September Arts

(Note: The Tribune will highlight some gallery openings and other arts happenings in the first edition of each month to coincide with First Thursday — this month, it’s Thursday, Sept. 1)

• The Portland Japanese Garden, 611 S.W. Kingston Ave., has featured some cool exhibits in recent months, even with heavy construction going on as part of the $33.5 million Cultural Crossing expansion project.

The latest is “Bending Nature,” which displays the works of artists from Portland and Japan in the ancient tradition of bending bamboo. Yes, bamboo, one of the most durable and prolific materials on Earth. The bending happens during the bamboo’s green phase, and artists can sure shape it into extraordinary things with their hands alone.

“They can weave intricate baskets with it,” says Diane Durston, the Arlene Schnitzer Curator of Culture, Art and Education at Portland Japanese Garden. “It’s a physical process and sometimes requires heating to bend it.”

The four artists are Jiro Yonezawa and Shigeo Kawashima from Japan and Charissa Brock and Anne Crumpacker from Portland. They’ve collaborated on the project as part of the garden’s “Art in the Garden” exhibition. Coincidentally, Kengo Kuma, who’s working on the Cultural Crossing project, has worked in bamboo, but he hasn’t incorporated any bamboo into the project.

Yonezawa and Kawashima have been trained in Japanese craftsmanship, particularly in functional basket weaving with bamboo, and they have branched out to make sculptures. Brock and Crumpacker were educated in the United States and chose bamboo as their art form.

“We thought it would be very interesting pairing the Eastern and Western artists using the same material and doing sculptures outdoors at the garden,” Durston says.

The garden had large bamboo poles shipped from Georgia — a state with a bamboo industry — and the Japanese artists created their works on site. There were volunteers who helped; Kawashima built a large arch bridge form that looks over the city and had help from several volunteers.

The work is displayed at three locations in the garden, through Oct. 16.

• The Froelick Gallery, 714 N.W. Davis St., continues to honor the memory of Rick Bartow, who died in April. The latest exhibit, “Sparrow Song,” continues until Oct. 1, and there’ll be a First Thursday opening until 8 p.m. Charles Froelick will guide an exhibition tour and discuss the history of working with Bartow, 11 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 17. Bartow made paintings, drawings, prints and sculpture. Bartow’s traveling retrospective exhibit “Rick Bartow: Things You Know But Cannot Explain” continues showing until Dec. 31, 2018; the works will not be available to purchase until 2019. For more: www.froelickgallery.com.

• “The Soul of Black Art: A Collector’s View” is curated by collector John Goodwin for Upfor’s third anniversary exhibition. It includes work from his and Michael-Jay Robinson’s collection in conversation with work selected for the occasion. A description: “Briefly surveying changes in depiction of black culture in America over the last 100 years, the exhibition begins with abstract expressionist collage depicting economic strife in Goodwin’s home state of North Carolina, and extends to a young physician/photographer of black/Korean descent who captures powerful and poignant images of today’s black culture.” It starts with a First Thursday opening at 6 p.m. and goes through Oct. 15. Upfor is located at 929 N.W. Flanders St.; for more, see www.upforgallery.com.

• The Center for Contemporary Art & Culture at Pacific Northwest College of Art, 511 N.W. Broadway presents “Roy Tomlinson: ReMap,” beginning First Thursday and going through Sept. 22. It’s an exhibition of large-scale installation and a series of process-driven works on paper and will feature a fabricated 12-foot-by-16-foot light-sealed room that will be illuminated only by the viewer with a self-activated flash. It’s inspired by Tomlinson’s interests in the nature of perception, physics and Buddhist psychology. For more: www.ocac.pnca.edu.

• The Butters Gallery, 157 N.E. Grand Ave., features the paintings of Andrea Schwartz-Feit, “What I Saw. How It Was.” It’s the seventh solo exhibition at Butters by Schwartz-Feit, who has been showing there since 1999. It starts with a First Thursday opening at 6 p.m. and includes an artists talk (with Schwartz-Feit and Eric Boyer) at 1 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 17, and goes through the end of the month. For more: www.buttersgallery.com.

• For info on galleries: First Thursday, www.firstthursdayportland.com; Portland Art Dealers Association, www.padaoregon.org.

— Jason Vondersmith