For this Thursday's new installment of the Designs on Portland series at Design Within Reach, I will be interviewing Pacific Northwest College of Art president Tom Manley - or, to be more official about it, Dr. Thomas Manley. Either way, as leader of PNCA since 2003, he has helped make the school Portland's intellectual nerve center. PNCA is today a place not just where students learn about painting, drawing, sculpture or other traditional artistic media, but also a place for countless exchanges, discussions and events surrounding a wide cross section of art, culture and design. PNCA has also done a great job of connecting its educational offerings to opportunities in other cities around the world.
I first met Manley four years ago while working on a story about a new exterior paint job for the school, fashioned by designer Randy Higgins, that is a mathematical, geometrical language that expresses the text of a Rimbaud poem. It was an excellent example of how the school would in the ensuing years continually exhibit dynamic thining as it applies to education, culture and even city building.
In the ensuing years, I've covered serveral different events and undertakings at PNCA, from the Tokyo Flow conference that brought creative minds from Tokyo and Portland together to a host of visual art exhibits to an ambitious campaign to expand the school's physical presence with the historic 511 Broadway building and, more recently, acquisition of the Museum of Contemporary Craft. PNCA began about a century ago as part of the Portland Art Museum. Much of that history was respectable but somewhat quiet. Since the turn of the 21st century, and Manley's arrival, PNCA has begun to roar with life and have a hugely significant impact on Portland's burgeoning culture of creativity and design.
PNCA is also a great center of activity for the Pearl District. This neighborhood can no longer be called a place of merely condos, trendy restaurants or even galleries and furniture stores. As its campus branches out, not only with 511 and the MCC but also the inclusion of student housing and integrated graduate study programs involving other schools like the Oregon College of Art & Craft (through a joint degree program), PNCA's influence and importance, both to the Pearl and Portland proper, will only incease. And while that has been a collaborative effort at PNCA inolving a lot of faculty and board members and students as well as collaborators like architect Brad Cloepfil and Wieden + Kennedy executive creative director John Jay, Manley unquestionably deserves ample credit for taking PNCA to a new sphere of influence and interest.
Design Within Reach, host for our discussion, is located at 1200 NW Everett Street, on the ground floor of the Wieden + Kennedy building. Doors open at 6PM with the discussion beginning officially at 6:30 but actually a few minutes afterward.
Comments