Oregon Humanities Spring/Summer 2007

Cover of Oregon Humanities Spring/Summer 2007
Kathleen Holt
EDITOR
Jennifer Viviano
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Leigh van der Werff
PUBLICATIONS ASSISTANT
Allison Dubinsky
COPY EDITOR
Editorial Advisory Board
Tom Booth
Brian Doyle
Debra Gwartney
Julia Heydon
Marianne Keddington-Lang
Guy Maynard
Win McCormack
Camela Raymond
Kate Sage
Linny Stovall
Rich Wandschneider
Curt Yehnert

Oregon Humanities, a journal of ideas and perspectives about the humanities, is published biannually by the Oregon Council for the Humanities, 812 SW Washington Street, Suite 225, Portland, Oregon 97205.

We welcome letters from readers. If you would like a letter published, subject to editorial discretion, please include a daytime telephone number. Letters may be edited for reasons of space or clarity. Oregon Humanities is provided free of charge.

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To submit articles and essays for consideration, please read our writers' guidelines.

Field Work: For Artists' Sake

A new organization supports creativity at its source.

For some, the idea of the starving artist is a romantic archetype, a bohemian character who forgoes material comforts to pursue the muse. For others, it's stone-cold reality, scraping by on temp jobs, lacking health insurance, and eating noodles while waiting for someone to buy or publish their creative endeavor, their true passion.

But great art doesn't come from growling stomachs; it comes from great artists who are, ideally, well fed. Based on this premise, United States Artists was born. Established with an initial $20 million from the Ford, Rockefeller, Prudential, and Rasmuson foundations, the organization exists to give a boost to the arts in America by providing direct financial support to artists each year.

In 2006, United States Artists made its first investment: fifty unrestricted grants of $50,000 each to artists who were nominated and then evaluated by critics, scholars, and other artists in their disciplines. This year's recipients include a Chilkat blanket weaver in Alaska, a sculptor and photographer in New York, and three Portland artists: comics journalist Joe Sacco; writer, actor, and radio producer Dmae Roberts; and novelist Matthew Stadler, who delivered OCH's Winter 2006 Commonplace Lecture in Astoria.

With this significant infusion of support for the arts, United States Artists launched a social experiment of sorts. How will priming the creative pump affect the broader culture five, ten, or thirty years from now? What becomes possible when starving artists get the financial stability they need to be, simply, artists?

Those answers will emerge over time, but for now, one thing is clear: the artist's life just became a little sunnier for these three Oregonians.

Joe Sacco: Sketch Tragedy

In Joe Sacco's comics series Palestine, true tales of torture, humiliation, and violent struggle scream off the page, punctuated by the furrowed brows, gnashing teeth, and tears of his subjects. With his eyewitness reportage, precise illustrations, and harrowing stories of suffering told in speech balloons, Sacco has become known as a pioneer in a graphic form of new journalism: comics journalism.

"Comics are a powerful medium because they hit you in the gut," Sacco says. "You can smear readers with the mud of a particular place, and they can feel the taste of the place in their mouths."

Although he's done his share of lighthearted work, including satirical comics and rock poster art, much of Sacco's work focuses on civilian victims of war. For Palestine, he spent two months traveling through Israeli-occupied territories and Palestinian refugee camps to find the real stories behind what he'd been hearing on the news. He then spent more than three years writing and drawing what he saw.

Sacco's comics have appeared in the Guardian, Details, and the New York Times Magazine, and he's also published two book-length works of comics journalism set in Bosnia: Safe Area Gorazde and The Fixer. By including himself in many scenes, Sacco constantly reminds readers that his stories of civilian suffering are true, heard over tea in people's living rooms and witnessed firsthand amid the smoke, hurled stones, and gunfire of conflict.

"I've never been directly in danger," Sacco says. "Well, maybe, but not like the people I write about."

Dmae Roberts: Airing Differences

Dmae Roberts grew up in Junction City, Oregon, where, as the daughter of a Taiwanese mother and a white American father, she felt defined by her difference. "Art has always been a way for me to deal with the difficulties of being in a biracial family in a mostly white area," she says. "Writing and acting in plays helped me deal with the ostracism I felt."

Roberts, who still acts and writes for the stage, has also created more than four hundred pieces of radio theater and audio documentary for National Public Radio and Public Radio International programs. With personal stories as her subject matter and sound as her medium, Roberts weaves music, drama, narrative, interviews, and ambient sounds to create powerful, nuanced works of audio art.

In 2006, as executive producer for the nonprofit organization MediaRites, Roberts produced Crossing East, a series of eight one-hour radio documentaries about the diverse histories of Asians in America. (OCH helped fund one segment of this program.) The series is sweeping in its scope, from the story of the first Chinese sailors to arrive on American shores in the 1700s to the incidents of violence against Muslim and South Asian Americans after September 11, 2001.

Roberts spent three years raising funds for the series and worked with more than forty writers, producers, scholars, and artists across the country to compile stories of discrimination, disenfranchisement, and cross-cultural clashes. "Those are the things I care about," Roberts says. "I use my art to reflect those themes and let others know they are not alone." (Read Roberts's Posts submission.)

Matthew Stadler: A Novel Novelist

In much of his work, Matthew Stadler examines the way people deal with space: the social space between cities and suburbs; the emotional space between adults and children; and the political space between art and activism. "I see the novel not as self-expression, but as a form of inquiry, like philosophy," Stadler says. "It's a way of exploring something outside yourself."

In his novels, Stadler blends lyrical prose, humor, and historical facts to create an intellectual space in which readers can explore the gray areas and blurry lines of memory, morality, and human relationships. In Landscape: Memory, the protagonist attempts to preserve a remembered scene by painting it, but the image evolves as his memory of the moment changes. In Allan Stein, a teacher considers a sexual relationship with a student only after he's been accused of it.

"The novel puts you in positions you would never enter into in life," Stadler says. "It allows you to arrive at something that is not resolved, to put readers face-to-face with ambiguity."

Stadler, who is cofounder and former editor of Clear Cut Press, says he was drawn to the writing life in his late twenties, partly because he needed a creative outlet beyond the punk rock band he was in and partly because he liked the fact that he could write even when he was broke.

Now that he doesn't have to worry about being broke for a while, what will he do with his $50,000? "I'm going to write."

--Sona Pai

Published in the Spring/Summer 2007 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2007 Oregon Council for the Humanities