Category Archives: Visual Art

Bringing it all back home: Steven Grafe at Maryhill

Queen Marie of Romania dedicating the still unfinished Maryhill Museum of Art in a 1926 ceremony.

Queen Marie of Romania dedicating the still unfinished Maryhill Museum in 1926.

Eventually the world seems to show up on the doorstep of the Maryhill Museum of Art.

Which is a funny place for the world to show up, in this isolated concrete mansion overlooking the Columbia River Gorge in the semi-desert landscape of Klickitat County, Washington.

But look at the evidence. Marie, the bohemian queen of Romania, and Loie Fuller, the American dancer who was the toast of European arts circles around the turn of the twentieth century, were vital figures in the founding of the museum.

One of the museum’s signature collections is the ornate scenes of Theatre de la Mode, the post-World War II tableaux of design that helped get the French high-fashion industry back in gear and that features fantasies by, among others, the incomparable Jean Cocteau. Another important collection is the museum’s icon paintings, many from eastern Europe and Russia. It’s a long story, and worth hearing, but not right now.

Maryhill with spring lupine. Photo: Nyland WilkinsPartly because of weather and isolation, Maryhill is a seasonal museum, and it takes its annual break Nov. 15 before starting up again in spring, on the ides of March. That gives you a couple of weeks to make the drive out the Gorge: It’s a little more than 100 miles east of Portland, about the same distance as Eugene, but a much more interesting drive.

When Lee Musgrave arrived as curator of art from Los Angeles 14 years ago he brought a vision for contemporary art to amplify and complement the museum’s historic collections, which ranged from outright curios to engaging oddities such as a collection of global chess sets to some very good Rodins. Works by the likes of Red Grooms, Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons started popping up on the museum walls, plus pieces by a whole lot of contemporary Pacific Northwest artists.

Musgrave retired this summer, and his replacement, Steven L. Grafe, is just getting his feet dry. I’d say “wet,” except it doesn’t rain much at the Maryhill end of the Gorge, and Grafe already knows a lot of the territory.

Grafe arrives at Maryhill after almost six years at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, where he was curator of American Indian art. It was a good stop for a specialist in Native American art and culture. But Maryhill is very close to home.

Steven Grafe, Maryhill's new curator

Grafe earned his masters and doctoral degrees in art history from the University of New Mexico, where his doctoral dissertation was on pre-1880 beadwork from the southern Columbia River Plateau — an area of deep interest, not coincidentally, in the Maryhill collection. And he put in a couple of years as chief curator of the Southwest Museum of the American Indian in Los Angeles, in addition to curatorial stops at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado and Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina.

He grew up in Salem, got his bachelor’s degree in studio art at Oregon State University, and has deep Northwest roots. His father’s family is from the Santiam area east of Salem, his mother’s family is from around Zigzag near Mt. Hood, and his wife went to Madison High School in Portland.

“She’s wanted to live at the east end of the Gorge since she was in high school,” Grafe said a couple of weeks ago when he was in town for a museum marketing meeting.

Continue reading Bringing it all back home: Steven Grafe at Maryhill

Scatter’s Halloween/Day of the Dead rotogravure edition

Mr. Scatter anticipates an evening of answering doorbells and dispensing mass quantities of solidified high fructose corn syrup when the lights go down tonight. But there are other, possibly better, ways to celebrate Fright Night. A visual selection, not one of which has to do with overturning outhouses:

"Canta y no Llores" at Miracle Theatre. Photo: Russell Young

Miracle Theatre Group’s original Day of the Dead play “Canta y no Llores” continues through Nov. 15 at Teatro Milagro. Performed in Spanish and English, it looks back on the trials of the Great Depression. Ticket information here. Photo: Russell Young

Halloween at Disjecta: a night of the living dead

Disjecta, the big barn of an art and performance center just a swing of the ax from the Paul Bunyan statue in Kenton, has a Halloween two-fer. Kid-and-family-friendly stuff rules from noon to 4 on Saturday, with proceeds going to benefit Chief Joseph Elementary School. Then, starting at 9 in the evening and continuing ’til the graveyards empty, all inhibitions are off for a dance party of ghoulish proportions. Details here.

At Onda Gallery, a photograph by Paulina Hermosillo

In the Alberta Art District, Allan Oliver’s Onda Gallery specializes in the art and craft of Latin America. His Day of the Dead exhibit, continuing through Nov. 22, gathers work from nine Hispanic artists from Portland and the Willamette Valley, plus several others exploring similar ideas. The photo above is by Paulina Hermosillo. More information here.

