Part II: Lost in the Gallery of Secret Art.
How come RACC doesn't want you to see it?
In our last piece, we wrote about the Regional Arts & Culture Council’s awards to local artists. In addition to keeping the applications for funds a state secret (although they’ll happily share data on the winners’ race), RACC’s city-funded website fails to reproduce a single work of winning art or offers any links for actually seeing what the mopes who pay $35 per head get for their money.
So I tortured myself by Duck-Ducking the 134 winners in search of who the artists are and what they do. (My advice: pinch yourself hard for two days instead.)
Post-search, my best guess is that a third of the grantees are so obscure that search engines simply cannot find them. Many others have websiites, but don’t bother mentioning or picturing the works that got them a stipend. (Some of the grants are for a measly $1,000, so that’s understandable.) But a few popped up.
So, let’s pretend that the Portland Art Museum (well known for dissing native Oregon artists) dedicated a few galleries to this secretive array of local artworks.
Let’s call the show, “Your Tax Dollars at Work.”
The entrance door appears to be locked; but if you utter the magic word “equity,” the door pops open.
We enter and encounter the traditional, “What you’re about to see” message on the wall.
“Agitprop: A portmanteau pairing of the words “agitation” and “propaganda,” usually used to describe media productions (posters, books, movies, music, etc.) designed to instill pro-system thought patterns into those who consume them.
—The UrbanDictionary
We’re first accosted by a list of the various winners—134 individuals and 59 organizations. Whew!
Some of the arts groups are familiar—All Classical Portland, Blackfish Gallery, Clinton Street Theater; some seem to have a rather, well… tenative connection to the arts, such as the Hillsboro Downtown Partnership (they’re getting $5K for something called the “Window Artist Takeover), The Ink Lab Custom Apparel LLC ($5K for “equipment”), and 45th Parallel ($4K for producing something called, “Femenine,” which, curiously is by a New York compose, Julius Eastman, who never set foot in Portland).
What ties them together is a general lack of really big audiences. Big audiences being, unfortunately, made up of too many you-know-who’s.
Some oddities pop up on the list: the Curvy Chic Closet Foundation got $3K for a “Curvy Chic Closet Foundation Spring Fashion Show.” The Latino Network non-profit got $5K for “Supporting Studio Latino Teaching Artists in Portland Public Schools,” but waitaminit! Isn’t what the Arts Tax is supposed to be doing with its $6-million slush fund for schools in the first place? Gilding the lilly, perchance?
As for the lucky individual artists, the RACC list of artwork titles is maddeningly uninformative. Caixin Huang got $2K for “Rocks.” Emily Running got the same for a “Gold Suit.” Emma Barrow got $5K for “Other Plans.”
Some awards seemed to have little to do with Portland: May Anuntarungsun got $5K for “Food Exhibition at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in NYC.” Three other artists got nice stipends for going to art schools in nice placs such as Florence, Italy.
Another gallery in our imaginary show doesn’t have any actual artworks; instead there are copies of invoices: Amanda Harris got $5K for “Whet Studio Expansion,” which is an onliine business selling wooden shelves that…
…will help to step up your propagation game; offering a beautiful and functional alternative to the collection of old pasta-jars lining your windows and shelves…
…for $70 a pop.
Zephyr Brown got $2K for “Rebuild the Hands On juggling school that comes to you!”
Oliver Daofu got $5K for “tattoo business.” His RACC application is secret, but here was his pitch on Indiegogo…
…send ollie to tattoo school! help support an asian-american qtpoc artist in their journey to becoming a tattoo artist!
Hailee Evans also scooped up $2K under “folk arts” for her “tattoo private studio.”
Finally, we get to actual art. And some of it, to be fair, isn’t embarrassing.
Mark Brody got $5K for the Glencoe School mural renovation…
…and, golly! There’s an American flag! Hope it doesn’t get painted over.
Jazz trumpeter Cyrus Nabipoor’s YouTube pitch for help making a studio album with an amazing story attached garnered $4K.
Xiaolin Jiang ($1K for “Intersection of mental health and art”) gets our vote for most charming—and politically untainted—drawings…
Kelda Van Patten ($4K for “Peaches and Perfume”) makes pictures that don’t seem to be selling any racial/ sexual/ political tropes and she has artspeak down pretty tight…
I seek to invoke a sense of surprise or contradiction through the consideration of photographs that occupy liminal spaces between artifice and truth, imagination and the real, and mimesis and the origin.
But they’re pretty—which no one in the art game is allowed to say. (So we said it.)
We thought we might have encountered some political counter-programming with Andrew Krissberg’s “Family Worship—Kicked Out of the Garden,” ($4K) which sounded as if religion had somehow eluded the “peers”—but, no. It’s a cheeky Portland rock band…
In a traditional sense, you know, with overdriven tube amps and swaggering bravado, with whiskey dripping beards and cigarette stained fingernails, bad attitudes and hearts of gold.
Now we’ll turn a corner and enter the gallery of, well…agitprop. Got a cause, a racial resentment, sexual preference, erotic compulsion, utopian dream, revolutionary manifesto, climate nightmare... You’ll find it here; It’s a big gallery.
A few examples…
Here’s Roger Peet, who got $3K for “Mapping the Mine—A printmaking project connecting DR Congo and Portland”…
His work tends to focus on civilized bad ideas, predator-prey relationships, and the contemporary crises of biodiversity and Capitalism and what can and can't be done about them.
Chisao Hata, who got $5K for something (unmentioned on her website) called, “The Assembly Center,” is self-described online…
Chisao’s work IS justice work... There’s not one group she hasn’t touched with her activism through art. Her themes are exigent for our times and urge participants to ponder their worldview and act for change.
