, after being closed almost a year for renovations. Photo courtesy Multnomah County Library.

Central Library’s upgrades were only part of a major system-wide rethinking, remodeling and rebuilding effort for the entire Mutnomah County Libraries system, as Randy Gragg outlined in his March 10 ArtsWatch story Designed by community: Multnomah County Libraries — including Central, Midland, and the new East County branch — reflect a new way of thinking about library architecture. The systemwide changes, spurred by a $387 million bond passed by county voters in 2020, are designed to “engage the patron in a much more collaborative way,” the library system’s then-director, Vailey Oehlke, told Gragg. “It’s not just a passive relationship, where the patron walks in and asks for something, receives it, and leaves. The patron now will be able to come, meet other people, collaborate, and learn. Maybe the staff helps guide them, but there will be so much more opportunity for the people to shape their own experience.”

Keller Auditorium and Portland State University

Rendering of PSU's proposed new performance art center. Courtesy of Portland State University.
Rendering of PSU’s proposed new performance art center. Courtesy of Portland State University.

One of the biggest political/cultural footballs in Portland in 2024 has been the struggle over what to do about Keller Auditorium, the 3,000-seat downtown performance hall near the riverfront that needs earthquake-resistant upgrades and a general redesign, most likely from the studs out.

In his March 18 ArtsWatch story Keller Auditorium’s future: Three options, one choice, Brian Libby laid out the possibilities: a remodeled Keller; a new complex at Portland State University including 3,000- and 1,200-seat halls; or a new auditorium at Lloyd Center. The Lloyd Center option fell by the wayside, and emerging sentiment seemed to favor building the PSU complex but keeping the Keller in operation in the meantime so that ballet, opera, and touring Broadway shows could continue to perform. Part of the concern was for lost revenue if shows needed to be canceled, and for lost jobs if the Keller shut down: On July 5 ArtsWatch published an opinion piece by Keller stagehand Kate Mura arguing that jobs must be saved.

In October the Portland City Council voted to go forward with construction of the PSU complex and renovation of the Keller, which would create two 3,000-seat halls and the challenge of keeping both filled. The Oregonian/Oregon Live reported that the total cost, which would also include parking and a hotel at the PSU site, was estimated at $857 million, and that the entire project would be completed in 2031.

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Cascadia Composers and Delgani String Quartet Portland Oregon

PSU, which sits just a few blocks south of downtown’s Cultural District, would in effect become an extension of it. It already has the popular Lincoln Performance Hall, which with 450 seats is in demand both for campus performances and those by such arts groups as The Portland Ballet, White Bird Dance, and Chamber Music Northwest. And in early April philanthropist Jordan Schnitzer announced a $10 million gift to the university’s School of Art, renamed the Schnitzer School of Art + Art History + Design. The money includes $5 million to build a new home on campus for the art school, $4 million to support the existing Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at PSU, and $1 million to “help PSU enhance its urban campus through additional signage, lighting and outdoor art.”

On June 1 Amanda Waldroupe wrote for ArtsWatch about PSU’s plans to redesign its campus, providing both a more distinctive sense of place and an integration with the surrounding city, and the Place Matte Design Competition that would get it there. A month and a half later Waldroupe followed up with the news that PSU had chosen the firm Walker Macy “to transform the campus and, the university hopes, inspire the revitalization of downtown Portland.”

Still, it’s not entirely a bed of roses on the university’s cultural front. On the downside, PSU’s once-thriving dance department is apparently no more: In December it was revealed that the school’s two remaining dance instructors will not be rehired for winter and spring 2025 terms.

All classical radio’s big move

All Classical Radio on-air host Christa Wessel in the classical station's new downtown Portland studio with the Grant High School Royal Blues Chamber Choir on “Thursdays at Three,” which features musicians in performance and conversation. Photo: Joe Cantrell
All Classical Radio on-air host Christa Wessel in the classical station’s new downtown Portland studio with the Grant High School Royal Blues Chamber Choir on “Thursdays at Three,” which features musicians in performance and conversation. Photo: Joe Cantrell

Portland’s All Classical Radio, which through its website has an international reach, also made the move downtown in 2024, to the third floor of KOIN Tower, where it’s settled into a 15,000-square-foot Media Arts Center that includes among other things a performance hall and five high-tech recording studios.