China rising: Shen Wei, Tan Dun, Third Angle, Isaac Stern, and the smashing of the Cultural Revolution

Wanfujing Street, Beijing: 100,000 visitors a day. Nggsc/Wikimedia Commons

For every now, there is a then. China, of course, has many thens, but two are on my mind right now: the then of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which might have outdone Stalin in its attempt to eradicate culture and replace it with ideology; and the then of the big melt, which began with Mao’s death in 1976 and gave birth to China’s rapid ascent to its current level of world power and influence.

Right now, the art of China seems everywhere. And it’s not just the ancient art of terra cotta soldiers and jade figurines. There’s a sense in the rest of the world that we have entered the Chinese Century, and if Beijing is the new Athens/Rome/London/New York, we’d better figure out what’s going on in the place.

Ji Ji, Hi Panda, 2006/Pole Design. Portland Art Museum's "China Design Now."The Portland Art Museum, in a show assembled by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, heralds the arrival of China Design Now. (“Now” is really then, but a recent then: The show was aimed to coincide with last year’s Beijing Olympics and to capture the wave of commercial and aesthetic design in the world’s most populous country, a wave that inevitably has since washed on.)

In New York, Carnegie Hall is hosting a Chinese cultural festival it calls Ancient Paths, Modern Voices. Chinese composers and musicians have become stars of the international scene, and several are part of the Carnegie’s extended party. Tan Dun conducts his Violin concerto The Love on Monday night at Alice Tully Hall, with soloist Cho-Liang Lin. On Nov. 4 at Carnegie, the St. Louis Symphony performs Bright Sheng‘s Colors of Crimson and Tan Dun’s Water Concerto. This weekend’s headliners are Shen Wei Dance Arts, who will be in Portland Nov. 11 as part of the White Bird season. New York’s 21-day festival concludes Nov. 10 with pianist Lang Lang and the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra.

This “now,” this flowering of Chinese cultural achievement, is an outgrowth of the restrictions of the Cultural Revolution and the intellectual relaxation of control that followed Mao’s death. A few months ago David Barboza recalled in the New York Times violinist Isaac Stern‘s 1979 visit to China, a celebrated journey that resulted in the documentary film From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China.

Beijing's ultramodern "Egg," the National Centre for the Performing Arts. Vera & Jean-Christophe/Wikimedia CommonsI remember that film well — the extreme, almost ecstatic enthusiasm of China’s musicians; Stern’s encouragement and good will; his sense that the older students and musicians he encountered — the ones who’d spent years being “reeducated” in peasant labor and cut off from contact with Western music — seemed technically correct but lacking passion in their playing.

Mao and his functionaries had virtually outlawed anything but traditional Chinese music, forcing musicians (and all sorts of other people) into what amounted to slave labor. Times were tough, and Barboza’s story in the Times quotes one older musician saying that the psychological brutalization during the Cultural Revolution was so harsh that 17 instructors at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music committed suicide.

So it was fascinating, at Friday night’s audience talkback following Third Angle New Music Ensemble‘s superb concert China Music Now at the art museum, to hear composer Ye Xiaogang‘s reply to a question about what effect the Cultural Revolution had had on him and other musicians who went through it. Continue reading China rising: Shen Wei, Tan Dun, Third Angle, Isaac Stern, and the smashing of the Cultural Revolution

Portland Open Studios: what’s behind the gallery walls

Portland loves process — a politician here can barely duck out for coffee without holding several public meetings first to thrash out which coffee shop she should hit in which geographically underserved corner of the city — and that extends to its arts scene.

Mar Ricketts, master kitemaker and fiber artist, in his Southeast Portland studio.Lectures, tours, workshops, open rehearsals: If it’s a behind-the-scenes peek, we’re there. It’s not enough just to see the finished project. We want to know how it got there.

What was the idea? How was it built? What were the stumbling blocks? Was getting there really half the fun?

In the visual arts, something else kicks in, too: sweet reassurance.

Galleries and museums intimidate a lot of people. They don’t know the language. They might know what they like, but they suspect the cognoscenti would laugh at them. In galleries, they think they’re getting the once-over (and in a few, they are): Is this person a potential buyer? Does she count? Is she worth my time?

