Spring Arts Preview 2023

Due to the nature of my profession—as the Mercury‘s arts & culture editor—I can’t help but see Portland’s amazing side. For instance, I was standing in line at a film festival the first time I heard about a series of “glam shot” portrait pop-up in the Lloyd Center Mall.  This led to our Spring Arts […]

For two years, Portland’s newest contemporary art venue, ILY2, has existed in a state of flux. It was a downtown storefront window that hosted live performances. It was an emotional support hotline. Its next-to-latest form was that of an offshoot “glamshot” pop-up in the Lloyd Center Mall—called ILY2 Too.  Now, in March, ILY2 will take […]

A collective “oh no!” rose up from the crowd gathered within the Historic Alberta House. They drew out the expression of dread, letting it fall into a murmur. Onstage, Chris Williams, the founder of Front Porch Sessions, joked about people running for the doors. “That’s usually the response, when an audience first learns that they’re […]

Presenting sound art in a gallery setting is a unique challenge for any curator or designer. Variform, the long since closed art space run by acclaimed musician Patricia Wolf and her husband, was successful on that front by keeping visual distractions to a minimum—all the better to concentrate on the field recordings or drones pouring […]

When we go out to see art, we go for the art. We love to see it, interact with it, be changed by it. But second best to the art is the talking about the art. Like food, wine, or a big bag of candy—art is better when shared. This year’s Spring Arts Preview contains […]

What most surprised Emily Schaber about mixing her own fragrances was the sense of order it brought to her life. Living with a learning disability had made scheduling and organizing next to impossible, Schaber told the Mercury, but the intentional planning that perfumery required helped her break through some of those difficulties. She became a […]

Computers are alchemical in the way that they use tiny assemblages of conductive squiggles and crystal wafers to generate images, solve complex mathematical problems, and connect people miles apart in real time. How does this transformation from material to information to image occur? Weaving Data, a group exhibition in the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art […]