In December Daryl Browne wrote Voices in radio history: The legacy of Roger O. Doyle and the new KQAC All Classical choral series that bears his name for ArtsWatch, about the station’s new performance space named for Doyle, former leader of Choral Arts Ensemble. Brett Campbell followed with All Classical Radio’s Media Arts Center: Portland’s newest cultural hub, giving both the history of the move and the station’s expanded possibilities in its new digs. Joe Cantrell’s photos of people using the station’s new home give an added sense of its vitality.

Artists Repertory’s slow revival

The cast in Artists Rep’s “The Event!,” which got the company back and performing in its under-construction home space. Photo: Philip J Hatton
The cast in Artists Rep’s “The Event!,” which got the company back and performing in its under-construction home space. Photo: Philip J Hatton

Portland’s Artists Repertory Theatre, at one time one of the city’s most significant companies, has been in the midst of a massive construction project for several years, waiting to move back in to what will be two intimate new performance spaces. For a while it shared space with Portland Center Stage, performing in the small Ellyn Bye Studio. Then, for a time, it stopped producing shows altogether. Of late it’s returned to its own building, where it’s carved a makeshift performance space from what eventually will be the building’s lobby, and begun to do shows again: It started in the fall of ’24 with an original play called The Event! (see Darleen Ortega’s ArtsWatch review here); coming up in 2025 will be the premiere of Diana Burbano’s Sapience and yet another premiere, Portland playwright Sara Jean Accuardi’s The Storyteller.

Other companies have been using the makeshift lobby space, too. On a Monday evening in December I took in a show called Season’s Readings!, part of the Cygnet Salon series, which specializes in well-rehearsed readings of plays (and, in this case, a couple of songs, too). The idea is to keep things simple, concentrating on the script and its meanings and the connection with the audience. On this evening a gathering of excellent stage veterans — Don Alder, Nancy Benner, David Meyers, John Morrison, Vana O’Brien and Wendy Westerwelle, accompanied on piano by Dashiell La Sasso — ripped and roared and laughed through a variety of short pieces by the likes of Frank Sullivan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Christopher Morley, Ogden Nash, Mike Nichols, Elaine May, and Eric Kimmel, creating a little bit of literary and theatrical magic for a packed house of about 125. Well-crafted absurdity abounded, as in Morrison’s turn as a growling bear who’s mistaken for a rabbi.

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Portland Opera The Shining Newmark Theatre Portland Oregon

All in all, the evening felt just a bit like Artists Rep’s early days, when it was performing in a small upstairs room in downtown’s YWCA and making big things happen in a little space. And it gave hope that, for today’s Artists Rep, a brighter future is in the works.

An airport, a literary home, a bridge, and more

On August 3 visitors got a first peek at PDX airport’s new terminal, which opened for passengers on August 14. Photo: Randy Gragg
On August 3 visitors got a first peek at PDX airport’s new terminal, which opened for passengers on August 14. Photo: Randy Gragg

For a city that’s supposedly in a Deep Funk, an astonishing number of social and cultural building projects are going on. In December, Literary Arts, which among many other things sponsors the annual Oregon Book Awards and the Portland Book Festival, moved into spacious digs in Inner Southeast Portland, complete with meeting rooms, a book store, and a café. Karen Pate covered its grand opening, and in September Brian Libby got an early look, touring the site with Executive Director Andrew Proctor while work was still in process.

In August, Libby reported on yet another huge municipal project: the variety of proposals to build a replacement for the Burnside Bridge, one of the main links between downtown and Portland’s east side, and also part of the divide between the city’s north and south quadrants. (An Inverted “Y” cable design won the competition.)