It’s not so much that people are afraid of wrestling with tough ideas, it’s that they’re afraid they don’t know the rules. They’re not specialists — and in the minds of the many, the art world has become the province of the anointed few. (In certain rigorously theoretical cases, of course, this is true.) Add to all this the sense of mystery — the popular idea that with artists, something magical happens, beyond the ken of mortal souls — and it’s little wonder that fear keeps people outside the gallery doors.

In fact, the actual making of art is usually a tactile, pragmatic, hands-on thing; down-to-earth in a sometimes literal sense. For all the metaphorical calisthenics in writing about art, artists themselves tend to be practical problem-solvers: What is this thing that’s wormed inside my head, and how can I work it out? Most artists grapple with chance and improvisation more than most of the rest of us, but the good ones do it with method and structure. In spite of C.P. Snow’s famous lament in The Two Cultures (or maybe in support of it), the worlds of art and science aren’t all that far apart, at least in a rudimentary sense. Both involve hypothetically based searches for truth, and in that search both find beauty.

Andrea Benson, weaving yarns in encausticSo let’s take the pressure off and take a relaxed look at how this art stuff really works. That’s part of the idea behind Portland Open Studios, the annual fall tour of artists’ studios across the greater Portland area. In its 10th year, the event includes 100 studios (they’re juried in) and runs the next two weekends: October 10-11 and 17-18. Most studios are open both weekends; the Web site has details.

It’s always fun to see where other people work. I visited three studios before the kickoff, and each represented a different approach to the artist’s workspace.

Bonnie Meltzer‘s studio in North Portland is a storybook sort of place, a small building steps away from the back door of an old farmhouse on a double lot that also holds gnarled fruit trees and a pretty terrific vegetable garden. The studio strikes a balance between orderly and cluttered, with all sorts of tools that a home handyman would be comfortable with, and a motley collection of globes destined to find their way at one point or another into her mixed-media works. A deck outside the studio is set up for sawing and bashing at big pieces of stuff.

Encaustic artist Andrea Benson works from a small studio at Troy Studios, a big brick former commercial laundry building in industrial Southeast Portland that’s home to about 25 artists. She can bike or walk there from her home, and likes having a separate space. A few blocks away, Mar Ricketts, whose fabric pieces range from aerodynamic kites and mobiles to temporary structures for big outdoor events, works in a big single-story space that allows plenty of floor room for laying out his sometimes gargantuan pieces. His studio isn’t a recycled industrial space: It is an industrial space.

Continue reading Portland Open Studios: what’s behind the gallery walls

China, Wordstock, studios, ballet: What a weekend!

Days at the Cotton Candy #4, copyright Maleonn

ABOVE: “Days at the Cotton Candy #4,” copyright Maleonn, in China Design Now. INSET BELOW: “Graphic Design in China,” poster for the 1992 exhibition, copyright Chen Shaohua. Both photos courtesy Portland Art Museum.

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Quick notes on a Thursday evening:

CHINA DESIGN NOW. I took a much too rapid walk through the installation at the Portland Art Museum this afternoon, and this show’s going to be a dazzler. It opens Saturday and runs through Jan. 17, and you won’t want to miss it. The sheer eye candy is amazing: China’s surge into the 21st century grabs hold of the nation’s traditional love for brilliant color and reshapes it in amazing ways. The show, which originated at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, is barely a scratch on the surface of the new China. But, my, the things you see! An important show for Portland because of the Pacific Rim connection, it’s also a whole lot of fun. I have a short table-setting preview in Friday’s A&E section of The Oregonian, and D.K. Row, the O’s lead art critic, will analyze the feast soon. Look for both.

Graphic Design in China, poster for the 1992 exhibition. Copyright Chen ShaohuaWORDSTOCK. Portland’s annual writers’ frenzy heads into its big weekend at the Oregon Convention Center with talks, workshops and publishers’ booths Saturday and Sunday. About a zillion Northwest writers will join such A-list types as James Ellroy and Sherman Alexie. Jeff Baker ran a good preview last week in the O. Willamette Week had some good interviews with participating writers on Wednesday, and I had a handful of interviews with participating writers (young adult novelist Rosanne Parry, mystery man Pierre Ouellette/Pierre Davis, Pendleton Round-Up historian Ann Terry Hill, poet Mark Thalman, kids’ writers Dawn Prochovnic and Brian Martin) in this morning’s Washington County edition of the O. The Wordstock Web site has the schedule; should be a kick.

