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Articles by David Bates
Narnia comes to Newberg: George Fox University hosts a C.S. Lewis conference
Jason Lepojärvi, director of the C.S. Lewis Initiative at George Fox University, greets guests on the first day of “The Undiscovered C.S. Lewis Conference” held in late September. Planning for the next one in 2028, he said, is already under way. Photo by: David Bates NEWBERG — C.S. Lewis is known to have remarked shortly before he died in 1963 that he expected to be forgotten within a few years of his passing.
States of War | David William Bates
States of War addresses one of the most pressing concerns of modern democratic states: how to reconcile the foundational drive to defend the nation with the principles of law and civic rights? Conceptually and historically, these two important dimensions of the modern state-sovereignty and the rule of law-have distinct roots. Sovereignty emerged in the seventeenth-century as the idea and practice of absolutism, where the final decision rested with the monarch.
‘The Singers,’ about a sing-off in a dive bar, wins Grand Jury Prize at McMinnville Short Film Festival
“Borrowed From the Earth” won the McMinnville Short Film Festival’s Native American category this year. The 15-minute film, directed by Zach Johaneson and written by Jesse DesRosier, was made with the cooperation of the Blackfeet Nation. McMINNVILLE — The American film industry is trying to navigate a perfect storm of economic and social difficulties, exacerbated by the influence of AI, and that’s produced a lot of handwringing in recent years about how to get butts back in movie theater seats.
D.E. May’s ‘Postcards from Islandsalem’: Not what art means, but what it does
D.E. May’s Dark Cabinet, mounted on the wall in the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, with his cabinet of drawers in front. Photo: David Bates SALEM — In the fall of 2024 the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem mounted an exhibition of “Indie Art” curated by Melissa F. Feldman, an East Coast art historian who regarded the Pacific Northwest’s artistic ecosystem as having a unique sensibility, and it was there that I discovered the artwork of D.E. May.
McMinnville Short Film Festival: Tiny budgets, small crews, big impact
Emily Topping has the title role in Jason Rosenblatt’s “Briyana,” a film about a young woman who turns to prostitution on the streets of Portland. The 12-minute short is extracted from a feature-length film, “Intersection,” Rosenblatt shot about 10 years ago. It will screen in the McMinnville Film Festival’s drama block at 9 p.m. Saturday.
Mullowney Printing Company: An idea factory for a collaborative community of artists
San Francisco artist Sandow Birk didn’t know anything about printmaking until he started working with Paul Mullowney in 2004, so a few years later when the master printer invited him to his studio in Hawaii, Birk took it seriously. Mullowney had some downtime in his shop and wanted to work with an artist.
Hallie Ford Museum: Touring collection of works by African American artists has humble, inspiring roots
SALEM — The final exhibition to fill the main gallery at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art this year is a delightfully eclectic collection of postwar African American art that is every bit as interesting as the story of how it came together is inspiring. Memories & Inspiration: The Kerry and C. Betty Davis Collection of African American Art is on display in the Melvin Henderson-Rubio Gallery and in the lobby through Dec.
Richard Cutshall’s ‘Return to the Fool’s Garden’ at Linfield is a delightfully surreal and sensuous feast
McMINNVILLE — With the start of a new academic year, Linfield University ushered in the fall arts season last week with an exhibition of paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture by one of its own instructors, Portland artist Richard Cutshall. It’s a delightfully surreal and sensuous feast, just the sort of thing to widen the eyes of incoming art students and hint at the depths they might one day explore.
Hallie Ford Museum of Art showcases Oregon’s foremost Modernist painter with ‘C.S. Price: A Portrait’
One measure of an artist’s success is numbers — how many attend an art exhibition or how many paintings sell, how many buy the book or attend productions of the play. Over the years, here’s where I’ve landed: How many people find an artist’s work doesn’t matter nearly as much as who encounters it — and then, the path it lays for them.
‘C.S. Price: A Portrait’: Roger Saydack’s book is a thorough and precise chronicle of the Modernist Oregon painter
Roger Saydack started writing his book about Modernist Oregon painter Clayton Sumner Price about eight years ago, but in fact, the retired Eugene attorney has been working on it for most of his adult life. His path into the life and art of Price, who died in 1950, was one of the artist’s later paintings: The Fisherman, which Saydack saw at the Detroit Institute of Arts when he was 12 years old. Clearly, it made an impression.
