OPB's State of Wonder

It’s not often you find an artist whose work incorporates nature, meditation and a business plan. Erika Bartlett is such an artist.

We meet the contenders for the general nonfiction category: Tracy Daugherty, Andi Zeisler, Kathleen Dean Moore, Bill Lascher, and Sue Armitage.

Chuck Close Portraits Heat Up The Pendleton Art Scene It's not every day that a small town arts center gets to pick works from a blue chip artist like it's checking out library books, but that's basically how this show came to be. Sam Hamilton Brings His Films And More To PAM's APEX Gallery The fresh face at Portland Art Museum is Grace Kook-Anderson, the new curator of Northwest art. It’s her job to make sure the museum reflects regional work, but she also has a strong feel for contemporary art. And that is reflected in her first choice for the Museum’s APEX Gallery: fellow recent Northwest transplant Sam Hamilton, whose playful interdisciplinary work interweaves films, music and installation. Who else would mix Carl Sagan, David Attenborough and Kenny G in one show? Oregon-Born Play Wins Pulitzer Playwright Lynn Nottage premiered her play “Sweat” in 2015 as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s “American Revolutions” series exploring key moments in U.S. history. With the announcement Monday that the…

As a girl, Laini Taylor wanted to be a writer. She would dream up magical worlds filled with witches and monsters. But once she got into high school and college, she started reading literature — all those serious books about the real world that serious people read. And she stopped writing. “I had no life experience,” she laughs. “And really nothing to say. I felt a lack of ability to contribute to that body of work.” Then years later, she read a little book you might’ve heard of. Harry Potter? And her childhood imagination rose up like a phoenix. “That whole ‘write what you know,’ you don’t have to do that,” she says. “I find it much more fun to imagine what I don’t know and want to figure it out.” Since then, Taylor has imagined stories to incredible success. Her early collaboration with her husband, the illustrator Jim Di Bartolo, “Lips Touch,” was a finalist for the National Book Award, and her “Daughter of Smoke and Bone” trilogy is an international best seller. We sat down with Taylor at her Portland…

Jack Perrin is not your typical science teacher. “I really love hands on stuff,” he told me last month when I visited him in White Salmon, Washington. “If kids can use their hands, learning goes a lot deeper.” Perrin was my science and math teacher all through grade and high school at a small private school in the Western Colorado town of Paonia. He caught my attention right away, when he introduced a course titled 'bubble-ology' to my second grade class. By the time I was in high school, his lessons had evolved in a more athletic way: we would pop off to Utah for a week of backpacking, learning how to start a fire with flint or cook pasta inside a sleeping bag. “I think for me, teaching has always been about relationships,” he says. “Paying attention to the relationship made it possible for us to do a lot of things that we wouldn’t have been able to do if I just regarded you as the girl that takes math from me one period a day.” Perrin grew up in Portland and moved back to the Northwest to be near family a…

Ever passed a gallery and seen something that looked interesting through the window, but found yourself thinking "I could never afford it" or "I probably wouldn't get it?" Well, you're not alone. "Galleries can be really intimidating places—I'm sometimes intimidated to walk in," says artist and writer Jennifer Rabin, which is saying a lot, given that she's paid to know art. Since 2015, she's been the visual art critic at "Willamette Week," although she will depart at the end of March. After watching nine Portland galleries and one museum close in the first nine months she was at WW, Rabin grew alarmed. Then President Donald Trump proposed eliminating the national endowments for the arts and the humanities, and Rabin had to do something. In the last two weeks, Rabin launched two programs, Art Passport PDX and Artists Resist, to get more people looking at art and standing up for why art matters. Read the full story: http://www.opb.org/radio/article/jennifer-rabin-art-passport-pdx-artists-resist

Greg Ewer of 45th Parallel and Tristan Bliss talk about digging deep to resolve an online spat and forge a deeper conversation about welcoming new audiences for classical music.

Jayanthi Raman has been staging Internationally renown shows in Portland for nearly 30 years. This one had a small hiccup.