PORTLAND OPEN STUDIOS. This weekend and next, 100 artists’ studios across greater Portland will throw their doors open and welcome visitors. You can see who, where and when here. I should have a bigger piece posted in a few hours. Grab your map and make your plans.

OREGON BALLET THEATRE. Time to forget the offstage drama and remind yourself of why we care about this brilliant troupe of dancers. This retrospective program, which opens Saturday in Keller Auditorium, features George Balanchine’s celebrated Emerald plus excerpts from a whole lot of highlights from OBT’s own history: Dennis Spaight’s Gloria and Ellington Suite; Trey McIntyre’s Speak; Bebe Miller’s A Certain Depth of Heart, Also Love; Julia Adam’s il nodo; Yuri Possokhov’s La Valse; James Kudelka’s Almost Mozart; and artistic director Christopher Stowell’s Eyes on You and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. That’s a knockout of a program. Details here.

DOROTHEA LANGE IN OREGON. In the late 1930s the great photographic documentarian took a large number of photos of Oregon farmers and farm laborers for the federal Farm Security Administration, and the results are a rare combination of art, history and social comment. A selection from those 500-plus images has just opened in the Littman Gallery at Portland State University, and it should be worth going out of your way to catch. The campus paper, the Vanguard, has the story.

CLASSICAL RADIO’S FUND DRIVE. I’ve spent a fair amount of the last few days in my car (don’t ask), and that means I’ve been listening to a fair amount of classical station KQAC during its fall fund drive. Is it my imagination, or has it been a little harder than usual to shake money out of the tree this time around? Seems like every hour the station’s been falling short of its announced goal. I like this station. I wish it were more adventurous in its programming — I’d love to have a more liberal dose of contemporary and even 20th century stuff in the mix — and I shudder every time I hear a listener’s comment that classical music “soothes” them, as if it were some sort of handy on-demand muscle relaxant. But KQAC is an extremely important part of the city’s cultural fabric, and on the whole it does a good job, and it should succeed. Spare a buck?

Sweetheart, get me rewrite: We just hit an iceberg!

The Titanic, proud prowler of the ocean, steaming into history

Above: The Titanic, proud prowler of the ocean, steaming into history. Inset below: The Titanic’s bow, as seen from a Russian MIR I submersible. Wikimedia Commons.

As you may have noticed, American newspapers are in a spot of trouble these days. Bad economy, sinking circulation, this newfangled thing called the Information Superhighway … the troubles just keep piling up.

So I’m always interested in seeing what our best and brightest newspapering minds are doing to stop the bleeding. The New York Times has this thing it cleverly calls The New York Times Store, because it’s, well, it’s run by the New York Times and it’s a store. As in, a place where you can buy merchandise that you probably don’t need but that might be fun to have, anyway. A sort of readers’ boutique.

The haul is tasteful, and handy if you need to score a quick birthday present for a happily retired stockbroker uncle in Montauk. It’s a little New York-centric, but that’s OK: Derek Jeter memorabilia, Yogi Berra signed baseballs, Authentic Yankee Stadium “Freeze-Dried Grass” Sod (!), Babe Ruth baseball jerseys. Looking westward, Edward Curtis prints seem to be a popular item. So are crossword puzzles, executive-desk knickknacks … you get the picture. The store’s a good idea: When the ship’s going down, any little bucket on deck helps.

About that bucket.

The other day I flipped to the back page of the arts section and saw the latest come-on from the Times store.

THE FLEET IS IN

AMAZING SHIP MODELS

the headline screamed, and there at the top was a photo of a splendid-looking model of The Titanic.

Ttitanic bow seenfrom Russian MIR I_submersible/Wikimedia CommonsJust $249 for the 32-inch edition, but let’s go whole hog: You can get the 40-inch model, complete with “accurate crow’s nest, metal propellers and railings, and intricate cranes, ventilators, ladders, funnels, steam pipes, benches and skylights,” for $379. It’ll look great on your mant …

Hold on: A newspaper’s selling a model of The Titanic!

Guys: Have you read your back issues? Is this really the image you want to put out there right now? How about a bronzed commemorative pile of molten debris from the Hindenburg? Have you been too busy rearranging the deck chairs to notice the iceberg out there in the fog?

Just sayin’, this might be a tactical mistake.

But I do like the idea of the company store. Lord knows, even in their current state of disarray the newspapers are raking in more money than this blogospheric whiz-bang buggy we’ve hitched our wagon to here at Art Scatter.