In the heart of Oregon wine country, a hotel gathers Northwest writers for residencies
In the spring of this year, I checked in with several Pacific Northwest writers to hear about what they were working on. It was an interesting mix. CULTURAL HUBS: An Occasional Series Daniel Nieh was deep into a novel, his third: It’s set in the service industry and explores the subject of unconditional love. Jaye Nasir also worked on a novel, plowing into the home stretch of a manuscript she’d spent an inordinate amount of time with on the front end. Both writers are from Portland.
MFA:NW connects emerging artists and rural communities, this month at the Pendleton Center for the Arts
A few years ago, art historian and teacher Georgina Ruff noticed that her students around Oregon — she teaches at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland State, and Southern Oregon University — had a limited vision of artistic work “outside their own little bubble.” Her response to that “siloing” was to create the nonprofit MFA:NW, which gathers work by recent MFA graduates from around the Pacific Northwest into a traveling exhibition that gets beyond the Portland bubble, landing in...
Melding media: Professor William Campbell guides Linfield University students in writing musical scores for animated short films
In the months leading up to graduating from Linfield University this week, senior Élana Gatien composed an original musical score for a film. Spring is about a magical rite in an ethereal forest that dispels winter and initiates the season associated with rebirth.
In Yamhill County, poetry and prose bloom in annual ‘Paper Gardens’ anthology
Oral storytelling is among the oldest arts, so it’s appropriate that the release in Yamhill County of this year’s Paper Gardens anthology of locally written prose and poetry gives authors the opportunity to read their work aloud to an audience. The 32nd annual publication was released earlier this month at the Chehalem Cultural Center in Newberg before a crowd of more than 200 friends, family, and other supporters of literary arts.
Inaugural Newgrass Festival brings bluegrass bands, including Broken Compass and Never Come Down, to Newberg
Yamhill County has in recent years seen a blossoming of new musical events — along with the Walnut City Music Festival held around Labor Day that sprouted forth in 2015, we have also seen the Aquilon Music Festival and the Keynote Concert Series come to life, along with McMinnville’s participation in Make Music Day on the summer solstice.
Celebrating the small has become a big deal at the McMinnville Short Film Festival
The McMinnville Short Film Festival wrapped its 14th annual outing last Sunday with a mid-afternoon awards luncheon scheduled to avoid conflicting with the Oscars. Reflecting afterward on all the films and conversations, I’m struck by a paradox. The festival’s mission is to showcase and celebrate the small, but this event, easily the largest cultural celebration in McMinnville and possibly in Yamhill County, increasingly has an epic vibe. Let us count the ways.
Artist Travis Johnson brings ‘Toxic Gods & Black Fairy Tales’ to Linfield University
Toxic Gods & Black Fairy Tales is the cryptic title of the winter exhibition at Linfield University’s art gallery, and when artist Travis Johnson unveiled this collection of his paintings and sculptures at the opening reception in mid-February, he brought song and poetry with him, too. Seated in the gallery surrounded by his work, he absorbed the physical space of the room with a series of long, deep breaths, eyes closed. The audience fell quiet.
Four-day McMinnville Short Film Festival starts Thursday with 107 films from 15 countries
Every year around this time, in the weeks leading up to the McMinnville Short Film Festival, I find myself telling people about the terrific films I’ve been watching to prep for covering the event.
Gender Revolution, Zoë Bossiere and ‘Cactus Country’
In January 2017, National Geographic magazine published a Gender Revolution issue, described by then-editor Susan Goldberg as an effort to acknowledge “new complexities in the biological understanding of sex.” The issue was short-listed for a Pulitzer Prize and is one of the few editions of the magazine this cisgender writer has kept on his shelf.
Chehalem Cultural Center goes for ‘A Walk in the Woods’
Trees, it seems, are having a moment. Richard Powers’ 2018 novel The Overstory may have had something to do with it, or at least the book was lifted by currents already in popular culture. Two years earlier, the German forester Peter Wohlleben’s book The Hidden Life of Trees posited that trees literally “talk” to and even “feel” each other through the vast mycelium networks that run beneath them.
Chehalem Cultural Center celebrates MLK Jr. Day with music, film, and a call to action
The audience of roughly 300 celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Monday night in the Chehalem Cultural Center got a little bit of everything: jazz, gospel singing, poetry, history, film, and personal reflections by performers. Of course, the voice of King himself was heard throughout the hour-long show, as images of the late civil rights leader and Christian minister, slain in 1968, flickered across two screens in the center’s ballroom.
