RACC Blog

Double your donations for free, Oregon

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Thank you for supporting the Regional Arts and Culture Council, Work for Art and The Right Brain Initiative. We invite you to keep track of your donations to all cultural nonprofits in Oregon. If you match the total with a gift to the Oregon Cultural Trust, you receive a 100 percent tax credit on your gift to the Trust!* That’s right, you double the impact of your cultural donations for free!

Oregonians fund the Cultural Trust. The Trust in turn, funds the artists, potters, rappers, acrobats and dreamers who make Oregon, Oregon. Every year they disperse funds via the state’s 1,400+ cultural nonprofits, 45 county/tribal coalitions and five statewide partners. Learn more at CulturalTrust.org

Donate by December 31, 2016.

*You can donate all you like to The Trust, but the tax credit is limited to $500 for an individual, $1,000 for a couple and $2,500 for C-class corporations.

2017 RACC Workshops – photo credits

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Below are the photo credits for the photography featured on the 2017 RACC Workshop postcard:

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Deena Jones from Dreamgirls, Portland Center Stage at the Armory. (Photo by Patrick Weishampel)

 

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Mexican Dancers, Miracle Theatre/Milagros. (Photo by Russell J. Young)

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aptART’s Paint Outside the Lines campaign, Kevin Ledo + students of David Douglas High School, 2016

The Portland Ballet, Spring Program
Ballet/Tambourine guy, The Portland Ballet. (Photo by Blaine Truitt Covert)

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“Office” photo, PNCA Center for Design

Portland Building Installation Space: Artist Alex Luboff’s pipeline installation: November 14 – December 9

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Beginning November 14th artist Alex Luboff will offer visitors to the Portland Building a timely reminder of how the development of extractive energy infrastructure is confronting communities in Oregon and across the continent. His series of hand-crafted wooden pipelines, unavoidable as they cleave and intersect the exhibition space, can be seen as craft objects, or as a design composition, but the impression of the imposing physical presence that pipelines represent in our landscape is unavoidable.

Luboff’s project examines the physical, metaphorical, and systemic obstructions dealt to nature and society by the continued expansion of extractive energy infrastructure through the metaphor of “pipeline.” Projects ranging from the Keystone XL pipeline, the proposed LNG terminal in Coos Bay, and the current face-off over construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline are just a few of the growing number of energy infrastructure projects with the potential to significantly alter our surroundings and force communities into confrontation with government, industry, and their fellow citizens. As Luboff puts it “As a systemic obstruction these infrastructure projects reinforce a value system that may not prioritize a sustainable vision for humanity and the planet.”

The Portland Building is located at 1120 SW 5th Avenue in downtown Portland. The exhibition is free and open to the public from 8 am to 5 pm, Monday – Friday. For more information on the Portland Building Installation Space series, including images, proposals, and statements for all projects dating back to 1994, visit http://racc.org/installationspace

Light a Fire Award: George Thorn

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Eloise’s Blog:

The Regional Arts & Culture Council heartily congratulates George Thorn for receiving a Light a Fire Lifetime Achievement Award from Portland Monthly. George has been the quiet force of wisdom and advice for countless arts organizations in our community for many years. Happily for us after working all around the country with his partner in Arts Action Research he settled here. He is essentially a part of the RACC family shepherding our Cultural Leadership Program, which helps many arts organizations large and small every year with all kinds of arts management challenges. I compare his work to that of a therapist, listening to leaders articulate the problems they have identified and then talking through how best to address and resolve them. And these invaluable services come at no charge to the arts non-profits.

George also teaches the Art of Leadership, a program RACC inherited when Business for Culture and the Arts closed last summer. This series of classes trains business and other professionals in all aspects of serving on non-profit boards with a focus on arts & culture organizations.

When people ask how Portland has developed such a vibrant arts community part of the answer is certainly George Thorn. We are so lucky that he landed in our midst. Congratulations George!

Read: How George Thorn Guides Portland Arts Organizations to Sustainability

Coming to the Portland Building Installation Space: Our annual Día de los Muertos installation, October 19 to November 4

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In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, Unidos Latinos Americanos (ULA) will present a Día de los Muertos installation in the exhibition space adjacent to the Portland Building lobby starting October 19th.

Día De Los Muertos is a national holiday in Mexico and is now celebrated widely throughout Latin America, the U.S., and beyond. In keeping with the holiday’s tradition of remembering and celebrating the lives of loved ones who have passed on, ULA will build their Día De Los Muertos ofrenda (altar) in the center of the space and surround it with a  cascade of vibrant handmade paper flowers. The ofrenda will also include photos, objects, and food & drink favored by loved ones. Visitors will be invited to participate in the celebration by submitting images of their loved ones to be added to the display.

Unidos Latinos Americanos is an affinity group of City employees committed to developing a Latino professional network, to promoting professional advancement, and to strengthening community inclusiveness though public outreach. The exhibition opens on October 19th and runs through mid-day of November 4th.