We talk with Eutectic Gallery's Brett Binford about the onset of NCECA in Portland this week.

Rack up the brackets: we are in the midst of a tournament to find the most sorrowful of songs! Elliott Smith or Franz Schubert? Billie Holiday or the Pogues? Dive in and simmer in the sad.

During a rehearsal in Northwest Dance Project’s light-filled Portland studio for a new adaptation of “Carmen,” set in part in ‘50’s-era beauty salons, the company is trying to observe one of childhood’s cardinal rules: never run with scissors. “That’s a good point: Where are they going to be when you’re running?” resident choreographer Ihsan Rustem says when dancer Kody Jauron asks how to incorporate a menacing pair of shears that are over a foot long into the choreography. “I’m wearing a lot of black,” says Jauron about his costume, joking that it would likely hide any accidental blood stains. It’s one of several problems Rustem is wrestling with as they near the show’s world premiere March 16–18 at the Newmark Theatre. There’s also how to deal with Jauron’s whiplash during the preceding scene in which the male dancers, acting as a gaggle of barbers, twist his head every which way, and several points of nigh-impossible movement. If Northwest Dance Project has built its identity around commissioning world…

Two artists on impermanence, their process, and the joys of the 8 x 10 view camera.

The bandleader who drove students to top-level performances is served an indictment for sex abuse charges.

Artist Leila Del Duca is wrapping up her amazing series with Joe Keatinge, "Shutter". We talk to her about her new YA graphic novel with Georgian Kit Seaton, "Afar".

Imagine a gallery where you can step into a painting, fly through the ceiling to the heaven’s above, or learn a dance from a virtual flamingo. It’s not a world far off. Virtual and augmented reality stand to transform the art world, and the tech incubator Oregon Story Board is on the front lines. As a December snowstorm raged around OSB’s office in downtown Portland, the artist Kristin Lucas was dreaming of flamingos. “I’m interested in making an augmented reality experience for the HoloLens,” she said, referencing Microsoft’s new augmented reality glasses that make it look like the digital object is floating in the room in front of you. “In which they receive a dance lesson, and they’re doing a multi-species dance with a flamingo.” Read the full story: http://www.opb.org/radio/article/virtual-reality-artists-oregon-story-board

From “Wayne’s World” to “UHF,” public access television often seems to serve more as a satirical punching bag than a respected media form. But that’s about to change. Portland Community Media is renovating its building and rebranding itself as Open Signal, a media arts center where you can learn not only TV, but storytelling, podcasting, coding, mixed reality, and other forms of digital media. They’re celebrating the transformation with an open house on Feb. 25. “The fact that the city has this asset, where anybody can come off the street, for practically free of charge, and learn how to tell a story,” says Justen Harn, “it is amazing.” Harn was part of the team that transformed the Hollywood Theatre from a dilapidated, second-run movie house into an innovative cinema and community hub. He we hired as the executive director at PCM a year ago with the instructions to create a more global vision for the organization, focused on programs, equity, and the future. With a budget of roughly $2.5 million drawn…

Ten years ago, two silvery orbs began floating 3,000 feet between Marquam Hill and South Waterfront over the roofs and backyards of one of Portland’s oldest neighborhoods. Millions of rides later, Portland’s aerial tram can now be seen as one of the city’s most transformational projects ever, leading to the dramatic waterfront expansion of OHSU and the creation of a new neighborhood, and paving the way to the successful $500-million Knight Challenge that is positioning the university as a global center for cancer research. The tram’s elegant towers and cars came courtesy of the city’s first international design competition since the early ‘80s and have since grown into a glittering landmark, making it easy to forget that when it was being conceived, it was the center of a brutal political fight. Read the full story: http://www.opb.org/radio/article/from-controversy-to-icon-portland-aerial-tram

The man who re-imagined John Shaft, Night Hawk, and Power Man talks to us about the new Luke Cage standalone series he's writing, starting in May, what he thought of the Netflix series, and why Black Mariah has to be the smartest person in the room.