And in his August story PDX airport’s $2 billion reinvention takes flight, Randy Gragg takes a deep look at the radically reshaped Portland airport, an international hub that now takes its design cues from the Pacific Northwest forests.

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NOR HAS THE BUILDING BOOM been confined to Portland. 2024 in Review: All Around Oregon, ArtsWatch’s year-end look at cultural happenings across the state, has details on major projects in Corvallis (the new Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts, or PRAx), Newberg (the $5 million renovation of the Chehalem Cultural Center, adding a 250-seat theater), and a trio in Astoria (a $30 million expansion of the Columbia River Maritime Museum, a massive expansion of the city’s Oregon Film Museum, and the transformation of an old downtown building into the Astoria Arts and Movement Center, “a vibrant new community center hosting classes ranging from ballet to Zumba.”

Money makes the world go ’round

Among the many offerings at the Oregon Contemporary arts center, which has protested the method and amounts of city arts grants, is the Oregon Contemporary Artists’ Biennial. The 2024 edition, shown above, ran from late April to early August. Photo courtesy Oregon Contemporary.
Among the many offerings at the Oregon Contemporary arts center, which has protested the method and amounts of city arts grants, is the Oregon Contemporary Artists’ Biennial. The 2024 edition, shown above, ran from late April to early August. Photo courtesy Oregon Contemporary.

So far we’ve been blithely tossing around big-budget figures — $111 million, $15 million, $387 million, $857 million, $2 billion — as if they were casual withdrawals from Uncle Scrooge’s overflowing Money Bin. But money to support culture and the arts has always been a precious commodity, and hard to come by: From public schools to nonprofit theaters and dance companies and orchestras and museums, scraping up operational cash is almost always a tough task.

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Cascadia Composers and Delgani String Quartet Portland Oregon

It could be getting tougher, not just in Oregon but also nationally. The first Trump administration made noises about drastically curtailing or eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities, although Congress didn’t go along with the administration’s plans. Don’t be surprised if the second Trump administration tries again. And Elon Musk, the multibillionaire in charge of reducing everyone else’s budgets, has taken aim at National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service, home of such suspicious characters as Elmo and Big Bird. As Musk so elegantly puts it: “Legacy media must die.”

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COMPLICATING MATTERS in Portland is the switch from a strong five-member City Council to a new twelve-member council representing four quadrants of the city, with a less powerful mayor and a city administrator. No one’s quite sure how this new structure is going to work out, and where arts funding might fall in the mix. With a mostly new council, how will arts funding stack up with matters ranging from housing people living on the streets to dealing with a drug crisis to maintaining basic services and finding ways to manage soaring housing costs?

The year-and-a-half-long battle between the Regional Arts and Culture Council, which for decades had managed most tri-county administration of government arts spending, and the City of Portland, which withdrew most of its underwriting of RACC and set up its own Office of Arts & Culture, only makes things less settled. Many arts groups that have had long working relations with RACC have opposed the structural change. Several small- and medium-sized arts groups, among them Profile Theatre and Oregon Contemporary art center, have lamented that the city in its last round of grants gave significant cuts to 45 smaller organizations. In a response to Oregon Contemporary’s Blake Shell, the city arts program’s Darion Jones and Chariti L. Montez made a distinction between general operating support grants, which “have remained constant over time,” and investment awards, which “can vary significantly each year.” They continued: “We also want to clarify that the city remains committed to supporting the arts ecosystem — from individual artists and creatives to small, medium, and large arts organizations alike.” Still, many groups remain unconvinced.

Meanwhile, in July a proposal was floated to replace Portland’s $35-a-person city arts tax with a broader-based parks and arts levy, under the city’s new “Vibrant Communities” umbrella combining its Parks Bureau and arts programs. The current parks levy expires at the end of 2025, and a new levy on the ballot would more than double the current amount, to include arts and presumably other parks programs.

