PORTLAND & OREGON ART

News, reviews and events on the visual arts

The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art is apparently teetering on the edge of extinction, at least as an independent museum. This become public knowledge almost two weeks ago, after Mike Boehm's story in the LA Times on Nov. 19 detailed just how shaky things had become. Since then, arts leaders in L.A. have attempted to rally support for the museum, its beleaguered board of directors has been under intense fire from critics for allowing it to deteriorate to such an extent and philanthropist Eli Broad has offered $30 million to stabilize things if the board and community joins in, though the details of the requirements haven't been published. Continue reading "Los Angeles contemporary art museum is on the brink" »

SALEM -- "There are two kinds of music," Duke Ellington famously said. "Good music, and the other kind."

As the ambitious and visually beguiling exhibition "The Art of Ceremony: Regalia of Native Oregon" proves, the same goes for art.

Continue reading "Review: "The Art of Ceremony" at Hallie Ford" »

Well before sustainability became a buzzword, and well before Portland became self-aware of its progressiveness, a small band of activists devoted to the environment and a love of the arts were writing and talking about such things.

That group, Orlo, is now 15 years old and will celebrate its scores of environmental events, art shows and championing of issues with a party Wednesday at Someday Lounge.

Orlo's essential medium of message delivery has been The Bear Deluxe magazine, the occasionally published gathering of art-based essays, think pieces and news reports. The new issue hits streets next week.

Continue reading "Around town: Orlo celebrates an anniversary and D.E. May at Hallie Ford Museum of Art" »

It was a rainy November morning and Brian Ferriso, executive director of the Portland Art Museum, might have considered armed security guards. In his pocket was a check for $2 million -- and he ambled all alone the dozen or so blocks from the museum to the offices of Robert Miller, former Fred Meyer chief executive officer and professional investor. When he got there, Ferriso promptly handed Miller the check.

"A deal is a deal," Ferriso said.

Miller accepted it and then returned the favor: He pulled out his checkbook and wrote a check payable to the museum -- "a large one," according to Miller's son, Mark Miller. Then, the two men shook hands.

Continue reading "The Portland Art Museum and the saga of 934 S.W. Salmon Street" »

There are some great talks this weekend, one by some notable local artists, another by a pretty famous photographer who's visiting.

Rae Mahaffey and Sherrie Wolf have separate solo shows this month at Laura Russo Gallery, and on Saturday, the two will talk about their exhibits and their work at the gallery. The artists have contrasting styles: Mahaffey makes systematized, patterned and colorful works perhaps based on organic forms; Wolf reinterprets the still-life tradition. The free lecture is at 11 a.m. at Laura Russo Gallery (805 N.W. 21st Ave.).

Continue reading "Events and lectures this weekend" »

Maybe it's because of the forthcoming holiday season, the vacillating weather or the failing economy. But many of the galleries I've visited recently have been empty -- lonely, white-cubed spaces where gallery attendants, directors and owners seem to be waiting for someone -- maybe Godot. (None is as empty, however, as the Portland Art Museum, which these days feels like a big, spacious tomb.)

Still, that doesn't mean there aren't some worthwhile shows out there.

Jeanine Jablonski's new gallery, for example, Fourteen30 Contemporary, remains true to her mission of finding and showing young, hungry artists that we've likely not heard of in Portland but should know more about. This month, she's paired two artists who usually exhibit individually, Portland painter Nicholas Pittman and New York sculptor Nick van Woert.

Continue reading "Review: Nicholas Pittman and Nick van Woert at Fourteen30 Contemporary and more" »

Paul Goldberger was exactly right Thursday night.

At the beginning of his lecture "The Challenge of Making a City in the Twenty-first Century," which was a spirited defense of the traditional city, he said that talking about these matters in Portland "seems like being a Catholic missionary in Rome." And he was in fact speaking to the converted, who had gathered in the White Stag building that houses the Portland outpost of the University of Oregon's architecture school.

Since the city turned its back on large-scale interventions to its urban core in the late 1960s and early '70s and embraced its neighborhoods and streets, it has been the national poster pin-up for the traditional city. Any Portland crowd that assembled for Goldberger was going to be fervent in its support of the idea of the vital city.

Continue reading "Architecture critic Paul Goldberger looks at the challenges of the city" »

Surely, you have seen many of Annie Leibovitz's photographs.

Perhaps it's the Rolling Stones on tour in 1975, when Mick and Keith were still angry, beautiful young men. Or John Lennon and Yoko Ono on a couch, hours before Lennon was killed in 1980. Or Queen Elizabeth II in Buckingham Palace during a 25-minute shoot last year that reportedly was so tense that the queen walked out. There are more, of course, that you've likely seen in Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair magazines, among others.

Continue reading "Interview: Annie Leibovitz" »

Bob Hicks wrote a fabulous story on the Sitka Center for Art & Ecology last weekend. The annual auction is over, but the story, which includes an overview of this center founded 38 years ago by Frank Boyden, is well worth reading. It follows after the jump.

Continue reading "Art and nature merge: Sitka Center for Art & Ecology" »

Encyclopedias are not the go-to reference manuals they once were. The Internet age has reduced these multivolume books explaining science, history and culture to near obsolescence. More than that, the days are gone when human knowledge can be cataloged and organized in bound form for all time without continuous, moment-to-moment updates.

Yet in "Encyclopedia A-L," photographer Allen Maertz's show at Chambers @ 916, this antiquated reference set becomes a metaphor for our desire to know and quantify the world out there, even as its continuous change transcends lives and generations.

Continue reading "On Display: Memorable metaphor inaugurates new space" »