Oregon Contemporary Postpones Summer Exhibition Due to Funding Woes

On Sunday, May 25, Kenton art gallery Oregon Contemporary announced it is postponing its summer exhibition due to funding uncertainty.

Ghosts in the Throat: Language, Song, Orality, and Resilience, was supposed to be a group show opening June 27 about Indigenous language revitalization, featuring 10 artists working in video, sculpture, installation and drawing.

Oregon Contemporary is not one of the 27 arts organizations that lost National Endowment for the Arts grants earlier this month, which left those groups scrambling at the last minute. Rather, executive and artistic director Blake Shell says she and the board postponed out of a sense of fiscal caution when considering the shaky funding landscape in Oregon arts right now.

In the fall, Shell was vocal in her opposition to the way the city’s new Office of Arts & Culture divvied up its annual grants, writing a letter co-signed by at least 15 other organizations about the reduced amounts that smaller arts organizations received while six of the city’s largest arts institutions got bumps up.

The Oregon Contemporary board passed its budget last week. In combing over the numbers, the board and staff decided it would be prudent to hold off on programming until they could fundraise and see if some outstanding grant applications come through. They aim to raise just over $88,000 by October, including a $50,000 foundation grant they are hoping to receive.

“We’re not closing,” Shell says. “We are hanging in there. It’s just fiscal responsibility. But we don’t want to be in the news for closing because we weren’t paying attention to things like this.”

The gallery joins a list of Portland arts organizations that have gone public with their budget struggles recently, including Portland Center Stage and Oregon Children’s Theatre. PCS kicked off a “Save PCS” campaign in early May, and OCT will pause all programming starting Sept. 1.

Oregon Contemporary—also known as Ox and formerly known as Disjecta—intends to move forward with its Ursula K. Le Guin show in November, as well as smaller exhibitions in the meantime. Shell hopes to hang the Ghosts in the Throat exhibition in the next 18 months, but has no concrete timeline.

“It’s a real loss to us as an organization but the biggest loss is to the public, the Portland audiences,” Shell says.