Anybody interested in a Mr. and Mrs. Scatter commemorative coffee mug?

How about a Large Smelly Boys minty air freshener for the car?

Oregon Day of Culture: Shake your arty booty!

Basic CMYK
Art Scatter has deep anthropological roots (when we say we’re cultural anthropologists, we’re not kidding) so we tend to think that every day is a day of culture.

But Cynthia Kirk of the Oregon Cultural Trust has reminded us that next Thursday, Oct. 8, is officially Oregon Day of Culture — and that, this being a government project, that “day” is actually an eight-day week that began yesterday and culminates on the 8th.

The ancient and venerable commissars of the Art Scatter Politburo know one place they’ll be packing their lunchbags of borscht and pelmini on the 8th: to The Old Church, where the sprightly Third Angle New Music Ensemble‘s string quartet will be performing a free noon concert of Ernest Bloch’s String Quartet No. 3 and selections from Zhou Long’s Chinese Folk Songs. Regular readers of A.S. may have noticed that Mrs. Scatter has recently become general manager of Third Angle.

As for today’s activities, we reprint Ms. Kirk’s press release. Go forth, and multiply across the face of the culture:

It’s October 2, National Arts & Humanities Month and the second day of a weeklong celebration of Oregon culture, culminating in Oregon Day of Culture on October 8 and marking the anniversary of Oregon’s unique cultural tax credit.

Ernest Bloch and children; date unknown. Wikimedia CommonsThe Oregon Cultural Trust organizes Oregon Day of Culture to encourage Oregonians to Celebrate! Participate! Give! in support of Oregon humanities, arts and heritage. Oregon Day of Culture asks Oregonians to consider the every day value of culture in every community.

Taken as a whole or by community, www.oregondayofculture.org comprises a fascinating and compelling bird’s eye view of Oregon culture’s diversity and vibrancy, in just one single week.

Just a few selections from the October 1 schedule:

  • Dedication of Oaks Bottom Mural, RACC, Portland, Noon
  • Ballet Fantastique’s Visions d’Amour – 10 Ballets in Paris, Eugene, 4 PM
  • Coos Art Museum’s Fall Fling for the Arts, Coos Bay, 5 PM
  • Common Ground, outdoor Flickr projection on the OSU campus, Corvallis, 5 PM
  • Teen Mystery Night, Hillsboro Public Library, 5 PM
  • This is Our Universe exhibition, KindTree production, Eugene, 5 PM
  • Sculptor Lee Kelly at PNCA, Portland, 6 PM
  • First Friday, Columbia Center for the Arts, Hood River, 6 PM
  • Street Painting Demonstration, Firehouse Gallery, Grants Pass, 6 PM
  • Music for the Arts, Umpqua Valley Arts Center, Roseburg, 6 PM
  • Celtic Music, Salem Public Library, 7 PM
  • A Ferry Tale, Frog Pond Grange, Wilsonville, 7 PM
  • Groovin’ Hard: Buddy Rich, Portland Jazz Orchestra, 7:30 PM
  • XY&Z: A Word Art Extravaganza, Write Around Portland, 7:30 PM
  • The Dining Room, Lumiere Players, The Heritage Center, Tualatin, 7:30
  • A Chorus Line, Stumptown Stages, Jefferson High School, Portland, 8 PM
  • Jazz at Newport, Newport Performing Arts Center, 8 PM
  • Plus a multitude of evening theater, music and dance performances in Ashland, Hillsboro, Lake Oswego, Portland, Eugene, Oregon City, Roseburg, Salem, Tigard

Greek Festival, Portland, All Day

Caw Pawa Laakni – They Are Not Forgotten, Támastslikt Cultural Institute, Pendleton, All Day

Linn Benton Community College Hispanic Heritage Month Exhibit, Albany, All Day

Culture Inspired Art, Coos Historical & Maritime Museum, North Bend, All Day

Oregon 150 Quilt Show, Benton County Historical Museum, Philomath, All Day

and much, more! Many Oregon Day of Culture events are free!

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Inset photo: Ernest Bloch and children, date unknown. The composer spent his last years at Agate Beach, north of Newport on the Oregon Coast. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Wednesday morning hot links: Get ’em fresh here

John de Andrea, The Dying Gaul. Portland Art Museum.One of Art Scatter’s favorite blogs is Fifty Two Pieces, on which the erudite Amy and LaValle write about specific works at the Portland Art Museum and then let their minds wander into those strange and fascinating places that great art tends to nudge active minds. The blog is called Fifty Two Pieces because its authors declared from the get-go that they would write for one year only.