How intimately parks and arts programs would work together under the Vibrant Communities umbrella isn’t clear. But it’s possible that money and programs could filter out to the neighborhoods, too. Decades ago many city parks had arts programs in their buildings, available for their neighborhoods and in some cases attracting visitors from around the city. A few such parks-sponsored programs, such as the Multnomah Arts Center in Multnomah Village, still exist. Is it possible that the new parks/arts hookup could revive that old citywide system?

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Cascadia Composers and Delgani String Quartet Portland Oregon

HOW THE OREGON LEGISLATURE will approach arts and cultural funding in 2025 isn’t clear, either. In 2024 the Legislature partly made up for a disastrous 2023 session in which most Republican senators walked out for six weeks and essentially brought legislation to a halt. The ’24 short session rushed to get business done that was postponed from ’23, but couldn’t get to everything, and results for the arts were mixed. Legislators approved operational funding for several larger arts groups, and approved some funding for more than 70 cultural organizations across the state, but for less than half of what those groups had requested.

Left unfunded was a $13.5 million request for post-Covid grants meant largely for smaller arts organizations, many of which are still struggling financially from the effects of the pandemic years. Legislators tend to think of arts and cultural funding in terms of economic stimulus, and see large groups as more effective contributors to the overall economy. In fact, a healthy cultural scene has strong players among its large, medium, and small groups, which often feed one another and sometimes work collaboratively.

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Oregon Children’s Theatre’s “Cat Kid Comic Club: The Musical” played in the fall of 2024 at the Newmark Theatre in downtown Portland. OCT was awarded a $100,000 grant by the Oregon Community Foundation. Photo: Jeremy Daniel
Oregon Children’s Theatre’s “Cat Kid Comic Club: The Musical” played in the fall of 2024 at the Newmark Theatre in downtown Portland. OCT was awarded a $100,000 grant by the Oregon Community Foundation. Photo: Jeremy Daniel

ON A BRIGHTER NOTE, several foundations came through with large and widespread arts grants. In March the Oregon Community Foundation and the James F. and Marion L. Miller Foundation announced that they would each give $20 million over three years for arts infrastructure around the state. Combined with $11.8 million from the ’24 Legislature, it amounted to what supporters were calling a “love letter” to the arts.

In April Bend’s High Desert Museum scored a $500,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to help revitalize its permanent exhibition dedicated to Indigenous cultures of the region. In November the Oregon Community Foundation announced $578,000 in grants to 21 mostly smaller arts and cultural groups from Coos Bay to Bend to Baker City and beyond to help them rebuild from the difficult Covid and post-pandemic years. It was the first of what the OCF expects to be about $6 million in such payments by the end of 2026.

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Wendy Red Star, “Apsáalooka Feminist No. 4,” 2016, archival pigment print, 35 x 42 inches. In this series Red Star, who won both the Bonnie Bronson Visual Arts Fellowship and a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in 2024, photographed her daughter and herself “wearing traditional elk tooth dress, representing her Crow heritage and emphasizing the matrilineality of her tribe.”
Wendy Red Star, “Apsáalooka Feminist No. 4,” 2016, archival pigment print, 35 x 42 inches. In this series Red Star, who won both the Bonnie Bronson Visual Arts Fellowship and a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 2024, photographed her daughter and herself “wearing traditional elk tooth dress, representing her Crow heritage and emphasizing the matrilineality of her tribe.”

AND SEVERAL OREGON ARTISTS got significant individual awards in 2024. In April Portland painter Arvie Smith, one of the state’s best and most prominent painters, won a Guggenheim Fellowship, following his 2022 auxiliary exhibition at the Venice Biennale.

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CMNW Hagen Quartet

Also in April, jazz bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding, jingle dancer and Umatilla tribal member Acosia Red Elk, and former Oregon Shakespeare Festival Artistic Director Nataki Garrett won unrestricted $525,000 cash awards from the Doris Duke Foundation, and Portland artist Wendy Red Star, a member of the Apsáalooke (Crow) Nation, won the 2024 Bonnie Bronson Visual Arts Fellowship, which she followed up in October with a MacArthur Fellowship “genius grant” of $800,000 over five years.

