Kristy Edmunds

Even if you've never been inside a Portland art gallery, you know the name of Kristy Edmunds. Since Edmunds moved to town in 1990, she's been stirring up the often-staid local arts scene, first with her own visual and performance pieces, then curating Art/On the Edge, the Portland Art Museum's performance series. Since 1995, she's headed the upstart Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, which has grown into a successful nonprofit with a $1.6 million annual budget, while launching the Time-Based Art Festival, Portland's latest attempt at an international performance festival.

Last year, Edmunds made headlines when she took on another role, that of artistic director of the well-established international arts festival in Melbourne, Australia. Willamette Week sat down to talk with Edmunds last week, after she announced, with high fanfare, her departure to live full-time in Melbourne, the home of her partner, dancer Ros Warby, and the couple's young son, Malachi.

WW: Oregon ranks 47th of the U.S. states in terms of government funding of the arts, according to a recent national report. How is it different in Australia?

Kristy Edmunds: There the primary funding of the arts is through government sources. Art is really connected to the ideas of civic health.

In Australia, even the conservative parties support arts funding. Why?

It's a cultural issue: Australians as taxpayers would expect their government, whether they voted to the right or to the left, to invest in artistic and cultural activity.

How much has fundraising played a part in your day-to-day job at PICA?

A major part.

In Melbourne?

About 7 percent.

Was this a major factor in your decision to leave Portland?

Oh, no! Absolutely not. I like raising money.

Considering the recent inauguration, is there a political component to your decision? Is it time to get out of the country rather than Portland?

I would put it this way: I have a bi-national family. Ros and Malachi hold Australian passports. I'm a U.S. citizen. It's increasingly difficult to get them in and out of this country. Malachi even had to get a work visa to come to America. He's seven-and a half months old! And, flying through Los Angeles, they were fingerprinted and retina-scanned.

You, too?

No. I can't even be in the same line. I don't know if they're going to be allowed in or not.

What's it like for you going into Australia?

They have little sniffing beagles that run around with their tails wagging to make sure you're not bringing any plants or food into the country.

Assess the current state of the local arts scene.

I think the arts organizations that we have are quite good at finding an audience. The issue for us is how to sustain that. We can, on a project-by-project basis, find different alliances, different collaborations, different ways of reaching out to a community. But you have to maintain the core of what you have, expand the core, diversify in a lot of different ways. That's a more challenging thing that funders often don't consider.

How do you extend enthusiasm for the arts to someone who lives in the suburbs and is interested, but has kids, a job, and simply lacks the time to devote to a city's cultural life? Can you point to any programs that really get to people outside the arts community, that really draw people in?

First Thursday is a good example of drawing people in that normally wouldn't otherwise venture into the visual-arts community. Obviously PICA has done it. We started with an audience of, what, three…

And you knew all of their names.

Yeah. But PICA had an opposite sort of model. It's working from within the arts community specifically at a sophisticated level and then rippling out. There are other institutions… the Northwest Film Center works with young people and artists and filmmakers. The Vancouver School of the Arts I think does it beautifully. The Portland Art Museum, certainly, especially with this latest Native American exhibit, has pulled in a lot of people. At PICA we're committed to the program or the artist or the series of projects before the funding. You keep all those conversations with artists and venues and vendors and everything in balance while you go and try to raise the money to realize your plans.

So you have to be ahead. You're always making commitments...

But you can't make them contractual until you know you can. So as an artistic director you become really interested in helping to raise the funding necessary to implement the projects.

In this country, some people ask how we can justify arts funding when we're having difficulties with education funding, among other problems.

In America, we've gotten the idea that the human imagination is only valuable if it produces a commodity. I think that the arts and culture and education are all connected to the idea of the human imagination being able to expand.

People say PICA is Kristy Edmunds. Can it survive without you?

I wouldn't leave if I felt like the organization was vulnerable, because it's the thing, aside from my family, that I feel the most pride in. Look at any one of the staff members in this organization and try and tell me there's not a professional capacity underneath it. The board is very strong. TBA has been a success.

Why are you confident about leaving this institution that you founded at this moment?

From the very beginning, we set up a plan for my eventual departure. When I started, I had to learn how to become an executive director. I mean, I was an artist and a curator, kind of. I had to learn to be an executive director instantaneously; the curve was directly vertical. Mach 10-hair-on-fire, no curve at all! I actually thought it would only take a couple of years to get this little PICA project off the ground, and then a real person could take the reins.

What have you learned from your critics?

It's been hard for PICA to directly learn from criticism because often the criticism has come in a very under-informed way. There's a very big difference between criticism and whingeing.

Whingeing?

An Australian term. Think of it like the graduate degree of whining.

Some local artists say they don't feel like they have ownership in PICA.

PICA's mission was to advance and acknowledge the creative ideas that are happening in art and the artists who make them, nationally and internationally. And to act as a magnet for what was going on here.

As you got more involved nationally, some of PICA's programs faltered. Many people maintain that giving up the gallery space was a real detriment.

Honestly, there's a part of me that's absolutely sick to death of people feeling like the closure of that gallery was some monumental moment in their life. Because if it was, they would've spent a lot more time in it.

Can you point to examples of constructive criticism?

There was criticism about the DADA ball, that it was becoming a tradition, becoming redundant or disconnected from art. So, in having that conversation that maybe that's true, you go: OK, how do we let that thing go, but not let go of certain things that it does?

Such as? What did it do?

Provide a place for a creative community to really let their hair down, for volunteers and artists to become involved in different ways without the high pressure of a curatorial situation. All these kinds of elements-we knit them over and through and into the TBA festival.

You say TBA is a success. How do you judge it? A festival is successful when…

It gives you a fever. What was interesting to me about Year One of TBA is people got it. The second year, this community knew how to use the festival and brought somebody else. The audience more than doubled.

Yet many people thought that trading an arts series for a huge single event was a crazy idea. Why did it work?

It was the right time for TBA. Internationally, you could feel that America's borders were tightening up, so we thought about it from an arts perspective: How can we act as a beacon to tell the world's artists to come regardless? To me, Portland is one of the best cities in this country to be able to do that.

Why?

It's so unsuspected.

Provincialism works in our favor?

This is really quite an innovative little city.

Kristy Edmunds will direct this year's Time-Based Art Festival, which is scheduled for Sept. 9-18, while the agency conducts a national search for her replacement.

Edmunds, a native of Chelan, Wash., attended the University of Montana.

WWeek 2015