"Shine A Light" at the Portland Art Museum

This Saturday from 6PM to midnight at the Portland Art Museum is Shine a Light: A Night at the Museum. The event consists of six hours of performances, installations, tours, workshops, and games inside the museum, hosted by 15 artists from Portland State University’s MFA, Art and Social Practice program, led by Harrell Fletcher and Jen Delos Reyes. The projects are centered on artist and audience participation and visitors are encouraged to experience the Museum’s spaces and collections in new ways.

The Art and Social Practice MFA program encourages students to develop and utilize their artistic skills to engage in society. Social practice might appear to be more like sociology, anthropology, social work, journalism, or environmentalism than art, yet it retains the intention of creating significance and appreciation for audiences in a similar way to more conventional art. Students learn about a variety of working artists and non-artists who have engaged in civic activity, and apply their knowledge and abilities to initiate, develop, and complete projects with the public—individuals, groups, and institutions. 

Outdoors in the museum's sculpture court for Shine A Light, local bands Atole, Tu Fawning and E*Rock, will play throughout the day including a demonstration of printmaking at a mobile print factory and sample specially made beer brewed to complement individual museum objects for the event by Old Lompoc, Laurelwood and Lucky Lab.

Inside, projects located throughout the Museum include “Learn to Count in Mon”, a project to save endangered languages, a break-dancing display, musicians, including Mirah, Joe Preston of the Thrones, Honey Owens of Valet, Christopher Doulgeris of Hooliganship, Alex Guy, Drew Slum, and Blacque Butterfly serenading select works of art, “Stranger Moments”, a roving theatrical tour of the Museum employees’ interactions in the galleries with strangers, video installations from the Northwest Film Center and much more.

Tickets are $12, the regular museum admission price.

The Portland Art Museum, at least when I've visited it, has often been surprisingly yet frustratingly empty. Maybe it's not the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but I find it a hugely enjoyable exercise to peruse the many exquisite works, something too many people don't do. Maybe that's in part because of the admission price. At the Met, by contrast, you can pay a suggested donation price. I wish PAM could commit to more regular free-admission days as well.

All of which makes checking out Shine A Light worthwhile, as does the involvement of Fletcher's class, which has increasingly made Portland State an engaging presence in the city.

Comments

[yoda]

this house looks odd, seems like it might function better as a table. where is the sustainability, . . .the horror?

[K]

The Portland Art Museum offers free admission every second Friday after 5pm. IN this Economy no art institution is in the position to be free. Give the Museum a Break.It's this kind of event that shows that they're trying to open their doors to a wider audience. Kudos to Portland Art Museum!