And in December the Miller Foundation announced its Spark Awards — $25,000 to each of 20 Oregon artists, and the beginning of a three-year program that will amount to 60 artists and $1.5 million.

A scattering of stories from 2024 that we like

Albina Music Trust, L to R: Calvin Walker, Ken Berry, Paul Knauls, Norman Sylvester, J.W. Friday, Jeddy Beasley, Rickey Brame, Bobby Smith seated. Photo by Eric Mast.
Albina Music Trust, L to R: Calvin Walker, Ken Berry, Paul Knauls, Norman Sylvester, J.W. Friday, Jeddy Beasley, Rickey Brame, Bobby Smith seated. Photo by Eric Mast.

Jan. 25: Albina Community Archive: Recovering Portland’s Black Music History. Jazz writer and radio host Lynn Darroch tells the story of the recovery and preservation of what’s come to be known as the Albina Community Archive: “This remarkable repository of neighborhood culture was the fruit of the ‘memory activism’ of Bobby Smith and Calvin Walker, who were supported by elder Black musicians and others close to the scene. Since 2015, they have been working to bring to light the story of Albina’s funk, soul and gospel music from the 1960s through the 1980s.”

Just part of the Mekong River Band, from left: Jimmy Russell, Wendy Nguyen, Sophie Nguyen, Minh Pham, Chan Vu “Bon,” Saron Khut. Photo: Brooke Hoyer
Just part of the Mekong River Band, from left: Jimmy Russell, Wendy Nguyen, Sophie Nguyen, Minh Pham, Chan Vu “Bon,” Saron Khut. Photo: Brooke Hoyer 

Feb. 6: Everybody comes to Mekong Bistro. “The dining room was packed, the tables laden with stir fry noodle dishes with names like Pad Kee-Ma, Pad Sa Eaw and Mi-Cha, a Cambodian fried noodle specialty,” Elizabeth Mehren wrote about an evening at Portland’s Mekong Bistro. As good as the food was, something else was going on: a gathering of friends, brought together by Saron Khut, the bistro’s owner and founder of the Mekong River Band, which was playing on this evening. Khut, who escaped the Khmer Rouge as a child and eventually, like so many of his customers, found his way to the United States, “prefers to direct his attention to the restaurant that has become a social magnet for greater Portland’s Southeast Asian community (and others) than to think about his painful past,” Mehren writes. “Khut has become a kind of cultural ambassador for Cambodian, Vietnamese, Laotian, Thai, Burmese and Filipino residents around Portland.” A beautiful story about a beautiful human thing.

March 27: Amanda Waldroupe interviewed Elizabeth Mehren, author of the story “Everybody comes to Mekong Bistro,” about her new book “I Lived to Tell the World,” which tells the stories of 16 Oregonians “who survived some of contemporary history’s most atrocious events: the Holocaust, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Bosnian War, the Rwandan genocide, the Vietnam War.”

March 7: Devising the future at Hand2Mouth. Bobby Bermea writes about the Portland theater company’s Youth Devising Residency program, which gives teenagers the experience of working with older actors as they learn the skills of creating a show as a group process rather than from a pre-existing script.

Jennifer Wright’s Glass Piano with its glass wings, and Bonnie Meltzer’s wall hanging behind. Photo: Andie Petkus
Jennifer Wright’s Glass Piano with its glass wings, and Bonnie Meltzer’s wall hanging behind. Photo: Andie Petkus

April 29: “Burned Piano,” rising out of the ashes. An exhibit at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education told a tale of creating beauty out of ugliness. After the house of a Portland Jewish family was burned in an anti-Semitic attack, a charred grand piano that had been in the family for generations was pulled from the ashes and slowly transformed into a new musical instrument made partly of glass by musician Jennifer Wright and her husband. Their friend the fabric artist Bonnie Meltzer in turn took unusable parts of the burned piano and wove them into fabric art.

