Oregon Humanities Fall/Winter 2008

Cover of Oregon Humanities Fall/Winter 2008
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
Rich Wandschneider
Dave Weich
Curt Yehnert

Oregon Humanities, a journal of ideas and perspectives about the humanities, is published triannually by the Oregon Council for the Humanities, 813 SW Alder Street, Suite 702, 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 to Oregonians.

To be on the mailing list to receive this magazine, please e-mail us, or call the OCH office at (503) 241-0543 or (800) 735-0543.

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

Field Work: Thinking about Art

An OCH grant funds a contemporary art festival that offers context and a chance for interaction.

For ten days every September, Portland's cultural scene transforms into an international stage when Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) presents its multidisciplinary Time-Based Art (TBA) Festival. The festival is held in all quadrants of the city and offers traveling and participatory pieces, as well as impromptu installations and events.

In addition to presenting cutting-edge theater, dance, music, and visual art, as well as pieces that seem impossible to categorize, the festival offers the TBA Institute--a daily program of chats, workshops, lectures, and salons--which is sponsored in part by a grant from the Oregon Council for the Humanities. The Institute also takes place online via podcasts and a blog with up-to-the-minute reviews by local volunteer writers, photographers, and videographers.

OCH Program Director Jennifer Allen says that the institute is an integral part of the festival because "it allows the public to interact with artists and their work, and helps them think critically about the ideas being explored at the festival." In addition, the institute offers festival attendees the opportunity to understand the broader context of the issues that inspire the art.

Kristan Kennedy, PICA's visual art program director and TBA curator, describes the festival as a ten-day-long crash course in contemporary art, and the institute as a way to find various points of entry into the festival. "Some audience members just buy a ticket to Antony and the Johnsons at the Schnitzer and never even know it's part of a festival," she says. "But those who purchase a pass get access to a much richer and more meaningful experience, not just during the ten days, but from year to year." Noting that the institute is in its sixth year, Kennedy says she can sense the readiness and expectations of audience members who return annually. This eagerness to soak up the festival's offerings and a willingness to leave preconceptions at the door, she believes, is what makes Portland the right place for TBA.

Panel-style chats take place at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland's Pearl District and offer the community a rare chance to hear internationally acclaimed artists discuss their work. Panel moderators include PICA's artistic staff as well as other local curators and scholars. Technical workshops are a more active and intimate chance for participants to tap into their own talents by seeing professional artists explore the process of their craft as they develop their next pieces. Salons focus on the visual art portion of the festival, which this year included sculpture installations created by artists-in-residence, videos, storefront exhibits, and portable walls.

Kennedy helped start the TBA blog when she first joined PICA's staff five years ago and now manages a team of writers with the help of a blog captain each year. In 2003, the economic downturn was working against arts funding, as well as affecting many arts critics in newspapers around the country, and the lack of critical press demanded a volunteer set of reviews. "What the blog provides is a document of how the community is responding to the festival from start to finish. And for the international artists, it's imperative to have coverage of the community dialogue because they need it for continued government funding," Kennedy says. Blog posts range from cut-and-dry reviews to musings about recently viewed performances.

Several new partners joined the festival this year and brought more humanities-based perspectives with them, thanks to an innovative use of the city as a stage. Portland's Sojourn Theatre presented Built in the shadow of the city's newest development hot spot, the South Waterfront. The work asked attendees to build their own ideal cities and then work with other participants, whose visions and values were undoubtedly different, keeping the needs of a healthy civic infrastructure in mind. On the last day of the festival, City Dance, an innovative performance involving dance, music, and architecture, commemorated the series of fountains in the South Auditorium district designed by Lawrence Halprin and influenced by his wife, choreographer Anna Halprin. A collaboration with the Halprin Landscape Conservancy and several other nonprofit sponsors, the project offered workshops for dance participants, lectures at AIA Portland, a Friday Forum at City Club of Portland, and a walking tour led by architecture critic and editor of Portland Spaces Randy Gragg. City Dance helped introduce a forty-year-old architectural gem to a whole new audience by celebrating its public use, which was an original intent of the design.

Each year, PICA intentionally selects TBA venues in areas of the city that are in transition because, as Kennedy says, they mirror the community of TBA: one that's still defining itself.

--Laura Becker

Published in the Fall/Winter 2008 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2008 Oregon Council for the Humanities