What Is Portland's Artistic Future?

Theater is Portland's artistic future.

Amanda Hunt and Disjecta's "Portland2014," partially exhibited at Southern Oregon University's Schneider Museum of Art through December 6, respectfully nods to studio art's 2D past while drawing focus to its interactive and performative future.

The body of Portland2014 is 2D: Modou Dieng and Devon VanHouton's Tranquilo references public mural. Travis Fitzgerald represents tapestry with Objects of Permanence I & II. Blair Saxon-Hill's double-sided quilt Shifting Ground and Occupation hangs in the center of the gallery, and D. E. May's geometric musings hang towards the far end. Abra Ancliffe's interactive Personal Libraries Library nestles in a corner near the entry. The its membership card reads,

"The Personal Libraries Library is a lending & subscription library located in Portland, Oregon. The Library is dedicated to recreating the personal libraries of artists, philosophers, scientists, writers and other thinkers & makers. It, and the books, function as a locus for research, connections, convergences, discoveries, curiosity & happenstance.

"The PLL Press produces and disperses printed matter that investigates the material, conceptual, textual and social presence of the Library."

Enhanced white noise emanates from Kelly Rauer's Locate, a triptych of video loops meditating on human movement with its locus in the spine, in the back antechamber. Studio art, dance and video converge in this geographically isolated yet aurally pervasive piece.

PLL and Locate stand out by their difference. In a space dominated by satisfying but ultimately predictable work, these two pose questions: what is a lending library doing in a museum? what is that noise coming from the back? Without ignoring the pedigreed place that 2D art holds in such a venue, Portland2014 guides museum art towards the interactive and performative. Hunt and Disjecta are telling their artists and venues to think theatrically.

We're used to the two dimensional in art museums. There's not a lot of ground left to cover. If artists want to grow, they need to encourage their audience to engage with their work, like Ancliffe. They need to pull divergent media together like Rauer. They need to think like theater makers. 

Americana Passé

How can we open galleries up to people of color to make them more than simply white man's land? Not by focusing on Caucasian nostalgia, like Royal Nebeker does at his ongoing exhibit at the Schneider Museum of Art at Southern Oregon University.

America's demographics are changing. We are increasingly becoming a brown nation, but we wouldn't know that by going to look at the art at Schneider. If we want our cultural resources to represent our whole community, then we need to exhibit work that doesn't present such a narrow view of American culture.

Nebeker is a neo-Expressionist who utilizes collage in nearly all of his work by juxtaposing text with his images. His painting is rich in texture, and vibrant in color from the sylvan blues of The Blue Bike to the oppressive shadow of Hands of Healing to the lonely maroon of Til Østbon. Twilight, in fact, is a favorite theme. It infuses everything in The Blue Bike and Til Østbon, and it approaches just off frame in Marbles at Twilight. Americana also weaves throughout his oeuvre. It's passive in his 1971 piece Mrs. Senior and Fern, but dances with twilight and violence in The Blue Bike, Marbles at Twilight and War Cry. The latter juxtaposes silhouettes of Indians and Arabs with a placard for Gene Autry's The Cowboy and the Indians which reads "war whoops ring.. war paths flame."

His Americana demonstrate exhibits nostalgia for a time of innocence, untouched by the brutality of racism and xenophobia. It negates the American-ness of experiences that have always been fraught by one race's ongoing oppression of the others. It's a comfortable fit for a venue as rooted in white privilege as an art gallery. It's a great fit for the America of the 1950s, but not for the America of 2014.

Cultural resources ought to be for everybody in the community, not just the white and/or privileged. To exist for the whole community, they need to exhibit work by and about more than just the white and/or privileged.