Portlanders love to love their airport. There’s the Stumptown coffee, the Powell’s bookstore, the local restaurants, and perhaps the most photographed carpet in the world. So what else could PDX put in front of passengers? While other airports add yoga rooms and rooftops pools in the quest to tempt travelers, PDX has welcomed an outpost of the iconic Hollywood Theater to be America’s only airport cinema. On a typical January morning at the Portland International Airport, a not so typical passenger unloaded at the departure drop-off area. A team used a crane to transfer a 28-foot-long sign from a flatbed trailer to a set of wheels. Anyone who’s driven down Portland’s Sandy Boulevard would recognize it: it’s styled after the Hollywood Theatre marquee. “I get goose bumps watching it roll in,” said Hollywood’s executive director, Doug Whyte, in front of the Delta ticketing booth as the team pushed the sign past the Portland Roasting Company kiosk. “Usually things come in through the causeway, but it’s too big,…

Director Elizabeth Huffman talks to us about the play she's directing this weekend by Turkish playwrite Sedef Ecer, and her a one-woman show juxtaposing a wealthy Syrian refugee with Marie Antoinette. She performed the show in Germany last year, and visited refugees camped in Bremen, awaiting permanent resettlement.

While America spent last winter wondering why the National Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was taking so long to reflect the face of America, some amazing features were in the works, featuring African-American directors, writers, and actors — films like "Fences," starring Denzel Washington and Viola Davis, "Moonlight," featuring Naomi Harris, and "Hidden Figures," with the ever-talented Octavia Spencer, have all gotten Oscar nods. If those films made you hungry for more, get ready to head over to the Hollywood Theater for the Portland Black Film Festival. Creator and co-curator David F. Walker talks to us about some of the films on screen Feb. 9-22nd.

Portland-based vocal ensemble Cappella Romana creates otherworldly mystic sounds with layers of harmony, plumbing that space where eastern and western sacred music meet. While most of their repertory involves the old world, occasionally they love to inject a little new music. One composer in particular embodies their approach to choral music—Arvo Pärt. Cappella Romana has organized a festival of Pärt’s music, the first in the US, Feb. 5–12. Joining with Third Angle New Music Ensemble and other musicians, they will offer eight live chamber performances, documentary film screenings, and lectures interpreting the groundbreaking composer. Pärt is the world’s most performed composer alive today. Growing up in Soviet-era Estonia, Pärt was considered a rebel in the world of composition. His early compositions broke both compositional and political rules in a very tense historical moment; some were even rejected for incorporating western techniques. “He spoke with musically — such a directness and a simplicity and a…

Goodbye Reading Frenzy, hello SW 4th Ave. We sit down with Portland's new City Commissioner, Chloe Eudaly. Her meteoric rise from indie bookseller to Council parallels the city's growing unease with growth, gentrification, and the status quo. This is the first of several check-ins we'll bring you this year.

For five years, Eliza Jane Schneider played most of the female characters on South Park: Wendy, Shelly, Mrs. Cartman, the Mayor — they’re all her. She’s created characters for everything from the animated film “Finding Nemo” to the TV series “King of the Hill” to video games like “Assassin’s Creed.” And to top it all off, she writes and performs award-winning plays and one-woman shows. Her voices come from years spent traveling the world, studying and teaching dialects and touring as a musician. For Portland's Fertile Ground Festival of New Works, she’s premiering a piece called “Displaced,” based off of conversations she's had with houseless and displaced people across the globe. It runs Jan. 20–28 at Abbey Arts.

Subashini Ganesan and Oluyinka Akinjiola stop in to talk about their upcoming performance of new work, IGNITE. They’re from radically different traditions, but each embraces a marriage of traditional and modern forms.

A visit to Desert Rain, the Bend home of Tom Elliott and Barbara Scott that is the first single-family home in the world to earn certification under the Living Building Challenge.

