Yes, there is some. Check out the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, where you can see five plays in a summer weekend; the Oregon Bach Festival in July in Eugene, bringing German Bach choral interpreter Helmuth Rilling to the city’s Hult Center; and check out the Portland Art Museum year round for a variety of contemporary and historical exhibits.
Check out some of the state’s other museums. One of the best is the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem.
Oregon has a lot of artists, whose work can be seen in galleries in Portland and Eugene. And there are lots of books and movies about the state.
A little known fact is that poet Richard Brautigan grew up in Eugene.
Read on for more:
Here’s a short video about the work of Springfield artist Renee Manford, who is showing her paintings at the center, 500 Main St. in Springfield, through Dec. 28. Her monoprints are on display at nearby Island Park Gallery, 215 W. C St., through Jan. 24.
The Portland Art Museum has just announced the five recipients of its first Contemporary Northwest Art Awards.
The CNAAs, begun this year, are the museum’s replacement for its Oregon Biennial, which collapsed and died under the weight of dull conceptual academicism. It also didn’t represent much of anything about Oregon art. An artist virtually couldn’t get work into the Biennial unless he or she happened to live in Portland and produced slick, anemic, university style postmodern art. It wasn’t an Oregon Biennial. It was a Portland Biennial.
But the CNAAs have made things even worse. Of the five artists selected, four live in Washington.
The fifth, Portlander (surprise!) Marie Watt, says on her website that her approach to art-making “is shaped by the proto-feminism of Iroquois matrilineal custom, political work by Native artists in the 60s, a discourse on multiculturalism, as well as Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art.”
Artist statements like that kind of make the heart beat faster, don’t they?
The other artists are Dan Attoe (who writestext on paintings like so many people did in the 1980s); Cat Clifford, who does (ho-hum) video installations; Jeffry Mitchell, who really likes the color white; and Whiting Tennis, who does quirky sculpture.