Yamhill County art galleries offer a bounty of gift ideas
I’d planned this week to do a longer feature on a couple of visual art shows out here in wine country, but I realized that would give short shrift to several others. That wouldn’t be fair — we’re into the holiday season, which for some people means purchasing art as a present. So, as we roll out of 2024 toward a new year, here’s a roundup of Yamhill County’s art gallery scene. LINFIELD ART GALLERY in McMinnville is closing out the year with a show that puts students’ work front and center.
Portland’s Bridgetown Conservatory of Musical Theatre expands acting, dance, and vocal classes to second location in Salem
Salem’s lively theater scene this summer got a little bigger and deeper. Bridgetown Conservatory of Musical Theatre, which has been preparing young people in Portland for careers in theater arts since 2017, set up digs on one of downtown Salem’s busiest blocks. They’re upstairs in the Salem Arts Building on Liberty Street, about a minute’s walk from the Reed Opera House mall.
‘Indie Folk’ at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art: Rethinking the line between fine art and craft, with a Northwest twist
The premise of the new exhibition at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem, Indie Folk: New Art and Sounds from the Pacific Northwest, began formulating in curator Melissa F. Feldman’s mind after the New Yorker moved to the Seattle area in 2012. She noticed the artistic ecosystem and realized: Things look different here. The word “indie” is key. It was first used, she notes, to refer to independent record labels, which Seattle knows something about.
Joe Wilkins, Bethany Lee, Nicholas D. Kristof, Hannah Grace Spenner: New books by a quartet of Yamhill County writers
There are so many poets and writers in these parts that it’s impossible to produce a comprehensive list of “the year in reading” for book-lovers, but several Yamhill County authors caught my eye in 2024. All these works may be found at local bookstores, including Third Street Books in McMinnville and Chapters Books and Coffee in Newberg, as well as at local libraries. Not that one ever needs an excuse to buy books, but holiday shopping is upon us, so here’s your go-to justification for loading up.
A new chapel at Newberg’s George Fox University, filled with art
After George Fox University students deserted campus for summer vacation last May, art and design professor Tim Timmerman retreated to a large, windowless studio on the west side of the private Christian school in Newberg and began working on two murals, both inspired by Bible stories and imagery. I dropped in on him in July as the bold colors were starting to pop on six large wooden panels, each nearly as tall as the artist and about 5 feet wide, requiring an assistant to move them.
‘A Democracy of Multiples’: Linfield University displays political works by Mullowney Printing
There’s an interesting paradox in an exhibition of prints at the Linfield University Art Gallery. The show is modest in size, just a couple dozen pieces by six artists. But many of the works are so large — epic, even — that it would be easy to spend a long visit engaging with a single image. The show, A Democracy of Multiples: Recent Print Publications from the Studio of Mullowney Printing, opened in October and runs through Nov. 22.
Transformations: The A to Z of wine and art
Go to any wine-tasting room in Yamhill County—or anywhere in Oregon, for that matter—and chances are pretty good you’ll see art on a wall or two, perhaps everywhere. Not surprisingly, this is true at A to Z Wineworks in the hills just east of Newberg: It is, after all, one of the largest wineries in Oregon. But there’s a crucial difference here: Virtually all the art was produced by artists who had a hand in making the wine.
From barns to studios, Yamhill artists open their doors
There’s no shortage of barns in Yamhill County, but chances are good you’ve not seen one like Joshua Simonson’s. Granted, it’s small, but the walls are covered, from the floor to the ceiling, far out of reach, with paintings—nearly a hundred of them—that Simonson has done over the years. He first picked up a brush in his mid-20s in Los Angeles after deciding a theater career wasn’t for him.
LaJoie Theatre adds new jewel to the Chehalem Cultural Center crown
Shortly after 8 p.m. on the first Saturday of September, a tuxedo-clad Sean Andries stood on the stage of the Chehalem Cultural Center’s new LaJoie Theatre to welcome an invitation-only crowd of supporters, financial backers, artists, and staff filling the 250 plush seats. “For 20 years people have been dreaming about this brand-new theater,” said Andries, the center director, his infectious enthusiasm ramped up to 11. “When was the last time you saw a dream come true?
McMinnville’s Art Alley turns blank walls into colorful murals
Artist Natalie Fletcher used to work in a tattoo shop in downtown McMinnville where the rear opened into a concrete canyon of an alley between Davis and Evans streets. She and her co-workers used to remark how the walls back there “should be covered in art.” Now, they are. Local efforts to make blank slabs of brick and concrete around town pop with color have ramped up in recent years following the city’s 2016 creation of a public art committee.