When it comes to women, there are two things American culture doesn’t look so kindly on: age and weight. Tahni Holt’s newest show revels in both. By the time the audience walks into the theater, the performance has already begun. A heap of dancers writhe across the floor in an undulating mass of brightly patterned skirts, splayed hair, and little flashes of gold lame, like some thrift store reenactment of a Gustav Klimt painting. A tone slowly builds, and the six dancers eventually break into pairs, rolling, lifting and collapsing into each other. “A lot of this work features women's bodies on the ground, experiencing or reveling in the weight of their bodies, the heaviness of their bodies, which is something we culturally cannot fathom or talk about,” says Reed College theater professor Kate Bredeson, who worked with Holt as a dramaturge, providing research and a second set of eyes and opinions. “It moves me regularly to tears because I watch these six women on the ground, and it's not about victimization…

By 2015, the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education had a problem — the good kind of problem: It couldn’t accommodate the crowds that wanted to get into its exhibits and events. So it commissioned a study to see if it could afford a bigger building. Then director Judy Margles learned that the Museum for Contemporary Craft was closing its downtown Portland doors after 79 years. “It was just absolutely serendipitous, as we were completing the study in February 2016, this building landed on the market,” Margles said. “We said, 'This building is perfect for us.' It had exactly what we needed: a changing exhibition gallery, space for core exhibitions.” Read the full story: http://www.opb.org/radio/article/oregon-jewish-museum-new-home

Amid regulatory crackdown on Northwest glass makers, Eric Lovell transfers the business to California-based Oceanside GlassTile.

We listen back to what Ted Wheeler said as a candidate about his arts agenda for Portland, and talk with three bright guys in design, architecture, and planning about what challenges lie ahead for Portland during Wheeler's tenure.

[image: 20161217_arts_post-134_2,left,300x390,5852f415280b1e0339fc7fb2] Ever been in an American Legion hall? They’re not fancy, but for a certain generation they’re as familiar as the corner taproom. They're the place to go for a chat, cheap drinks and of course, monthly bingo — not to mention the assurance of finding people who’ve experienced military service. Legion membership is shrinking nationally, but one hall in Northeast Portland — an old Quonset hut with a dropped ceiling and scuffed floors — found revival by embracing new people and new voices. American Legion Post 134 on Alberta Street has become a home for all kinds of new voices. In the course of one evening, the audience heard a blazing variety of personal stories and essays, as well as poems and songs. Some writers are vets. Some aren’t. Post commander Sean Davis holds book release parties for veterans who are publishing their own work. The post even has its own small press and published an anthology of war stories. [image:…

Mark Rothko is one of the 20th century’s most famous painters, and his formative years were spent in Portland: He immigrated here at age 10 from Latvia and took classes at the Museum School at the Portland Art Museum before graduating from Lincoln High School. In October, the museum announced plans for the Rothko Pavilion (see pictures), a new multi-story glass structure that will link the museum’s two free-standing buildings and include a number of new galleries and education and programming spaces. The Rothko Pavilion is not just paying homage to this under-sung hometown hero in its name. The art museum also announced a partnership with Rothko’s children to cycle his works through the museum on a rotating basis. Christopher Rothko sat down with Aaron Scott at last month’s Wordstock. And we talk with the museum’s brand new Curator of Northwest Art, Grace Kook-Anderson.

The Cult of Orpheus is reviving last year's popular original, one-act opera, "Viva's Holiday", based on the memoirs of the celebrated Portland exotic dancer, Viva Las Vegas. Think your family holiday gathering is complicated? Picture outing your life as a stripper to a minister father. Take a listen, and mark the calendar for the remaining four performances. (photo cred. Gene Newell/Courtesy of the Cult of Orpheus)

Warm your hands on these picks from KMHD program director Matt Fleeger, and OPB digital producer David Stuckey. We talk about a few selections from KMHD's top ten albums of 2016, plus a few live shows that kept us jumping this year. (Photo cred. David Stuckey)

