Starting Over: It’s not about the elk, it’s all about the elk
Barry Johnson starts with a beloved statue and then follows it and a New York Review of Books article all the way to Confederate monuments and buttons.
Barry Johnson starts with a beloved statue and then follows it and a New York Review of Books article all the way to Confederate monuments and buttons.
“Mayday 1971” by Lawrence Roberts gives us a window on a massive protest of the past. That’s useful in our own protest-drenched time.
As fires consume vast swaths of the Northwest, Mathews’ book “Trees in Trouble” moves to the front burner.
Where is the culture now? Culture critic and philosopher Raymond Williams has ideas we can use to figure it out.
Covid-19-inflected arts news: Literary Arts, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, BodyVox, The Old Church, more.
Can we move forward when our government can’t test, trace or isolate us? The processes of artists can show us how.
Major foundations join forces to create the $1.3 million Oregon Arts and Culture Recovery Program.
How are big arts groups handling the pandemic? Portland Center Stage’s Cynthia Fuhrman takes it step by step.
Relief efforts for artists affected by income loss from the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting crash of the economy continue. More is needed.
We talked to Brian Rogers, who leads the state’s arts services organizations, about current conditions and some help on the way.
Combine a pandemic and an economic crisis and you get the dragon. How do you fight it? With songs and strategies, poems and music. You wait the dragon out.
Starting Over is a new column about arts and culture in the time of the pandemic. This is its first issue.
Regional Arts & Culture Council shifts its focus to fundraising, advocacy, outreach. One result: 15 layoffs, 15 new positions.
Robert Swinston talks about restaging two of Merce Cunningham’s masterworks of the ’90s, “BIPED” and “Beach Birds.”
If I were going to guess (and I suppose I am), I’d suggest that the moment Boomers in the audience will react to most immediately, probably with a snort, comes near the start of the first scene after intermission in David Hare’s
Every culture needs at least one Lyndee Mah—an indomitably positive source of energy, compassion and commitment to art, a connector and facilitator, an advisor and advocate, someone to console us when that is necessary. Fortunately for Portland, we had Lyndee Mah herself.
Earlier this month I landed in Ashland to see the first five plays of the 2018-19 Oregon Shakespeare Festival season, Bill Rauch’s last as artistic director. The plays under inspection here include: the vastly popular stage version of the John Waters film
Artists Repertory Theatre hired J.S. May to be its executive director less than six months ago, and he and his board are already about to make a big move—a $10 million-plus capital campaign that will redesign and renovate its building on Southwest
What happens when you try to close the debate before the debate ever gets started? At this point the Oregon College of Art and Craft board is starting to find that out. During the week since my last commentary on the OCAC
Let’s say someone said, “Tell me, Mr Bones, what should happen next, now that Oregon College of Art and Craft has decided to close the college and sell the campus?” I’d probably sputter, make a few false starts, and then I’d say
The Oregon College of Art and Craft board of trustees has announced it will “terminate all degree programs” at the college at the end of this academic term. “May 19, 2019, will mark the commencement ceremony for the final graduating at OCAC,”
Two big questions remain from the failed merger talks between Pacific Northwest College of Art and Oregon College of Art and Craft back in the fall. The first: What are the details of the financial condition at OCAC that led it to
After a week of thinking about it—or in the business parlance of our times, after conducting a “feasibility study” or “due diligence”—Portland State University officials informed Oregon College of Art and Craft officials on Thursday (January 24) that the university had decided
While the Oregon College of Art and Craft was seeking to join forces with Pacific Northwest College of Art this fall, it was also talking to Portland State University about a possible deal. Those talks are heating up. The statement yesterday from
When I visited the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in July this year, the temperatures were on the hot side, but unlike a few previous years, the air was clean and at night, quite pleasant and fresh. Given the vast conflagrations in California earlier
This year’s slate of plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, I decided after my visit to Ashland in mid-July, has to be my favorite. I loved the mix of new plays and the new approaches to classic, and I thought that the
When people leave Portland for jobs in another city, all good journalists understand that they have just opened a door, not just on a new future for themselves but on the past. Or at least a more candid view of the past
Bill Bulick, the architect of the Regional Arts and Culture Council, the primary way government supports the art in the tri-county area, died yesterday in Portland. He had lived with Parkinson’s Disease for many years. He was 65. When I first met
Your faithless correspondent has now spent a week dithering over all that this particular brainpan could usefully muster about opening weekend at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Hey, these observations and opinions don’t come ready-made! And maybe it’s harder when said correspondent finds
Bill Rauch, the artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival since 2007, is leaving Ashland to become the first artistic director of the Perelman Center, the festival announced this morning. The Perelman Center is the performing arts component of the reconstruction on
Nearly everyone within earshot of these words already understands that one of the implications of the dramatic uptick in the cost of real estate and rents we’ve experienced lands directly on artists and the arts. At City Hall, it’s apparent that Mayor
Before Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble’s smashing version of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” takes center stage in this particular review—and it will, I promise, it will—allow me a little digression? We all come to the theater in various states: physical, emotional, spiritual, intellectual.
The Earth inches around the sun a fraction less than one degree between December 31 and January 1, and yet somehow I still believe that something momentous has occurred. “Thank the far-flung heavens that 2017 is over,” I exclaim aloud to myself
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