Design Museum Boston > PDX

PNCA in partnership with Museum of Contemporary Craft brings the co-directors of Design Museum Boston, Sam Aquillano and Derek Cascio, to Portland to talk about their wide-ranging collaborations with colleagues and institutions such as the exhibition Retail: Retell. Recycle. Rethink on sustainable marketing, a competition to design street seating for Boston’s booming Fort Point Channel, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to use design to build community and increase the livability of the South Boston Waterfront, home to the city’s burgeoning Innovation District. Their visit culminates with a Portland design community town hall, Design as Common Ground, at Portland Monthly’s Bright Lights Monday, January 8 at 6 pm at Jimmy Mak’s.

— Posted on 01/23 at 01:32 PM

Binary Lore Featured in Artforum

Binary Lore, a unique two-institution exhibition curated by the curator of PNCA’s Feldman Gallery + Project Space, Mack McFarland, and Shannon Stratton of Threewalls in Chicago has been selected by John Motley as one of Artforum‘s picks. Motley writes, “…in Binary Lore, their dissimilar work forms a cohesive demonstration of how cultural categorizations based on simplistic binary oppositions—for Fake, male and female, horror and lust; for MSHR, nature and technology, craft and code—are fast becoming the stuff of modern myth.”

— Posted on 01/22 at 11:45 AM

New Pedal Garden

What’s new on the west side of the Main Building? That’s the Pedal Garden, a new bike storage sculpture by David Boekelheide MFA ‘10 in memory of Tracey Sparling and celebrating PNCA’s cycling community. President Tom Manley will dedicate the Student Pedal Garden on January 25 at 11:30 am in the Swigert Commons of PNCA at 1241 NW Johnson Street. Read more about the background of the project in the recent press release.

— Posted on 01/15 at 12:10 PM

Harry and Mardy Widman Profiled in Oregonian

Faculty emeritus Harry Widman and his wife, Mardy, were profiled over the weekend in the Oregonian where David Stabler called Widman, 83, “one of Oregon’s great painters, a modernist of bold human forms, influential, gregarious, gentlemanly, an admired teacher whose words of advice could change a student’s career.” Painter Laura Ross-Paul, who is hosting an exhibition of both of the Widman’s work at Golden Gallery in Beaverton, called Widman, “one of the gods” along with Mel Katz and Jay Backstrand.

— Posted on 01/15 at 11:04 AM

Bright Lights: Manley + Cloepfil

Portland Monthly magazine sponsors a conversation with PNCA President Tom Manley and architect Brad Cloepfil on Monday, January 14 at 6 pm. Art Schooled Urbanism: PNCA and the Rebirth of the North Park Blocks is part of the magazine’s Bright Lights conversations series hosted by editor in chief Randy Gragg. The event is at Jimmy Mak’s, 221 NW 10th Avenue.

As Monthly notes, “For decades, Portland’s verdant Park Blocks have ended their northern reach at a fenced parking lot with all the life of a dead-end alley. But come September, a transformation will begin as one of the city’s most august and imposing edifices—the 511 Building—becomes home base to its fastest-growing creative institution: the Pacific Northwest College of Art.”

The event promises, “a tour of the vision for the college and the rebirth of the North Park Blocks with the project’s leaders, PNCA president Tom Manley and renowned architect Brad Cloepfil. The duo argue the new building—to be dubbed the Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Center for Art and Design—will be a booster rocket, not just for the college, but for the neighborhood and the city, adding a critical link to the so-called “Creative Corridor” stretching from the Ace Hotel and Wieden & Kennedy to the University of Oregon’s White Stag Building, and standing at the doorstep of the future redevelopment of the nine-block US Post Office site.”

— Posted on 01/10 at 11:49 AM

Pratt & Larson in the O

PNCA alumni Reta Larson and Michael Pratt and the handcrafted, artisanal tile business they built from scratch, Pratt & Larson Ceramics, are featured in a recent profile in the Oregonian. Over 30 years ago, a trip to Mexico inspired the two artists to begin making handmade tiles. Today their business, which was one of the first of its kind in the U.S., has more than a hundred showrooms and nearly a hundred employees.

— Posted on 01/02 at 12:09 PM