If you’ve been tuning into State of Wonder this fall, you know that we’ve been full bore on a flash fiction contest being run by the Portland/Brooklyn publisher Tin House. It’s called Plotto, after a weird gem of a book from 1928, “Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots,” which collects 1,462 plots in an encyclopedic list to help struggling writers. “Plotto” was written by the pulp author William Wallace Cook. "Like 'Plotto,' he was sort of a plot generator himself," Tin House editor Masie Cochran told State of Wonder. "Once in the 1920's, he wrote 54 novels in one year. He was so prolific, he became known as 'the man who deforested Canada' due to the sheer number of pages he produced." To celebrate its reissue of "Plotto" in paperback, Tin House posted a plot prompt a week for five weeks and gave writers six days to come up with stories inspired by each. They received a whopping 932 entries and chose one winner a week. Local author Paul Collins then chose the grand prize winner. State of Wonder then recorded…

If you’ve been tuning into State of Wonder this fall, you know that we’ve been full bore on a flash fiction contest being run by the Portland/Brooklyn publisher Tin House. It’s called Plotto, after a weird gem of a book from 1928, “Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots,” which collects 1,462 plots in an encyclopedic list to help struggling writers. “Plotto” was written by the pulp author William Wallace Cook. "Like 'Plotto,' he was sort of a plot generator himself," Tin House editor Masie Cochran told State of Wonder. "Once in the 1920's, he wrote 54 novels in one year. He was so prolific, he became known as 'the man who deforested Canada' due to the sheer number of pages he produced." To celebrate its reissue of "Plotto" in paperback, Tin House posted a plot prompt a week for five weeks and gave writers six days to come up with stories inspired by each. They received a whopping 932 entries and chose one winner a week. Local author Paul Collins then chose the grand prize winner. State of Wonder then recorded…

If you’ve been tuning into State of Wonder this fall, you know that we’ve been full bore on a flash fiction contest being run by the Portland/Brooklyn publisher Tin House. It’s called Plotto, after a weird gem of a book from 1928, “Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots,” which collects 1,462 plots in an encyclopedic list to help struggling writers. “Plotto” was written by the pulp author William Wallace Cook. "Like 'Plotto,' he was sort of a plot generator himself," Tin House editor Masie Cochran told State of Wonder. "Once in the 1920's, he wrote 54 novels in one year. He was so prolific, he became known as 'the man who deforested Canada' due to the sheer number of pages he produced." To celebrate its reissue of "Plotto" in paperback, Tin House posted a plot prompt a week for five weeks and gave writers six days to come up with stories inspired by each. They received a whopping 932 entries and chose one winner a week. Local author Paul Collins then chose the grand prize winner. State of Wonder then recorded…

If you’ve been tuning into State of Wonder this fall, you know that we’ve been full bore on a flash fiction contest being run by the Portland/Brooklyn publisher Tin House. It’s called Plotto, after a weird gem of a book from 1928, “Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots,” which collects 1,462 plots in an encyclopedic list to help struggling writers. “Plotto” was written by the pulp author William Wallace Cook. "Like 'Plotto,' he was sort of a plot generator himself," Tin House editor Masie Cochran told State of Wonder. "Once in the 1920's, he wrote 54 novels in one year. He was so prolific, he became known as 'the man who deforested Canada' due to the sheer number of pages he produced." To celebrate its reissue of "Plotto" in paperback, Tin House posted a plot prompt a week for five weeks and gave writers six days to come up with stories inspired by each. They received a whopping 932 entries and chose one winner a week. Local author Paul Collins then chose the grand prize winner. State of Wonder then recorded…

