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Portland, OR — Visitors of all ages are invited to a free Community Day program at the Oregon Historical Society on Saturday, September 14, highlighting the current exhibition, A Fountain of Creativity: Oregon’s 20th Century Artists and the Legacy of Arlene Schnitzer.
Presented in partnership with the Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC), this program will feature book-making demos and the opportunity for visitors to make their own pocket notebooks to capture their thoughts about the works of arts on display in the exhibition. Participants will come away with an understanding of the tools required for softcover bookbinding and will have the opportunity to learn how to create a softcover book with a pamphlet stitch, a folded zine, and the option to create saddle-stapled notebooks.
This workshop is presented by Harper Quinn, part of the staff leadership collective at the IPRC. She works in collage and print and is the author of Coolth, a full-length collection of poetry, as well as the chapbooks Unnaysayer and Thrownness, a collaboration with artist Jillian Barthold.
This is a family-friendly activity appropriate for a range of ages and abilities that will be available from noon to 4pm. Admission to OHS is free all Saturday; museum hours are 10am to 5pm.
This community program was designed to give visitors an opportunity to have a tactile experience with art while also considering the history of art and artists in Portland that is explored in A Fountain of Creativity. During the early twentieth century, the arts community in Oregon was small, isolated, and offered few opportunities for artists to exhibit and sell their work. While the Portland community valued public engagement with arts and culture, local artists were isolated from the wider national art community due to a lack of commercial gallery space to show and sell their work.
Decades later in 1961, Arlene Schnitzer, along with her mother Helen Director and friend Edna Brigham, started the Fountain Gallery. The commercial art gallery, named after its location near the Skidmore Fountain, became a hub for Pacific Northwest modern artists and helped raise the status of the Portland art scene.
Arlene Schnitzer was quoted as saying “a city without an art community has no soul.” Honoring her legacy and influence on the history of Portland, A Fountain of Creativity features a range of bold, evocative, and influential works created by Pacific Northwest artists from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation — many on public display for the first time.
The first part of this two-part exhibition will run through January 2, 2025, and features artworks from 1915 into the early 1960s with cultural and historical context on the Pacific Northwest arts scene prior to the opening of the Fountain Gallery in 1961. The second part, on view from November 1, 2024, through May 4, 2025, will highlight many of the artists who worked closely with Arlene Schnitzer throughout the Fountain Gallery’s 25 years supporting the local arts scene.
“Art gives you a different perspective on history,” says OHS Curator of Exhibitions Megan Lallier-Barron, “People’s lived experiences at a point in time are captured and preserved in art and allow us a means for reflection and interpretation in the present.”
DOWNLOAD PRESS KIT: https://bit.ly/fountainofcreativity
About the Oregon Historical Society
For 125 years, the Oregon Historical Society has served as the state’s collective memory, preserving a vast collection of objects, photographs, maps, manuscript materials, books, films, and oral histories. Our research library, museum, digital platforms, educational programming, and historical journal make Oregon’s history open and accessible to all.We exist because history is powerful, and because a history as deep and rich as Oregon’s cannot be contained within a single story or point of view.
About the Independent Publishing Resource Center
The IPRC is a community organization and print and publishing resource center that supports writers and artists by providing educational opportunities and access to a shared studio space equipped with publishing tools and printmaking resources suited for the creation of short-run publications including zines, chapbooks, comics, art books, prints, posters, fliers, buttons, and other print ephemera. Its mission is to provide affordable access to space, tools, and resources for creating independently published media and artwork and to build community and identity through the creation of written and visual art.
About the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation
Founded in 1997, the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation collection, one of the most notable in North America, functions as a living archive to preserve art for future generations and share it with the public through groundbreaking exhibitions, publications, and programs. Today, the Foundation has organized over 160 exhibitions and has loaned thousands of works to over 120 museums, dramatically improving access to art, especially in underserved communities.