Scoop: Gossip That Knows Santa Claus Is Black.

TBA FESTIVAL
  1. KICKSTART MY ART: The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art is wading into territory more often frequented by at-home lithographers and ukulele musicians. Oregon’s leading avant-garde art organization last week launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $25,000 by Jan. 2 for the annual Time-Based Art Festival. Relatively speaking, that’s small change for PICA, a 17-year-old organization that brings in more than $1 million annually in grants and donations. But executive director Victoria Frey says other arts organizations of PICA’s size have also turned to crowdfunding. She says this campaign is just one arm of PICA’s year-end fundraising push, which also includes a major-donor campaign and a New Year’s Eve fundraiser. “We have to fundraise 80 percent of our budget, so we’re using every vehicle we can,” Frey says. “I don’t send this out to major donors, but Kickstarter is a language that a lot of our participants understand.” And what does the Kickstarter campaign say about PICA’s overall finances? Asked if PICA will end the year in the black, Frey answered: “If we succeed in all of these plans, yes. There’s a perception that we’re swimming in money, but we have to piece it together in a lot of different places.”
  1. BANNED AT BELMONT: Portland’s most persnickety bottle shop and bar, Belmont Station, will no longer fill the bulbous swing-top glass growlers favored by Astoria’s Fort George Brewery and California’s Russian River Brewing. According to a Belmont bartender, that style of growler is “extremely wasteful” as it tends to foam up, wasting beer. “We don’t have a problem with the 64-ounce swing-top growlers here,” says Fort George spokesman Brad Blaser.
  1. BRINGING HOME THE BACON: The most expensive piece of art ever sold at auction will soon be hanging on the walls of the Portland Art Museum—for a few months, at least. Starting Saturday, Dec. 21, PAM will exhibit Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud, which sold last month for $142.4 million at Christie’s in New York. The huge triptych from 1969 depicts Freud, a fellow painter who was both friend and rival to Bacon, sitting in different positions on a wooden chair. The work will be on display until March 30, when it will return to the private collection of the anonymous buyer.
  1. PAY, PAL, OR DON’T: A group of restaurant workers plans to start a nonprofit, pay-what-you-can restaurant called Ne Si’ka at 9216 SE Ramona St. in Lents. James Layton, head prep cook at Southland Whiskey Kitchen in Northwest Portland, got the idea from Jon Bon Jovi’s Soul Kitchen in Red Bank, N.J., a donations-only restaurant with no prices listed on the menu. A Dec. 12 fundraiser at the Eagle Eye Tavern in Lents raised $1,200 for Ne Si’ka. “This’ll be an actual sit-down restaurant that anyone will want to go to,” Layton says. “It’s for everyone, not just people with food-insecurity issues.”

WWeek 2015

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