We've got issues.
¡Viva La Cultura! If you lived in town for an extended period, you’ll notice a sort of pipeline runs between Oaxaca, Mexico, and Eugene, Oregon, with locals, snowbirds, writers and artists crossing paths back and forth across the border. Additionally, Lane County has a slow-but-steadily growing Hispanic population, increasing from 7.4 percent in 2010 to 8.5 percent in 2015, according to the most recent U.S. Census data. Continue reading
The day after Erika Fortner graduated from art school in New York, she headed straight to Berlin to work on a $5 million 80-foot long mural for banking behemoth Goldman Sachs. She wasn’t alone; Fortner was one of about 30 art assistants in the employ of abstract painter Julie Mehretu, a 2005 MacArthur “genius” grant awardee who Goldman Sachs commissioned in 2007 to create “Mural.” Continue reading
Mike Leckie was lugging an armful of his hand-cast sculptures of athlete Ashton Eaton up the stairs at the 2012 Olympic Trials at Hayward Field when someone from above offered him a hand. It was Eaton himself, the new world-champion decathlon runner. Oddly enough, Leckie was bringing the sculptures up the stairs as a gift to Eaton and his mother for the racer’s new 2012 world record. Continue reading
Mural mania: Eugene is becoming the mural mecca we always hoped it would, catching up to the flourishing walls of downtown Springfield. The Lane Arts Council hosts its 3rd Mural Bike Tour 10 am to noon Saturday, Aug. 20, spinning off at the Whiteaker Carpark South (5th Alley and Blair Boulevard). Continue reading
As cold and verboten as government buildings typically feel, it’s easy to forget that they belong to us, The People — paid for with taxpayer money, and don’t you forget it. Too often these edifices are lifeless, soul-squashing, Orwellian; but it doesn’t have to be that way. Here in Eugene, U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken, with a board of art advocates, is trying to shift that perspective by transforming the blank walls of the Wayne L. Morse U.S. Courthouse into a home for art exhibits. Continue reading
Farewell New Zone: The New Zone Gallery opens August’s First Friday ArtWalk with its final show at its downtown location on Broadway (which it has called home for 10 years) with pieces from more than 70 artists, as well as a featured collection — Muses, Dreams and Wanderings — by artist Tom Capri. The come-one, come-all attitude of the gallery and its members has been a bright spot on Eugene’s arts horizon with beloved annual shows like the Salon du People. Continue reading
Cereal and the City: New York pop artist Michael Albert is coming through Eugene with his traveling exhibition, including workshops, 1:30 to 4 pm Tuesday, Aug. 2, at the Hult Center plaza; FREE. Albert is perhaps best known for his cubist cereal box collages, or cerealisim, and his knack for using junk, from junk mail to old business labels to the Frosted Flakes box that started it all. Continue reading
If you haven’t seen the work of self-taught local artist Larry Hurst, get thee to Corvallis for an opening reception of his solo exhibit, What He Sees, 4 to 8 pm Thursday, July 21, at the ArtWorks Gallery, 408 S.W. Monroe Street; FREE. His swirling landscapes and remarkable use of color could have been born out of the wild expressionism of the early-20th-century Fauves, while a fellow EW writer told me his paintings looked Van Gogh-y. Either way, his work is a breath of fresh air over the mountains. Continue reading
How is the American identity defined today? When a certain Fanta-faced presidential nominee is targeting American minorities with threats of deportation or supporting heightened “security” of browner neighborhoods, the question takes on a new urgency. Two artists, Victoria Suescum and Lee Michael Peterson, tackle the question by exploring their identities as Latin@s (the gender neutral term for people of Latin American roots) within American culture in the new ¿Identity? exhibit up through Sept. Continue reading
The Oregon Country Fair poster is as much of an institution as the Fair itself. Around May each year, the OCF poster committee reveals the winning design and, like a harbinger of summer, it becomes increasingly ubiquitous, pinned to bulletin boards and taped to storefronts around the region. Artist Ila Rose had submitted work to the committee in the past, to no avail. This year, she nabbed the commission — in a year that, according to the poster committee, had a record-breaking number of submissions. Continue reading