The Mercury covers culture & art because we think all its various forms are—quite plainly—how people understand one another. Conversations about food, music, performance, and “weird” installation art provide touchstones to deepen friendships, create new connections, and better understand our world. If you appreciate the Mercury’s interesting and useful news & culture reporting, consider making a small monthly contribution to support our editorial team. (WE HAVE TOTE BAGS NOW!) Your donation is tax-deductible. Oh, do you not like reading this on every article? Then read the guide IN PRINT.
This is not a time to fight with one another. This is a time to get along. You don't have to make nice with people who refute your very existence, but I do need you to walk behind the person in your building who trods at the pace of a locked shopping cart and just BE COOL.
This spring you are called to make alliances with those around you: team up on a idea, do fun stuff with your friends, lock eyes on the dance floor—platonically or otherwise. However, we are not asking that you do this purely from invention. Artists, performers, and local politicos are setting the pace with new projects, plans, and perspectives to inspire you to collab—collab with all your might!
Here are just a few of the amazing alliances you'll find in the Mercury's 2025 Spring Arts Guide:
• For the Spring Arts Trash Report, we asked Elinor Jones to write up some arts news and she instead pointed out that, after writing B00BS on our calculators for most of our youths, AI will soon be able to write B00BS on us—I for one welcome it. Also the Goonies might be getting back together!
• City councilor Jamie Dunphy has some ideas for how to make Portland more friendly to local musicians and music venues.
• What's going on with the Live Nation development project? While writing up a birds-eye view, we caught a glimmer on the horizon, of a local music promoter challenging the land use permit.
•A founder of brand new nail art show ManiFest, Asa Bree says she hopes it can be fun for everyone—from nail art admirers to nail DIYers to fine art lovers.
• FISK design agency founder Bijan Berahimi curated his 100+ artist show, Eyes and Ears, to connect creatives locally and in larger design scenes.
• The collaborators behind Monet’s Floating Worlds at Giverny have so many titles we dedicated an entire paragraph to them.
• Our seasonal art show round-up includes at least one gallery wants you to come to lunch—check out these "Artists in Cahoots!"
• Multimedia artist Patricia Vázquez Gómez pairs video and audio in ja’ / buuts’ / t’aan (Water / Smoke / Word), an installation about diaspora and the loss of language. In this piece, she says that making a poster for an organization is not beneath her talents because "images that make people imagine and dream of better things play an important role."
• Stumptown Stages' production of comedy musical Tootsie features gender-bending and progressive themes—and it's co-directed by its co-stars!
• Portland theater is in full swing, and the reviews are in:
• Sapience is about a friendship between a teenage boy and an orangutan, but our eyes were on the tortured scientist love triangle.
• A Case for the Existence of God finds friendship in a mortgage broker office, which may, in fact, prove the case.
• Portland Center Stage's ensemble cast for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? are breathtakingly good.
• Shaking the Tree’s captivating production of The Antipodes rewards audiences who enjoy sitting with big questions.
• Literary Arts and Mother Foucault’s now live across the street!
• The debut novel from Portland climate journalist Emma Pattee, Tilt begins at the Portland IKEA; we met her there for an interview and she showed us how to get free coffee.
• In her new collection Stag Dance, author Torrey Peters dreams of a dystopia where trans women support one another—“All it took was the end of the world to make that happen,” a trans homesteader in the book observes.
• At the Mercury's Geniuses of Comedy, ten comics collaborate with us to make you laugh! See who made this year's list!
• The collabs don't stop in EverOut’s spring calendar—Lidia Yuknavitch interviews Rebecca Solnit, Silkroad Ensemble continues an idea created by Yo-Yo Ma, and you're invited to a costume parade to celebrate Making Earth Cool!
