"visual-arts"

The Largest Sun Ra Retrospective Yet is Hidden on the Top Floor of the Portland Art Musuem

In the 1960s, jazz legend Sun Ra applied to NASA’s art program. Somewhat of a glorified PR campaign, the program mostly funded cubist portraits of astronauts and artist imaginings of space colonies. But Ra had much bigger ideas about the program’s potential. “Without the proper type of music, your program will be more difficult than need be,” Ra wrote in his application. “You know it is said, ‘Music soothes the savage beast,’ and what is called man is very anarchy-minded at present.”

Art Exhibit “Utopia Without You” Attempts to Escape a Hostile World Using Balls of Trash and Video Games

Each piece in Utopia Without You is a synecdoche of a disheveled gamer’s bedroom—the rock of trash that is B-612, a hand-painted miniature elf displayed on a wooden table, a flat-screen TV playing a video game that Nikolai programmed, and Rich Inner Life, a gurgling fish tank filled with mineral oil and the electronic circuit that controls the video game. With its technological guts resting in goopy fluid, Rich Inner Life almost looks like a cyborg animal.

We Talked to the Portland Artist Whose Graphic Illustration of Trump Stirred National Controversy

Compton Creep is watching his back. One of the Portland artist’s illustrations recently went viral—a graphic illustration of President Trump with a knife to this throat and blood spewing from his neck. Creep—who declined to share his given name—had already sold the image on a few hundred T-shirts for about a year. But late in July, a blown-up version of the image was displayed in the window of One Grand Gallery on East Burnside Street, as part of a show called Fuck You, Mr. President.

“Sun Kittens & Moon Puppies” Imagines a Post-Patriarchy World

Sun Kittens & Moon Puppies lends the exhibit its name and, in a way, its manifesto. The show as a whole attempts to imagine what the world will look like after the fall of the patriarchy. To Rachel Rosenkoetter, it will look like vibrant paintings of exploding eggs. To E.M. Fuller, it will look like large ribbons of raw denim arranged in a pile shaped like a lopsided pyramid. To Maggie-Rose Condit, the impending social change will look like red-tinted photographs of hands clawing at cherries.

In Ori Gallery’s Third Exhibit, Two Emerging Artists Create Their Own Conventions

Printmaker Lo Smith had a formative experience on an art-school elevator. “I ran into a hijabi woman on an elevator who was silently crying,” Smith says. “This big, white professor man was trying to make small talk about the weather with me. Like, we’re pretending that this person who’s obviously crying next to me doesn’t exist.” The interaction led Smith to a question that informs several works in their new show, Linoleum Flowers: “How do we protect and defend each other’s humanity in this space where all of us are fading in and out constantly?”

A VR Program That Attempts to Replicate the Experience of Solitary Confinement Is Now in Portland

Welcome to Your Cell gives plenty of statistics about solitary confinement. Before 6×9 begins, white letters floating in a black void inform visitors that between 80,000 and 100,000 U.S. prisoners are currently held in solitary confinement. Gallery brochures offer information about organizations working to end solitary and improve the lives of prisoners. But the show is more concerned with conveying the horrifying experience behind the facts.
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