Jessica Mehta, who got $5K for “Spring 2023 Projects”…
As a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, but born in the occupied [read: stolen] land of what is today often called Oregon, space, place, and ancestry are driving factors in her work.
There’s lot more stuff in here, but let’s head into the gallery with LGBTQIA+ engraved above the door. Pick a letter: RACC’s got you covered…
Michael Espinosa, $5K for “snapshots for future lovers”…
…(they/them) is a non-binary, multi-racial, multi-disciplinary artist whose work embodies & embraces the undone artistic practices of Queer Ancestors lost to persecution, disease, fatal sadness, & closets.
Pilar Gallego ($5K for “Lust Killer”)…
…(they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work engages a critical materialist lens into the closet/wardrobe as a repository for potential selves, considering the ways in which design marks and speaks for the body. Their work reflects on issues relating to in/visibility, homonormativity, displacement, desire, assimilation, and respectability politics.
Rebel Sidney Fayola Black Burnett was awarded $5K for ”Art on Our Bodies: Being Black, Gender Expansive, and Disabled in the Arts,” although her website treats art as an aftethought…
We are a Portland OR-based, inter/national Disability Justice gathering space that focuses on disabled art, justice, culture, leadership, and more, by and for Queer and Trans (QT) + sex workers and trafficking survivors + Black, Indigenous, Multiracial, and People of Color (BIPOC).
Alas. There are no examples of “disabled art” on her website.
Anthony Hudson and sometime performance-partner Pepper Pepper each got $3K for a Drag Queen Festival and a performance of “The Moon Beneath Us.”
G. Chesler received $5K for “dysConnect: Trans Lives during COVID-19. ” The grantee (one hesitates to assume a pronoun)…
…directs and produces this film as a transgender nonbinary disabled queer person, primarily for other queer and trans folx.
Twig Cosby was awarded $2K for “Queer Cat Firing: An LGBTQIA+ Ceramics Workshop and Wood-Soda Kiln Firing Experience…” (She also picked up $1,245 from the Oregon Arts Commission, which ought to buy a lot of wood.) When clay gets messed-up in gender politics, you know it’s time to take a deep breath.
Joni Whitworth pulled in $5 for “Future Prairie Radio,” which is described as “a Portland collective of women and queer artists.”
As its name implies, Future Prairie is loosely guided by the values of futurism, with an emphasis on shaping the future of culture. This theme is evident in the collective’s podcast, Future Prairie Radio, with guests discussing such topics as the end of plastic, equitable ridesharing and Afrofuturism and autonomy.
Crystal Cortez got $3K for “Tools for Immersive Audio.”
As someone who never saw themself represented in computer music or creative tech their work focuses on the empowerment of underserved populations gaining access and knowledge around technology…. Under their performance moniker Crystal Quartez they transforms field recordings, uses synthesis, audio programming, data sonification, and 3D sound spatialization to produce complex sonic realms.
A final gallery has a sign, Enter at Your Children’s Risk. There’s only one item on the wall.
Rimona Eskayo was awarded $5K for “Workshop series and expanded access for ‘I’m Having Top Surgery: An Illustrated Guide For You And Me.’”
“Their” website explains…
…the 96 pages of “I’m Having Top Surgery: An Illustrated Guide for Me and You” interrupt the sterile, dehumanizing realm of the operating room to offer a meditation on the political dimensions of medical gatekeeping and trans liberation.
One suspects that while it may be helpful in keeping patients flowing into the Doernbecker Children’s Hospital gender clinic—which we wrote about here and here last year—it’s a certainty that the book is pitched to ease youthful confusion (a symptom of being an adolescent) and will grease the path to various hormones, puberty “blockers,” and the knife.
If this isn’t “grooming,” what is? If RACC has any sort of metric for judging the success of their grants, this one will be a doozy.
But, of course, no taxpayer will get to see it.
We’ve used up our bandwidth; time to exit through the gift shop.
One final note to hustling artists: “RACC’s next Arts3C Grant Program cycle has a due date of March 22, 2023 by 5:00pm.” Time to get hustling! Get those code-words flowing!
Meanwhile, immersion in this little island of socialism and agitprop got me thinking.
I have had a longtime compulsion to make art when I’m not slinging words—so much so that my daughter told me that, after I leave the planet, my output will probably fill a good-sized dumpster. I drop stuff daily on Instagram, which beats dealing with the avarice of galleries. I have a number of good friends immersed in that world and—believe me—it ain’t pretty.
But I “identify” as an artist, which makes me legit—and I plan to apply for my very own stipend. There’s a typical bureaucratic questionnaire to fill out, but I’m undeterred. I only want a lousy $-thousand. Here’s my first draft…
My primary goal is to enhance voices of dissent to the oppressive system of progressive culture in Portland. We believe in giving voice to the ethnic majority of the city's citizens through comedy, song, and speech.
We will celebrate our true diversity on the 4th of July in a stirring day-long "We Are Still Here" celebration of bravery and reimagination. We plan to focus on freedom of speech with a recitation of no-no words.
I’ll let you know if it flies.
My late mother, who studied under Josef Albers, worked almost exclusively in stained glass, the last 50 years of her life, and her works can be found in churches, private homes, and at the University of Oregon [most of her works are part of a wide variety of churches and synagogues in California].
I inherited NONE of her artistic talent, but she was outspoken in her contempt for government-supported art, which she saw an inevitable pandering and always seeking mass approval.
I remember she had a show of her glass work at the Portland Art Museum in the 80s which was very difficult to install.
I am totally mystified about the implication that much of this government-paid art is apparently NOT available for the mere hoi-polloi to see it?
Richard, I went over and looked at some of your art on Instagram. I think you’ve got a shot at a RACC grant. When you file your application, don’t forget this important qualification: You are a member of the Mongrel tribe.