Russo Lee Reopens on a Painting-Filled First Thursday
Tribute to Jean Renoir by Faye Jones from Stills at Russo Lee Gallery.
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When smoke damage from a fire at a neighboring restaurant forced the art gallery Russo Lee to close this past August, the city temporarily lost one of its best places to see paintings. Most months, the gallery mounts up to three simultaneous shows, filling one of the largest galleries in town with work from an impressive roster of regional artists—not to mention the back room showcasing an archive that’s been accumulating work since the ’80s. This week, after months of costly restorations and repairs, the gallery is reopening for First Thursday. While Russo Lee isn’t strictly devoted to showing paintings, that’s often what you’ll find there, especially representational works. The gallery is reopening with two knockout shows, and it happens that representational paintings are the flavor around town this month.
At Russo Lee, Seattle artist Faye Jones is showing Stills (reception 5–8pm Feb 6; thru Mar 1), a suite of paintings devoted to “the inherent oxymoron” of movie stills, which centers a tribute pulled from Jean Renoir’s Toni. Also at Russo Lee is Recent Paintings, a collection of Portlander Roll Hardy’s moody, puddle-filled scenes of the city, which the artist stumbled on by bike. At PDX Contemporary Art, another local painter, Storm Tharp, is making a reluctant return to portraiture with Company (Feb 5–Mar 1; reception 3–5pm Feb 8). “I have maligned the portrait for years,” Thorp writes in the notes introducing this arresting and coolly luminescent show. And at Elizabeth Leach Gallery, yet another Portland artist, Derek Franklin, is slowing down the warp speed of everyday life, so a viewer might look a little closer (there’s an ice cream cone in one painting!), by adding a few words while translating the French proverb “entre chien et loup” with Between the Time of the Dog and the Wolf (reception 5:30–7pm Feb 6; thru Mar 1).
More Things to Do This Week
design Eyes and Ears
5–8pm Thu, Feb 6; thru Apr 3 | The Center for Contemporary Art & Culture at PNCA, FREE
Designer Bijan Berahimi, of Portland studio Fisk, has worked on album art, packaging designs, and posters for the likes of Clairo, Aminé, Raveena, and Toro y Moi. But all too often that work is swept into the internet’s vortex: fawned over on IG for a few days then relegated to life as a tiny square on Spotify. To slow the storm, Berahimi partnered with the Pacific Northwest College of Art to curate, with cocurators Noah Porter and Kristin Rogers Brown, Eyes and Ears, an exhibition of vinyl packaging, music videos, photography, and posters made by a dozen creatives over the past four years for albums by Aminé, André 3000, Arooj Aftab, Charli XCX, Clairo, Chappell Roan, Dominic Fike, Kendrick Lamar, Post Malone, Sabrina Carpenter, Steve Lacy, Toro y Moi, and more.
Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo.
dance Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo
7:30pm Wed, Feb 12 | Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, $6–102
The “world’s foremost gender-skewering comic ballet company” has been parodying classical and romantic ballet numbers for 50 years now. The Trocks, as the group is known, is an all-male company that lovingly, skillfully, and with all due respect subverts the rigorous art form in drag. This show, presented by White Bird, pulls from the company’s expansive repertoire, which runs the gambit: a little Sleeping Beauty, some Don Quixote pas de deux, and the Chopin ballet blanc Les Sylphides.
music Reggie Watts
8:30pm Thu, Feb 6 | Aladdin Theater, $45
Hard to say what you’re going to get at a Reggie Watts show. As a rule, he doesn’t know either. Broadly speaking, his show is an improvised mix of looped, beatboxing music and comedy. But he also does stand-up, was famously on Comedy Bang! Bang!, and he’s a regular guy-about-town on the absurdist comedy circuit of TV shows and podcasts. Even the audiobook of Watts’s autobiography, published in 2023, features beatboxing.
What We’re Reading About Elsewhere
- Sam Korman remembers his Portland garage gallery Car Hole while introducing an art show in Stockholm. (Museum Studio)
- The Oregon Zoo’s yet-to-be-named new baby elephant. (The Oregonian)
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