The Portland Building is located at 1120 SW 5th Avenue in downtown Portland. The exhibition is free and open to the public from 8 am to 5 pm, Monday – Friday. For more information on the Portland Building Installation Space, including images, proposals, and statements for all projects dating back to 1994, visit http://racc.org/installationspace

Night Lights to appear over NW Glisan Street on First Thursdays

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Local artists will project large-scale media works outdoors each month through April

PORTLAND, ORE – Night Lights, a monthly public art event, begins its second year of urban intervention on Thursday, October 6. Every First Thursday through April 2017, local artists and art students will claim public space at NW Park Avenue at Glisan Street, broadcasting their digital media work on the north wall of the Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC) offices after dark.

Night Lights is a unique collaboration between RACC’s public art program and Portland Community Media (PCM). Now in its second season, participating artists were selected through an open call and a community panel process, and will receive a stipend for their participation. Presentations will include large-format projections, and, in some cases, live performance.

The full Night Lights schedule appears below, showcasing a different artist or university each month. The first installment, on October 6, features artist Renee Sills who will orchestrate a video dance party, in which attendees will learn dance moves from instructional YouTube videos. In January, members of the public are invited to BYOB (Bring Your Own Beamer), that is, to bring their own projector and media project to share.

As part of this year’s series, Kalimah Abioto was selected as an artist-in-residence. Abioto will work on-site at Portland Community Media for three months, using PCM’s state-of-the-art media equipment and production studios to develop a new work to premier at Night Lights on March 2, 2017.

Night Lights schedule

 

Regional Arts & Culture Council, exterior north wall
411 NW Park Avenue @ Glisan Street, Portland
First Thursdays, October 2016 – April 2017
Dusk – 9:00pm

Thursday, October 6, 2106
Renee Sills

Thursday, November 3, 2016
Arianna Gazca

Thursday, December 1, 2016
Portland Community College

Thursday, January 5, 2017
BYOB (Bring Your Own Beamer)

Thursday, February 2, 2017
Laura Heit

Thursday, March 2, 2017
Kalimah Abioto (Artist in residence)

Thursday, April 6, 2017
Portland State University

Learn more about Night Lights at nightlightspdx.tumblr.com

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The Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC) provides grants for artists, nonprofit organizations and schools in Clackamas, Multnomah and Washington Counties; manages an internationally acclaimed public art program; raises money and awareness for the arts through Work for Art; convenes forums, networking events and other community gatherings; provides workshops and other forms of technical assistance for artists; and oversees a program to integrate arts and culture into the standard curriculum in public schools through The Right Brain Initiative. RACC values a diversity of artistic and cultural experiences and is working to build a community in which everyone can participate in culture, creativity and the arts. For more information visit racc.org.

For over 35 years, Portland Community Media (PCM) has empowered our community to make effective use of media for civic participation, creative expression and cultural exchange. Through media production resources, education programs, community development initiatives and a robust distribution platform, PCM helps artists, nonprofits, community groups and government agencies explore the frontier where story and technology meet. Learn more about pcmtv.org.

Coming to the Portland Building Installation Space: “The Bridge, 1910,” an installation by Benz and Chang, September 19 – October 14.

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The artists known as Benz and Chang will present a site-specific installation in the Portland Building lobby starting September 19th. The project, titled The Bridge, 1910, is a visual homage to the work crews that built the Hawthorne Bridge, Portland’s oldest existing river crossing.

Inspired by a historical photo Benz discovered in the City of Portland Archives, the installation recreates a bridge work crew scene through a series of four large paper screens hung in the exhibition space. Each individual screen contains a hand-cut silhouette which offers a layer of visual information. Viewed together, the silhouettes complete and frame the scene into a recognizable archetypal representation of the building of a bridge. By adjusting position in front of or alongside the silhouettes, viewers can alter their angle of view and manipulate the degree of abstraction or representation they take in.

The Portland Building is located at 1120 SW 5th Avenue in downtown Portland. The exhibition is free and open to the public from 8 am to 5 pm, Monday – Friday. For more information on the Portland Building Installation Space series, including images, proposals, and statements for all projects dating back to 1994, visit http://racc.org/installationspace.

Coming to the Portland Building Installation Space: Bukola Koiki’s “JJC (Journey Just Come)”

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Bukola Koiki’s JJC (Journey Just Come) will be at the Portland Building Installation Space from August 15 through September 9, 2016.

This  installation is aimed at exploring the immigrant experience through the specific linguistic phenomena of the patois, slang and vernacular that is inherent in navigating the spaces between and within disparate cultures. The artist explains, “As a Nigerian-American immigrant myself, I am particularly interested in pidgin, which is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups that do not have a language in common…In Nigeria, a country of over 500 known languages, communication can be truly daunting at times.”

To explore this idea of communication and miscommunication, the artist will fill the Installation Space with a profusion of  brightly colored flags that will showcase Pidgin English sayings extracted from the local language in Lagos, Nigeria.

Viewing Hours & Location: The Portland Building is located at 1120 SW 5th Avenue in downtown Portland and is open 8 am to 5 pm, Monday – Friday. JJC (Journey Just Come) opens August 15 and runs through September 9, 2016.

For more information on the Portland Building Installation Space, including images, proposals, and statements for all projects dating back to 1994, go to www.racc.org/installationspace.