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High Desert Museum Frank Matsura Portraits from the borderland Bend Oregon

Gallery visitors taking in Phyllis Yes’s paintings of a naked man doing household chores. Photo: Jane Mantiri
Gallery visitors taking in Phyllis Yes’s paintings of a naked man doing household chores. Photo: Jane Mantiri

June 12: Yes says no to gender stereotypes. Claire Sykes writes about the odyssey of artist Phyllis Yes’s paintings taken from old photographs of a man doing housework in the buff, turning the table on gender expectations. The exhibit, banned from a church gallery, found a new home – and after a half-century, her nude model came clean.

Nanea Woods (with tote) visits with two participants in Prose Before Bros’ May “reading hour” at the Woodlark Hotel in Portland. Woods started the book club for women of color with seven people in 2018; today it has nearly 1,300 members. Photo by: Amy Wang
Nanea Woods (with tote) visits with two participants in Prose Before Bros’ May “reading hour” at the Woodlark Hotel in Portland. Woods started the book club for women of color with seven people in 2018; today it has nearly 1,300 members. Photo by: Amy Wang

June 13: Prose Before Bros: A book club where women of color share reading and community. Amy Wang spins the story of the book club Prose Before Bros, begun in 2018 by Nanea Woods and six other women. “As a woman with Black, Chinese, and Hawaiian heritage,” Wang writes, Woods “wanted to create a community for women of color, a space where they could find fellowship, particularly in a city and state where they often didn’t feel seen or supported. Six years later, Prose Before Bros has become that community, with nearly 1,300 members.”

Pinocchio puppet display at the Portland Puppet Museum. Photo: K.B. Dixon
Pinocchio puppet display at the Portland Puppet Museum. Photo: K.B. Dixon

June 19: Discovering the Portland Puppet Museum. Writer and photographer K.B. Dixon created a photo essay on the charms of one of Portland’s little-known cultural delights: the Portland Puppet Museum, half-hidden behind trees in an 1880s Sellwood former grocery building and one of the few museums in the nation dedicated to preserving the art, history, and pleasures of all things puppetry.

Kristoffer Diaz, author of “Reggie Hoops.” Photo courtesy Kristoffer Diaz.

July 29: Shooting the breeze with Kristoffer Diaz about “Reggie Hoops.” “Kristoffer Diaz is a man on fire,” Bobby Bermea wrote about Diaz, author of the Obie-winning play The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity and co-creator with Alicia Keys of the 2024 double Tony-winning hit musical Hell’s Kitchen. “Diaz, much like the characters at the center of his plays, is down to earth, clear-eyed and personable,” Bermea wrote about his conversation with the playwright, who was in Portland for the debut of his newest play, the basketball story Reggie Hoops, at Profile Theatre.

Teachers (l-r Laura John, Lori Tapahonso) celebrate their students (Taya Dixon, Dominique Knight, Cassie Funmaker) learning their traditional songs in the world premiere of Blossom Johnson’s “Diné Nishłį (i am a sacred being) Or, A Boarding School Play.” Photo: Jingzi Zhao
Teachers (l-r Laura John, Lori Tapahonso) celebrate their students (Taya Dixon, Dominique Knight, Cassie Funmaker) learning their traditional songs in the world premiere of Blossom Johnson’s “Diné Nishłį (i am a sacred being) Or, A Boarding School Play.” Photo: Jingzi Zhao

Sept. 18: A new stage for telling Native stories. Brett Campbell writes about the creation of director Jeanette Harrison’s new Native Theater Project, in an innovative partnership with Hillsboro’s Bag & Baggage Productions, which debuted with Blossom Johnson’s Diné Nishłį (I Am A Sacred Being) or, A Boarding School Play. It’s a story that resonates with both Native and non-Native audiences, Harrison told Campbell: “We’re telling stories for Native people, and also sharing them with wider audiences.” (See Darleen Ortega’s Sept. 23 ArtsWatch review of Diné Nishłį here.)