If you’ve been tuning into State of Wonder this fall, you know that we’ve been full bore on a flash fiction contest being run by the Portland/Brooklyn publisher Tin House. It’s called Plotto, after a weird gem of a book from 1928, “Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots,” which collects 1,462 plots in an encyclopedic list to help struggling writers. “Plotto” was written by the pulp author William Wallace Cook. "Like 'Plotto,' he was sort of a plot generator himself," Tin House editor Masie Cochran told State of Wonder. "Once in the 1920's, he wrote 54 novels in one year. He was so prolific, he became known as 'the man who deforested Canada' due to the sheer number of pages he produced." To celebrate its reissue of "Plotto" in paperback, Tin House posted a plot prompt a week for five weeks and gave writers six days to come up with stories inspired by each. They received a whopping 932 entries and chose one winner a week. Local author Paul Collins then chose the grand prize winner. State of Wonder then recorded…

If you’ve been tuning into State of Wonder this fall, you know that we’ve been full bore on a flash fiction contest being run by the Portland/Brooklyn publisher Tin House. It’s called Plotto, after a weird gem of a book from 1928, “Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots,” which collects 1,462 plots in an encyclopedic list to help struggling writers. “Plotto” was written by the pulp author William Wallace Cook. "Like 'Plotto,' he was sort of a plot generator himself," Tin House editor Masie Cochran told State of Wonder. "Once in the 1920's, he wrote 54 novels in one year. He was so prolific, he became known as 'the man who deforested Canada' due to the sheer number of pages he produced." To celebrate its reissue of "Plotto" in paperback, Tin House posted a plot prompt a week for five weeks and gave writers six days to come up with stories inspired by each. They received a whopping 932 entries and chose one winner a week. Local author Paul Collins then chose the grand prize winner. State of Wonder then recorded…

Do you ever drive by one of the dozens of buildings going up in Portland and think, man, I wish I owned a slice of that masonry pie? Well, now you can. In the middle of one of Portland’s biggest real estate booms, one building stands out, and not just for its name and psychedelic paint job. The Fair-Haired Dumbbell is the first building in Oregon and one of the first in the country to raise money via new crowd-funding regulation approved by Congress. Read the full story: http://www.opb.org/radio/article/fair-haired-dumbbell-crowd-funded-building

Few Portland artists can claim deeper ties to the city than Julie Keefe. She’s shot for everyone from the Oregonian to the New York Times; she’s done major community engagement projects like Hello, Neighbor, where kids in North Portland interview elders about how the neighborhood has changed; and she’s wrapping up four years as Portland’s first creative laureate. But she might be best known, at least in Northeast Portland, as the primary photographer for the Skanner newspaper, where she’s documented Portland’s African American community since 1991, as see in the exhibition “Document of a Dynamic Community: The Skanner Photography of Julie Keefe," at the Oregon Historical Society through Dec. 18. The hundreds of photos, drawn from the tens of thousands Keefe has shot, depict the everyday triumphs, challenges, and banalities of life in North, Northeast, and increasingly East Portland. "What the Skanner did is said, 'here, we're going to show you our parades, and we're going to show the girl scout troupes and…

The creative firm behind such famous spaces as the Alexandria Library and the new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has its eyes on Portland's waterfront, and there's good news and bad. First, the bad: the James Beard Market Snohetta was set to design got booted from the Morrison Bridge site that folks were so excited about by the developer, Melvin Mark. This is at least the fifth time organizers have had to change sites in the past 17 years. In good news, the partners behind Snohetta's other project, the Willamette Falls Riverwalk at the old Blue Heron Mill in Oregon City, have raised $19 of $25 million for the first phase, and Snohetta is deep in the design process with the public. Plus, the firm has signed on for a third project: to design plans for OMSI’s 16 acres of riverfront property in the central eastside. Snohetta’s team was recently in town to gather public feedback on their designs — a process that engaged several hundred participants, ranging from two former Oregon City mayors to arts advocates…

A brilliant stylist of crime lit, Hobbs is remembered by editor Gary Fisketjon and Professor Robert Knapp of Reed College. (photo cred. Leah Nash)

Best-selling author Hobbs wrote his New York Times bestseller, "Ghostman" during his senior year at Reed College. At the same time he was working on his thesis with Robert Knapp, a professor of English and Humanities. Knapp shares memories of Hobbs, and explains the links between Hobbs' academic work and his neo-noir fiction.