In the footsteps of the Impressionists: McMinnville’s Erin Hanson Gallery unveils paintings inspired by the artist’s visit to France
Maybe you’ve had the singular pleasure of taking in Claude Monet’s paintings of water lilies, but you haven’t seen Erin Hanson’s paintings of Monet’s water lilies. She finished them in the past few weeks, capping an artistic pilgrimage that took her through France over the summer.
Fall theater in wine country ranges from ‘Grease’ and ‘Putnam County Spelling Bee’ to ‘Footloose’ and ‘Death by Design’
Fall is a great time to check out the theater scene in wine country. All the stages are popping with drama, comedy, and music. In the next couple of months, it’s possible to take in more than half a dozen theatrical productions, most of them in Yamhill County — and one in a brand spanking new theater. Let’s take them in order of appearance.
Yamhill County gallery scene: Paintings by James Frey, clocks by Ann Durley, and art by art teachers
As is typically the case year-round, Yamhill County’s art gallery scene has a little something for everyone, whether you’re looking to browse, admire, or buy. For your August calendar, we begin on the east side, in Newberg, then head west through McMinnville and out to Grand Ronde.
‘Apocrypha’: The art of Dennis Evans at Salem’s Hallie Ford Museum of Art
Dennis Evans isn’t a marquee name in Oregon’s diverse, far-flung arts community, but those who see the Seattle artist’s retrospective show at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem likely won’t soon forget it. Dennis Evans: Apocrypha, at the Willamette University-affiliated art museum through August, is surely his largest Oregon exhibition. It is as magnificent and absorbing as the elegantly designed, full-color, hardcover book by arts critic Matthew Kangas that accompanies it.
Cherie Savoie Tintary’s collages at Chehalem Cultural Center turn old magazines into nostalgic whimsy
If you had seen a show by Forest Grove artist Cherie Savoie Tintary four or five years ago, you probably would have seen a lot of photographs … but as we all know, a lot went down in 2020. For Tintary, who had studied and practiced photography for about 20 years, more happened in 2020 than just the pandemic. A longtime hair stylist, she received a lung cancer diagnosis, which meant there would be no more photo-filled trips. Her creative impulse and energy had to be realized at home.
Poet Q&A: Portland’s Valerie Witte on the pleasures of collaboration, poetics of the strange, and going beyond the written page
The McMinnville Public Library consistently offers a steady supply of poetry on the “new” shelf upstairs, but that’s not the only way they go to bat for verse. On the second Thursday of each month, the library hosts Poetry Night, during which a local or regional poet reads their work, and an open mic follows. For May, librarian and organizer Courtney Terry landed the busy poet Valerie Witte, who will read from her most recent collection, A Rupture in the Interiors, at 6 p.m. at the library.
‘Connected to the Land’: Photographer Leland Butler’s timeless images of beach and forest grace Linfield University Art Gallery
If you stand on a beach or a bluff or a cliff looking at the ocean along the Oregon Coast and no ships or surfers are in view and no piece of modernity falls within your field of vision, you’re basically looking back in time. This is exactly what someone standing where you are thousands of years ago would, presumably, also have seen. I thought of that recently while looking at Leland Butler’s gorgeous pictures hanging in the Linfield University Art Gallery, many of which he shot at the coast.
‘Singular Visions’ of self-taught artists shine at Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem
A few years ago, Jonathan Bucci, the artist and curator who presides over the Hallie Ford Museum of Art’s collections, mounted an exhibition for the woodcarver Russell Childers, who by today’s diagnostic standards, was probably autistic. The exact reason Childers was placed in the old Oregon Fairview Home in Salem at the age of 10 in 1926 isn’t clear. But he spent most of his life there, presumed by officials to be deaf and mute.
In McMinnville, Keynote Concerts add to the growing musical mix
When I started filing reports for Oregon ArtsWatch from Yamhill County in 2018, McMinnville had one tent-pole music event: the Walnut City Music Festival in September. Then there were two: The Aquilon Music Festival added a month-long dollop of opera to the mix that summer, and two years ago we joined musicians around the globe celebrating Make Music Day on the summer solstice. It seems we aren’t finished.