Roberta Wong and Chisao Hata, key figures in Vanport Mosaic’s “memory activism.”
Roberta Wong and Chisao Hata, key figures in Vanport Mosaic’s “memory activism.”

Sept. 23: Stage & Studio: “Coming Home” to Portland’s Old Town. Dmae Lo Roberts talks in her Stage & Studio podcast with artists Chisao Hata and Roberta Wong about “memory activism” and Old Town’s deep Chinese, Japanese, and other cultural and ethnic roots. “Japanese pioneers came in the late 1800s,” Hata told Roberts. “My grandmother was one of 40,000 picture brides, because women were not allowed to come to America unless they were married. So she was one of those picture brides coming to Oregon and landing in Nihonmachi, or Japan Town.” 

Santa on the water: A Pumpkin Regatta competitor merrily mixes his holidays. Photo: Joe Cantrell
Santa on the water: A Pumpkin Regatta competitor merrily mixes his holidays. Photo: Joe Cantrell

Oct. 23: Splish-splash: Giant pumpkins on the lake. Photographer Joe Cantrell spent a day at the West Coast Giant Pumpkin Regatta in Tualatin, watching the gargantuan gourds glide across the water like bloated kayaks as the crowd cheered onshore, and created a sizzling-wet photo essay from what he saw. Who says veggies can’t be fun?

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Cascadia Composers and Delgani String Quartet Portland Oregon

Actor and writer Paul Susi.
Actor and writer Paul Susi.

Nov. 12: Stage & Studio: Paul Susi’s odyssey with “An Iliad.” On her Stage & Studio podcast Dmae Lo Roberts talked with actor and social justice activist Paul Susi about touring a version of Homer’s epic tale to prisons, church groups, community centers and more. “He just returned from a New England tour of An Iliad by Denis O’Hare and Lisa Peterson, a monologue with music that condenses Homer’s Trojan War epic about heroism and the horrors of war,” Roberts noted. Susi talked about taking the show to West Sylvan Middle School’s outdoor school. “There are Ukrainian and Russian immigrants and children in those schools,” he said. “And … they begged me to, to bring An Iliad to their classroom.”

Michael Mendelson, managing artistic director of The Actors Conservatory, works in the studio on a scene with conservatory student Kencess Polidor during Shakespeare class. Photo: Erin Jackson Caron

Dec. 7: The Actors Conservatory: Hale and hearty and going on 40. The Portland professional training school, which began life in 1985 in a former dental office, now draws students from across the nation seeking careers in the theater world. ArtsWatch tells the tale of its people and its past, present, and future.

ArtsWatch’s 2024 in Review:

Dec. 26: 2024 in Review: The story of music — listening back, again.

Dec. 27: 2024 in Review: All around Oregon.

Dec. 28: 2024 in Review: In Oregon’s museums and galleries, a big boom of art.

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Cascadia Composers and Delgani String Quartet Portland Oregon

Dec. 29: FilmWatch Yearly: The Top Ten Films of 2024.

Dec. 29: 2024 in Review: New Avenues for Portland’s literary hubs and libraries.

Dec. 30: 2024 in Review: The year in dance.

Dec. 30: 2024 in Review: A few of my favorite (theatrical) things.

Dec. 31: Passages: Remembering the artists we lost in 2024.

Jan. 1: Turning the page: Looking back on ’24 and ahead to ’25.

Bob Hicks, Executive Editor of Oregon ArtsWatch, has been covering arts and culture in the Pacific Northwest since 1978, including 25 years at The Oregonian. Among his art books are Kazuyuki Ohtsu; James B. Thompson: Fragments in Time; and Beth Van Hoesen: Fauna and Flora. His work has appeared in American Theatre, Biblio, Professional Artist, Northwest Passage, Art Scatter, and elsewhere. He also writes the daily art-history series "Today I Am."

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  1. Senior Crash Test Dummy, Institute of Empirical Blunders

    Gee whiz, wish I could have been there!

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