Mother Foucault’s Grand Reopening | Portland Monthly
Artist Lydia Rosenberg’s installation Lamp Store, Grand Reopening launches a new gallery space above bookshop Mother Foucault’s new digs this weekend.
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The bookshop Mother Foucault’s opened in 2010, but I’d believe you if you told me it was 1910. Its teetering stacks of primarily used books (a glut of twentieth-century literature, philosophy, and criticism in translation) overwhelm a hodgepodge of shelving, and a creaky stage for readings and mess of worn rugs provide the earned, disheveled elegance of a choice Parisian bookseller. In fact, all of this came together in the spirit of owner Craig Florence’s former employer, Paris’s Shakespeare and Company. Reading series like Other People’s Poems and the occasional art gallery in the rare book room, Martha Daghlian’s Grapefruits, only add to the shop’s deep roots. All of which made news late last year that this place with such bones was moving land like a threat to the city’s bookselling cosmos.
Alas, Mother Foucault’s hauled its stacks a mere couple hundred feet away, just across SE Grand Avenue from its original storefront on Morrison, reopening this spring in a former post office that dates to 1896. Now, a new iteration of its attached gallery space is setting up shop as well—in the attic this time. The artist and writer Ido Radon is behind a new space called Society opening this weekend above the bookshop. Its inaugural show is a fittingly conceptual brain workout for a gallery sat atop a room full of thought experiments. Lydia Rosenberg’s show Lamp Store, Grand Reopening (5–7pm Saturday, June 7; thru August 9) is an art installation that is also an actual lamp store, one selling “Lamps of exceptional formal invention and wit,” per the press release.
Rosenberg, who studied at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and works in Pittsburgh today, is at work on an ongoing series of what she calls “novel-as-sculpture,” in which installations, like this here totally real lamp store, create narratives. The lamps themselves are a type of ready-made sculpture—a move to reverse the trajectory of artworks becoming commodities by instead making art from mundane commodities (the urinal, yes, that guy; you know the one; but lamps here). There is a shtick, a wink, but the germ of the idea is to comment on the dubious relationship between artists and the mercurial art market, and “every other day job, gig, and hack that artists do to get by.” Harumph! that is. And buy the lamps! I’m almost positive they’re truly for sale. Books certainly are for sale once again at Mother Foucault’s.
More Things to Do This Week
MUSIC They Might Be Giants
8PM FRI–SUN, JUNE 6–8 | McMENAMINS CRYSTAL BALLROOM, SOLD OUT
“8-piece band. 3 horns. 2 sets,” the Brooklyn-born, two-time-Grammy-winning, alt-rock and children’s band write of their current tour. Nuf said? TMBG are in town for three—sorry if you were holding your breath—sold-out shows at the Crystal. The set list is supposed to wander each night, picking from more than 85 songs in their current repertoire. And that back catalog is of course huge: There’s the Malcolm in the Middle song, the tracks for the SpongeBob musical (the one that got them a Tony nom), and you know that one about that city in Turkey.
EXTRA SPECIAL EVENTS Gays Eating the Rich in the Park
3–6PM SAT, JUNE 7 | LAURELHURST PARK, FREE
This is exactly what it sounds like. Well, figuratively. Inspired by the Seattle queer meetup Gays Eating Garlic Bread in the Park, Portland social club PDX Queer Meetup and the resistance group Rose City Indivisible organized our very own “Queer Resistance Carnival.” Flyers around town promise friendship, cornhole, a Trump piñata, and a coordinated Pedalpalooza ride led by Revolutionary Bicycle Club. All of which you might see on any odd Saturday at Laurelhurst Park, but the city’s ambient resistance to queer persecution will be especially concentrated on the park’s lawns this weekend. The group is also collecting mutual aid donations of clean clothes and shelf-stable food.
BOOKS Andrew Barton
1–4PM SUN, JUNE 8 | THE PLACE CIDER BAR, FREE
In Free Food, Portlander Andrew Barton sorts out how to bring the loosey-goosey, good-vibes hippie food he grew up eating in Eugene into the present. Through recipes and collected narrative passages, Barton also champions the book’s title slogan as a way of life, holding a Back to the Land ethos and a townie’s affinity for pre-GOOP “health foods” as North Stars. He also tapped Portland authors Jonathan Kauffman (Hippie Food) and Lola Milholland (Group Living and Other Recipes) to contribute brief essays buzzing on a similar wavelength.
Elsewhere…
- Portland writer and editor Adie B. Steckel ventures to LA for “The Year of Alice.” Coltrane, that is. (Variable West)
- Bits of Oregon lore—“lots of trees, and nothing much else”—from Cole Escola’s Tony Awards news cycle. (Oregonian)
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