At Hallie Ford, William Volkers’ neon art shines bright
Visitors to the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem are accustomed to seeing art there using all manner of media — visual art ingredients like paints and charcoal, paper and canvas, varieties of stone and metal, glass, textiles, etc. But they’re unlikely to have seen artwork that employs the unique ingredient on display in the museum’s largest space: Neon. The arrival of William Volkersz: The View From Here at the Hallie Ford marks the third stop on a tour that started in South Dakota late in 2021.
Jess X. Snow and Kill Joy tackle Israel-Hamas war, capitalism, ecological destruction, immigration in multi-media show at Linfield
Linfield University’s art gallery has benefited over the years from having directors with connections far beyond the McMinnville campus. The exhibition brought in by Thea Gahr, Earth & Place/Roots & Movement, which runs through March 16, illustrates that fact with an eye-popping display of prints, video, and a sprawling installation by two artists whose work otherwise might never have landed in McMinnville. Jess X.
Q&A: Liz Cardenas, McMinnville Short Film Festival keynote speaker, on loving movies, the effects of streaming, and staying busy
The 13th annual McMinnville Short Film Festival lands this weekend, kicking off three days of screenings, workshops, and socials starting Friday morning. With more than a dozen 90-minute screening blocks Feb. 23-25, there really is something for everyone in this year’s batch of more than 100 films. It concludes Sunday evening with a dinner and awards presentation from 6 to 8:30 p.m. at The Bindery in downtown McMinnville.
Mixed-media artist Marvin Eans reflects on the life of Martin Luther King Jr. in show at Newberg’s Chehalem Cultural Center
The Chehalem Cultural Center in Newberg has in recent years mounted an ambitious program for the celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day on the third Monday in January, but the weather did not cooperate this year. The gallery remained opened, but the events were canceled. The exhibition that was prepared for that event remains open through Feb. 29, and an artists’ reception will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. Friday, Feb.
Yamhill County calendar: Metal Arts Gift Show, “Anne of Green Gables” at Gallery Theater, jazz by Lauren Kinhan
The Metal Arts Gift Show that fills the Yamhill Valley Heritage Center this Saturday began last year on a whim and now enjoys the status of a thing. Organizer Maggie Bowman, the McMinnville silversmith and jewelry artist who corralled dozens of artists for the debut outing, is calling this year’s event the second annual show. Really, she says, the only question about Year Three is whether it will continue as a single-day event, or whether there’s sufficient demand for two.
Inner Oasis Drum Circle: Connecting to the heartbeat of life
The first time I saw Terry Filer, a 74-year-old with Irish and Osage Nation roots, she was beating a drum in the breezeway of the McMinnville City Library on the summer solstice. It was Make Music Day 2022 and she was there with the Inner Oasis Drum Circle, an informal group that meets Monday evenings year-round. She handed maracas out to children in tow with parents and encouraged everyone to join in as the spirit moved them. Drums tend to do that — to call spirits, and move them.
Artist Serhat Tanyolacar confronts racism, nationalism, authoritarianism in Linfield show
On a cold, gray morning in December 2014, University of Iowa students walking through the sprawling plaza at the heart of the campus encountered a strange, disturbing scene: a Ku Klux Klan effigy, whose white robe was a tapestry of newspaper clippings disgorging a century’s worth of race riots and white supremacist violence in the United States. Turkish artist Serhat Tanyolacar, who was teaching there at the time, had created and mounted the display. School officials had it removed within hours.
‘Edible,’ guide to sustainable plants, includes illustrations by Dayton farmer Katie Kulla
A London-based publisher released a book Tuesdayin the United States called Edible: 70 Sustainable Plants That Are Changing How We Eat, and the story behind the illustrations says as much about the state of creative professions today as it does about winged kelp and dandelions.
‘Nosferatu’ at Linfield: Organist Dean Lemire says the creepy 1922 classic is a must-see on the big screen
In identifying the original Nosferatu as one of the “great movies,” the late, great film journalist Roger Ebert wrote that to see the classic 1922 German silent film was “to see the vampire movie before it had really seen itself … here is the story of Dracula before it was buried alive in cliches, jokes, TV skits, cartoons,” and, of course, many other films. One might update that list with the popularity of Nosferatu memes on social media.
Hallie Ford Museum of Art at 25: A ‘greatest hits’ show offers something for everyone
Spilling across the rooms of the main floor of the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, a hundred pieces of art — in all shapes and sizes, in different media, from different periods and different continents — offer something, it seems, for everyone. A viewer who didn’t know the occasion for this show might not grasp what it is about — and that’s allowing for the conceit that art needs to be “about” something at all. It’s about the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, it turns out.
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