PORTLAND & OREGON ART

News, reviews and events on the visual arts

On Saturday night, the sluggish giant that is the Portland Art Museum awoke, beckoned by strange and unlikely presences: break dancers, outdoor beer gardens, gorgeous ikebana floral arrangements, mystical dowsing auras, and much more.  Full story »

The Portland Art Museum is shining a light on the community this weekend. One of the museum's big initiatives the past few years has been a retrenchment of local involvement, a campaign that found greater resonance when the recession forced financial belt tightening and thus, more locally driven (and cheaper) projects.  Full story »

What's an outsider artist? In Portland, it's someone who lives and works in the city they love, far from the madding crowds of New York and Los Angeles. You might argue that Portland's art world has comprised many such outsiders since its modern art scene emerged during the 1950s.  Full story »

Visual arts critic D.K. Row explains how the Portland Art Museum is finally getting to fill an open curator position.  Full story »

"How do you explain to someone the beauty in being practical?" As we talk about the joys of practicality, J.P. Reuer has to speak above the din of table saws and drills and construction clatter. Reuer is chairman of the new master's program in applied craft and design that Pacific Northwest College of Art and Oregon College of Art... Full story »

The TBA catalog boasts a short blurb by James Franco in which the popular actor reveals that Erased James Franco, screening at Whitsell Auditorium as part of the Time-Based Art Festival, features his "favorite performance of any (he has) ever done." A more instructive assessment of the experimental feature can be gleaned from an interview The Guardian recently ran... Full story »

The college paid off $1 million of the museum's debt to rescue the museum's collection. Full story »

The nude is timeless. It's been one of most frequent subjects of artists for centuries, for example, particularly in Europe. Now, the nude as subject gets some gallery space with a new show, "The Language of the Nude, Four Centuries of Drawing the Body." On view at the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College, the exhibit... Full story »

"Joy and Reffry," on view at Pulliam Gallery, sounds at first like a curatorial sendup of "The Odd Couple" recast with two of Seattle's most highly regarded artists. Playing the role of neat freak Felix Ungar in our contemporary incarnation is master craftsman Roy McMakin --artist, furniture designer and architect, whose impeccable sense of formal restraint and subtle humor... Full story »

The word "sublime" ranks among the most over- and misused terms in the contemporary art world, whipped out anytime the descriptors "cool," "big" or "wicked" feel inadequately lowbrow. A gawky young man sports a t-shirt for the cheesy ska-punk band Sublime while yammering into a video camera in Brody Condon's "Without Sun," currently on view at Washington High School... Full story »

Before beaming the first of 510 photographs onto a large outdoor screen behind Washington High School last Saturday evening, Hitoshi Toyoda briefly illuminated his relationship to old fashioned, pre-PowerPoint slideshows. In keeping with the elusive nature of everyday life, he explained, in which subjects constantly "appear and disappear" from view, he was uncomfortable permanently fixing his photographs on paper.  Full story »

The people have spoken, and they are demanding more arts and culture. So says a May poll for the Creative Advocacy Network, the nonprofit that's organizing metro-wide support for dedicated arts funding. The network's board members --leading arts figures, business people and arts supporters -- wanted to wait until its new executive director, Jessica Jarratt, had time to study... Full story »

The minute ticking of little wheels you hear is Ethan Rose's installation at The Works for this year's Time-Based Art Festival. Much of the public may know Rose in the most accessible of terms as a musician -- his music, for example, was heard in Gus Van Sant's underappreciated gem, "Paranoid Park." But Rose is also that least accessible... Full story »

By most measures, there's alarming bafflement, seemingly arbitrary movement and scarcity of structure in "Last Meadow," a performance presented by Miguel Gutierrez and The Powerful People for this year's Time-Based Art Festival. That is, there's enough badgering physical movement and synchronic dissonance to annoy or scare off viewers desiring coherence.  Full story »

The Oregonian's visual arts critic loves the Time-Based Art Festival. But he also believes it should try to appeal to a larger audience. More: Complete TBA coverage. Full story »