In 2008, the Portland arts community suffered a number of major
losses. Gallerist Laurel Gitlen moved small A projects—and her
consistently challenging, sorely missed programming—to New York
City. (Luckily, Fourteen30 Contemporary has opened in the space with an
impressive string of shows, helping to fill the void.) Tilt Gallery and
Project Space closed its doors after a run of memorably brainy shows.
Most tragic of all was the passing of Portland Art Museum curator of
photography Terry Toedtemeier, who collapsed in Hood River earlier this
month, after a presentation on the wonderful Wild Beauty exhibit. In spite of those losses, here are a few of last year’s
highlights in Portland art. JOHN MOTLEY

Contemporary Northwest Art Awards

By far the most controversial show of the year, the Contemporary
Northwest Art Awards effectively replaced the Oregon
Biennial—but in its inaugural year, only one of the five
regional artists selected was from Oregon (Marie Watt). And while the
Portland Art Museum certainly seemed to ignore local talent for
Washingtonians, the high quality of the show itself shouldn’t suffer
the same neglect. If nothing else, it managed to get the Washougal,
Washington-based international artist Dan Attoe’s work seen by
Portlanders. And while there seemed to be a mild uproar over the
$10,000 Arlene Schnitzer Prize going to Seattleite Whiting Tennis,
there’s something quintessentially Northwest about his dreary paintings
of houses and buildings that exist somewhere in between the urban and
the rural.

Holly Andres

Local photographer Holly Andres’ new body of work, Sparrow
Lane, showed a significant leap from her previous,
semi-autobiographical Stories from a Short Street. Focusing on a
group of young girls who snoop around a majestic estate, Andres
telegraphs the girls’ sexual awakening through their insistent
searching and a sensuous palette of blood reds, emerald greens, and
robin’s egg blues. It’s a seductive suite of photographs, and it caught
the eye of New York’s Robert Mann Gallery, who showed an expanded
version of Sparrow Lane in October.

Antony and the Johnsons

Last year’s TBA Festival kicked off with the inspired pairing of
Antony and the Johnsons’ high-drama chamber pop with the Oregon
Symphony, running through a set largely culled from the band’s
self-titled debut and its forthcoming third album, The Crying
Light. Amazingly, 30-plus backing musicians still couldn’t upstage
Antony Hegarty’s ineffable vibrato. Opening with an oppressively
haunted version of the David Lynch/Angelo Badalamenti-penned “Mysteries
of Love” was great, but Antony’s transformation of Beyoncé’s
“Crazy in Love” from ringtone-ready jam to hysterical torch song was a
revelation.

MK Guth

The installation Ties of Protection and Safe Keeping made its
way back from the Whitney Biennial for the Portland Art Museum’s
APEX exhibition as the United States entered a historic election
season, lending MK Guth’s homage to the things we value most a new
level of poignancy. Having asked participants to write down the things
they cherish most on red scraps of fabric, Guth wove them into more
than a quarter-mile of flaxen artificial hair, which hangs from the
ceiling in a dense tangle of loops and coils. Before November 4, it
mapped the collective desires of several communities; after, it was a
symbol of how voicing those desires can enact change.

Suddenly

At its core a deceptively simple investigation into the evolution of
the modern city, the sprawling Suddenly project, orchestrated by
Cooley Gallery curator Stephanie Snyder, writer Matthew Stadler, and a
host of collaborators, included exhibitions at Reed College’s Cooley
Gallery and Milepost 15; a symposium featuring German urban planner
Thomas Sieverts and director of the Cincinnati Art Museum Aaron Betsky;
a reader; guided tours of Fritz Haeg’s Portland edition of his ongoing
Animal Estates project; and so much more. Also, it’s still
happening. The Cooley Gallery exhibition travels to the Pomona College
Museum of Art next month.

Storm Tharp

Though the portraits of smudged and disfigured beauties for which
he’s best known were still present in ARM & ARM, Tharp’s
newest work showed the Portland artist confidently branching out into
video and installation (in this case, an antique armoire, stuffed with
hand-tailored clothing). Another confident step forward for one of the
city’s best artists.

Adam Sorensen

Splicing the DNA of classical Romantic painting with his own
experience growing up in the hyper-consumer culture of the ’80s, Adam
Sorensen’s severe tableaus of jutting mountains and snaking rivers are
rendered in neon-charged hues. Are they post-apocalyptic vistas? Has
Sorensen rescued a stock background image of Eternia from an episode of
He-Man? Either way, it’s a masterful reconciliation of high art
and low culture.