Portland in Three Centuries: The Place and the People

Artists

155 Artists Portland in the generation after World War II was a long way from national centers of art and culture. Its art museum had scored a coup in 1913 as the only venue outside New York to display selections from the famous Armory Show that had introduced Americans to modern art, but its permanent collections were thin. The city had no literary outlets with New York connections, no coteries of competitive collectors, no throngs of newly minted millionaires looking to make a big splash with flashy donations. Portland was not a San Francisco or Paris that attracted ambitious newcomers who wanted to make their cultural mark on a big stage. Nevertheless, during the years of social and political transformation after the mid-20th century, Portland developed a vibrant local arts scene, often with individuals who arrived for mundane reasons like jobs and family and stayed to become mainstays of local culture. The preferred style of Portland’s midcentury artists resonated with the city’s emerging grassroots political culture. Key figures earned national and international reputations, but they spread their influence locally as teachers and mentors. Writers and visual artists remained rooted and connected to the city and region—provincials in the most positive sense of creative individuals deeply engaged with their community, city, and region. Poet William Stafford (1914–93) exemplifies the Portland style. He grew up in Kansas, served as a conscientious objector during World War II (the subject of his first book), and accepted an offer to teach at Lewis and Clark College in 1948. He spent some years in the mid-1950s earning a PhD from the University of Iowa and filling one-year jobs at other colleges, but he returned permanently to Portland in 1957. The first of his dozens of books of poetry appeared in 1960. Traveling Through the Dark, his second book, won the National Book Award in 1963. The ambiance of northwestern Oregon suffused his work, whether in a quiet meditation like “Camping at Lost Lake” or his masterly commentary on worldly ambition in “My Party the Rain.” Ursula Le Guin (b. 1929) spent the first three decades of her life in places far more sophisticated than Portland (Berkeley, Boston, New York, Paris), and came to the Northwest in 1958 only because her husband, Charles, took a position in the History Department at Portland State College. Her base of operations was a basement desk in their Willamette Heights house, shaded by tall trees, shadowed by Forest Park, and misted by northwestern clouds. She made her first sales in 1962 and published her breakthrough novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, in 1969, followed in the 1970s by The Lathe of Heaven, 156 portland in three centuries The Dispossessed, and the first of the Earthsea books. Her work spans genres— science fiction, magical realism, fantasy, historical fiction, poetry, criticism. In the 1970s and 1980s she was an active workshop teacher and mentor to other fine local writers like Molly Gloss. The Lathe of Heaven is her only novel set explicitly (and fantastically) in Portland, but the regional landscape pervades her work—the Oregon high desert in The Tombs of Atuan, the damp Oregon coast in Searoad, and the islands and fjords of the Salish Sea in some of the Earthsea tales. Portland may have been an even greater stretch for Michele (Mike) Russo. Raised in Italy and New England, Russo (1909–2004) arrived in Portland with a BFA from Yale and a job at the school of Portland Museum Art School (now the Pacific Northwest College of Art). He taught there until 1974 and co-founded the Portland Center for the Visual Arts in 1973. Along with colleagues like Mel Katz and Manuel Izquierdo, he introduced generations of students and other Portlanders to contemporary trends in the visual arts. In a 1983 interview available from the Smithsonian Institute Archives of American Art, Russo commented on his adopted home: “I love this region . . . I think I have a kind of idealism which I see in the region . . . I see it in the environment, and I see it in the people. And so I feel a very strong regional identification.” Russo, Le Guin, and Stafford marked a transition. They were neither gifted dilettantes like C. E. S. Wood nor local-color specialists like writer Stewart Holbrook (1893–1964). Instead, they worked for national and international audiences without losing their connection to Portland, and they paved the way for younger artists. Filmmaker Gus Van Sant, who had...