Time’s running short, so get your fresh links while they’re still hot off the grill. Amy and LaValle began their excellent adventure on New Year’s Day 2009 with a consideration of John De Andrea‘s fabulous hyperrealist sculpture The Dying Gaul.

Chaim Soutine, The Little Pastry Chef. Portland Art Museum.Their latest consideration is another of my favorites at the museum, Chaim Soutine‘s charming, red-and-orange-soaked painting (it reminds me of cinnamon) The Little Pastry Chef. It’s inspired, among other things, this delicious musing on Fifty Two Pieces:

According to the encyclopedia of gastronomy, Larousse Gastronomique, as early as the Neolithic Age, prehistoric man made foods based on honey, fruits, seeds, and maple or birch syrup. It’s thought that Mediterranean baklava and filo are the original pastries, made in Assyria on special occasions and for the rich. Medieval crusaders to the Middle East brought the recipes for these sweet treats back with them upon their return to Europe. Over the next century, according to FoodTimeline.org, French and Italian Renaissance chefs perfected puff pastry to an art form, adapting these original recipes to create Napoleons, brioche, éclairs and cream puffs.”

Today the blog considers the similarities between The Little Pastry Chef and Morris GravesPortrait of Bill Cumming, which hangs nearby. Soutine and Graves aren’t names you’d ordinarily through together in the same beret, but there you go: Art loves strange hatfellows.

LaValle, by the way, has been gadding about Berlin lately, and recording her impressions on her own blog, Two to Europe. She’ll be back. In the meantime, Amy’s holding the fort just fine.

A few other things we’ve enjoyed reading lately:

  • Grant Butler’s interview with James E. McWilliams, author of the new book Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, in the FoodDay section of The Oregonian. Butler and McWilliams bring some welcome nuance to the whole question of eating locally (McWilliams suggests not making it a religion) and raise the issue of feeding a hungry world, not just our little agriculturally blessed corner of it. The story brings up the work of Norman Borlaug, the “green revolution” pioneer who died this month at 95 (his New York Times obituary is here) and whom Art Scatter wrote about last year in a long piece that began with Leo Tolstoy.
  • Stephen Holden’s review in the New York Times of the “vaudevillian spark plug” Jason Graae’s new cabaret act. Holden’s running series of pieces on New York’s cabaret scene and its link to the Great American Songbook is a pure pleasure. Graae is apparently a mischievous sort, and Holden reports straight-faced on his closing number Slasher Medley: “It was a surefire piece of special material that stitched together revised quotes from Broadway standards: ‘Gray skies are going to clear up/Carve up a happy face’; ‘If ever I would cleave you, I’d start around the elbow.’ My favorite: ‘When you walk through a storm, hold a head up high.’
  • Jon Michael Varese’s impassioned argument in The Guardian (via Arts & Letters Daily), Why Are We Still reading Dickens? The old Victorian cliff-hanger specialist has had his critical ups and downs, but no matter what the fashion of the moment, he keeps hanging on — and we keep hanging on to him. For extremely good reason, Varese argues. Dickens, he concludes, is “shining a light on who I am during the best and worst of times.”

The Tree of Life: We think it’s made of words

I’ve been thinking about Wordstock, Portland’s annual orgy of wordsmithery, which runs Oct. 10-11 at the Oregon Convention Center.

A tree of words by Holly A. SennLots and lots of good writers will be showing up: Glad, for instance, to see that Sherman Alexie‘s finally making the party, and so soon after nabbing the National Book Award for his first young-adult novel, the wrenching and funny Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

There’s a lot more to Alexie’s book than its few short passages on the art of manly self-delight, but those glowing paragraphs are going to help keep Part-Time Indian in a sort of Holden Caulfield furtive page-flipping, perennial-sales mode for a long time to come.

And I’ve been thinking about another annual people’s celebration of the arts, Portland Open Studios, which runs the same weekend as Wordstock and one more, too — Oct. 10, 11, 17 and 18. Entering its tenth year (Wordstock’s half that age) Portland Open Studios throws the doors open to 100 artists’ studios across the city and invites anyone who’s interested for a tour of the stage shop behind the scenes. For people struck dumb with the dreaded Fear of Galleries, this can be a reassuring and fascinating way to get inside the visual arts scene, to see the everyday workings of everyday working artists, to actually talk with the artists about what they see and think and do.

