Galleries host First Thursday events on Oct. 1, and exhibits open at Lakewood Center for the Arts and OJMCHE
The Tribune will highlight some gallery openings and other arts happenings in the first edition of each month, coinciding with First Thursday (Oct. 1). Most have reopened with COVID-19 safety protocols and government restrictions in place:
• Portland Art Museum, 1219 S.W. Park Ave., presents its first exhibit since reopening, “Joryu Hanga Kyokai, 1956-1965: Japan’s Women Printmakers.” For more: www.portlandartmuseum.org.
• An out-of-Portland destination, Maryhill Museum of Art, in Goldendale, Washington, has reopened.
Hours are 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Fridays-Mondays. “A Particular Beauty: Romanian Folk Clothing” is a featured exhibit through Nov. 15, 2021. For more: www.maryhillmuseum.org.
• Lakewood Center for the Arts in Lake Oswego addresses the trials and tribulations of 2020 in an online art exhibit, “Disruption,” through its Festival of the Arts program. Artists have made works about the COVID-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter movement, social change, politics and environmental emergencies.
Works include Natalie Wood’s photograph on metal “You Are So Far Away,” which takes a common landscape reflection and transforms a city skyline into a forest.
Wood said: “During the pandemic I retreated into my home, into my mind and into nature. It’s sometimes difficult to make sense of my memories of a past life, living nonstop with the present reality of sheltering in place. … My busy streets are replaced with calm lakes. Appointments with friends are replaced by visits with silent trees. I am closer to life and yet desperate to go back to the living.”
The exhibit goes online Oct. 1 at www.lofestival.org and stays up till Nov. 1.
• A new multimedia exhibition, “Shelter in Place,” will be installed at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, 724 N.W. Davis St. It will be visible from the exterior, the windows and first-floor gallery, starting Oct. 1 (eve of Jewish holiday Sukkot).
The work by social artist and activist Adam McKinney includes film, photography and dance-based “interrogation” of social tenets of Sukkot — departing and dwelling, expressing and atoning, striking and shaking. It’s a Black Jewish response to histories of oppression by McKinney, and an inquiry into social isolation and the physical and emotional effects of anti-Black racial violence.
For more: www.ojmche.org.
• Elizabeth Leach Gallery, 417 N.W. Ninth Ave., has two new exhibits debuting on First Thursday: “Phalanxes,” featuring graphic textile wall works by Mark R. Smith (through Nov. 28), and “Black Wood,” which highlights new figurative paintings by Jeremy Okai Davis (through Oct. 31).
Smith uses dome, diamond, circle and starburst figures from linear woven strips that were cut, mitered and reconfigured into interlocking patterns that transmit an exquisite, symbiotic beauty. Davis makes his Leach debut with paintings that feature actors and models from Jet and Hue magazine covers in the 1950s-’60s. For more: www.elizabethleach.com.
• Reminder: Portland Art Museum, 1219 S.W. Park Ave., usually offers free admission from 5-8 p.m. on First Thursdays; www.portlandartmuseum.org.
• For information on galleries: First Thursday, www.firstthursdayportland.com; Portland Art Dealers Association, www.padaoregon.org.
You count on us to stay informed and we depend on you to fund our efforts. Quality local journalism takes time and money. Please support us to protect the future of community journalism.