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We’re back: Another Famous ArtsWatch Link Post

By Barry Johnson
May 10, 2012
Culture

Sometimes we fall SO far behind, we just can’t figure out how to catch back up, and then we fall even farther behind. So let it be with the Famous ArtsWatch Links Post! Most of these have appeared on our Facebook page, but not collected in one easy-to-assemble box. Oh no. We do that just for YOU.

Understanding that we’re laggards and all, which is a given, we’ll just jump right in…

The Fred Fields Fund at the Oregon Community Foundation, which will be devoted to arts and education, totals more than $150 million, according to the foundation. Fields was a successful, far from flashy businessman, and gave money primarily to larger institutions (like Lewis&Clark College, for example, where he was a trustee, University of Portland, OMSI  and the Portland Art Museum) during his lifetime. We’ll see if OCF follows suit with the fund.

Conduit has announced a new dance and performance series, DANCE+, which hits the boards July 19-21 & 26-28 at Conduit. Performers include Bob Bevy, Kaj-Anne Pepper, Keely McIntyre, Gregg Bielemeier and Luciana Proano, among many others.

While we are passing along announcements: Third Angle has released the details of its 2012-13 season, which continues its relationship with Steve Reich and new music from China as well as feats of contemporary percussion. Tickets are on sale now.

The National Arts Centre in Canada is staging an all-Native American version of “King Lear” set in the Algonquin Nation in the late 1600s as European settlement started to disrupt traditional culture, which is going to give “Lear” a spin that ArtsWatch never contemplated but would love to see. Maybe someone could do a Chinook version, set among the tribes of the Columbia? Just for the record: the Portland Shakespeare Project is taking on “King Lear” this summer.

A Mark Rothko painting, “Orange, red, yellow,” sold for $86.9 million at auction. Which seemed well-timed given that the Portland Art Museum’s Rothko show is up-and-running through May 27. Does this “valuation” change the way we see the art, or are our compartmentalization abilities sufficient to keep the money separate from the paint?

Mark Rothko's "Orange, red, yellow"/Courtesy The Guardian

Right after the news of the Rothko sale crossed our desk, we saw this on our Facebook stream, a painting in progress at p:ear, and that really re-organized our thinking for a minute or two.

Painting in progress at p:ear

We were among the Tweeters and comic book artists at a Portland Opera rehearsal of “Candide,” which opens at a Keller Auditorium near you on Friday. You can find our “output” collected here! But we must issue a SPOILER ALERT! for those who don’t like to have their plots dug up and displayed before the show. (That’s a HORRIBLE metaphor. Sorry!) By the way, the operetta by Leonard Bernstein based on the novella by Voltaire looked to be in very fine shape at the rehearsal, and we suspect even those not inclined toward opera will enjoy it!

We don’t do TV news, generally, but… our old friend Chelsea Cain, who writes the most delicious serial killer mysteries, if you’re into that sort of thing, has learned that the FX cable network (which also produces one of our favorite crime series, “Justified”) has picked up the option on the first of her series, “Heartsick.”  And then we read about it online! We have some thoughts about who should play the deadly but beautiful Gretchen Lowell and the dogged and troubled but wise detective Archie Sheridan in the show, but maybe we’ll do a contest, once things become finalized. And then we heard “Monday Mornings,”  a new David E. Kelley doctor melodrama, is going to be set in Portland. But it’s not going to be filmed here. We think there should be a law…

Thomas Robinson’s design for a new PNCA residence hall on the North Park Blocks, per Brian Libby, looks pretty fabulous…

PNCA ArtHouse/rendering courtesy Lever Architecture

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