So then I came across the images above and below from Tacoma sculptor Holly A. Senn‘s just-closed installation at Portland’s 23 Sandy Gallery, and the thought struck me: Senn’s work, which I unhappily missed, bridges the gap between Wordstock and Portland Open Studios.

Senn, who is a librarian as well as a visual artist, makes forests and giant seed pods from abandoned books, reimagining them into fresh new life: words become art become words.

“My art investigations,” Senn writes, “are inextricably intertwined with my work as a virtual reference librarian at Pacific Lutheran University where, while surrounded by books, I interact with patrons who prefer digital resources. As I cut, rip, realign and glue, I reflect on each new generations’ collective erasure of some element of the past and its casting of new ideas into the future. My work is as ephemeral and fleeting as ideas committed to paper.”

What are we in the process of collectively erasing?

23 Sandy’s current show, Broadsided! The Intersection of Art and Literature, seems to be bridging the art/word gap, too. It’s a juried exhibition of broadsides, those fascinating blends of letterpress art and information, by 34 artists from across the United States and Australia. The show stays up through Oct. 31, so there’s plenty of time to see what’s up.

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Ballyhoo hullabaloo: Out Oregon City way, in a town that’s ancient by Oregon’s thinly planted European standards, people know a thing or two about tradition. So maybe it makes sense that an old-fashioned play like Alfred Uhry’s The Last Night of Ballyhoo, a drawing-room dramedy that won the Tony Award for best play of 1997 and even then seemed a stylistic relic of a lost theatrical golden age, is on stage at Clackamas Repertory Theatre, the small professional company that performs at the O.C.’s Clackamas Community College.

Uhry’s play, set among the Jewish gentry of Atlanta in 1939, is about the layers of prejudice among the South’s several waves of Jewish immigrants. I’ve never been a fan of Uhry’s breakout play, Driving Miss Daisy — can’t get past the social implications of the sassy rich Southern woman and her devotedly longsuffering black servant — but I like Ballyhoo quite a bit, and the Rep’s production does well by it. My short review ran in Monday’s Oregonian. You can see the longer, more expansive version on Oregon Live.

Holly A. Senn installation at 23 Sandy Gallery

Lookin’ for a religious experience over here …

 Luca Signorelli - "Resurrection of the Flesh" (1499-1502). Chapel of San Brizio, Duomo, Orvieto/Wikimedia Commons

Luca Signorelli, “Resurrection of the Flesh” (1499-1502). Chapel of San Brizio, Duomo, Orvieto/Wikimedia Commons.

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Labor Day’s gone. School’s on. Summer’s over. First day of fall. Just like that.

With renewed academic rigor now that classes are in session, we turn to more serious matters. We turn to Heaven above and seek the answers to the really big questions.

To do that, we’re resurrecting a conversation we had here on Art Scatter more than a year ago. And adding a little juice that’s been specially blessed.

The original post and comments were in July 2008. I wrote a comment but was too timid to post it. I stashed it away and let the great scroll of blog parchment roll up and pass me by.

But come the wee hours of Christmas eve/Christmas morn, Mr. Scatter and I were hangin’ in the living room sipping wine with family and the same topic came up. We started throwing around barbs and I fetched my laptop, called up the post, read through the comments and we laughed and laughed. And then I said, “You know, I have something I wrote that I never posted here.”

"Salome With the Head of John the Baptist," Caravaggio (157-1610), from Web Gallery of Art / Wikimedia CommonsI called it up. And read it aloud. We laughed some more. And everyone urged me to post it as a comment. I still wasn’t sure, but the wine was flowing and the tree was sparkling and the company was cheery and did I mention the wine?

So I copied it into the comment field and clicked. It was comment No. 26. I told everyone that nobody would see it anyway except a pingback e-mail would go to the original poster: Barry Johnson. Remember him?

And then I realized it was Christmas, the comment was sorta about religion, and it was perfect timing. Merry Christmas, Barry.

The big question: If we raise our kids in a secular household and they grow up in public schools with no exposure to theology, how are they to understand the very basics and historic underpinnings of culture? Sure, we’re laughing here, but it’s a serious question. Please help us answer it.
Continue reading Lookin’ for a religious experience over here …