The First First Thursday of the Summer
In the galleries and on the streets, First Thursday is especially big this week.
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Most of Portland’s art galleries open new shows on the first Thursday of each month, and much of the Pearl District swells into a giant street fair around them. It would be unfair to say First Thursdays fell off at some point, though a renewed energy has been burbling around the happening. I don’t watch enough TikToks to know if saying things are “so back” is passé yet, but….
The street fair deal—a lollapalooza of a makers market with live music and food stalls that shuts down NW 13th Avenue between Hoyt and Kearney, which organizers call a “street gallery”—celebrates 25 years this summer. This Thursday, the first First Thursday of the summer, is the biggest of the year. In the Keen parking lot, on the corner of NW 13th and Glisan, a series of live concerts and DJ sets called the Picnic in the Pearl is the center of the party from 2 to 9pm.
It’s hard to miss the action. And while you can simply wander into whichever gallery you wind up in front of post–DJ set, here are a few notes on standouts worth plotting your night around.
- Portlander Sherrie Wolf’s new suite of oil still lifes at Russo Lee Gallery is titled Abstraction (5–7pm; on thru August 2), despite the fruit stands, fruit bowls, flowers, neck ties, shoes—the shoes are really something—being rendered in a chilly realism.
- mars ibarreche’s the ephemeral and the enduring at ILY2 (noon–6pm; on thru August 9) is a collage series that is concerned with the medium’s inherent effect; ibarreche’s fractured pieces of packaging, pulp novels, letters, and poems are ripped from context and excitingly glued in new dialogues, with much to say about the things us humans put into the world.
- PDX Contemporary Art is pulling the hits out of its flat files for a summer group show (10am–6pm; on thru August 23) that flexes the breadth of the gallery’s roster, with works by Jeffry Mitchell, Marie Watt, and more than a dozen others.
- At Stelo, a collaborative effort marrying music with visual art works to dramatize the state’s geologic history. Oregon Origins Project VI: The Birth of Cascadia (5–8pm; on thru July 12) is the latest in composer Matthew Packwood’s ongoing project, and features commissions from 10 visual artists, including James Lavadour and Sidony O’Neal.
- Taking over both of Blue Sky’s galleries, Seeing Being Seen (5–9pm; on thru August 2) is writer, editor, and designer Michelle Dunn Marsh’s personal photography archive. Her scrapbook, as it were, makes for a kind of under-the-radar blockbuster show, with works by Robert Adams, Annie Leibovitz, Mary Ellen Mark, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Carrie Mae Weems, Minor White, Edward Weston, and David Wojnarowicz, among a lot of others.
More Things to Do This Week
MUSIC Waterfront Blues Festival
FRI & SAT, JULY 4 & 5 | GOV. TOM MCCALL WATERFRONT PARK, $65+
Shrunk slightly from four to two days, the annual blues jam is moving to Waterfront Park’s bowl this year. The slightly condensed programming is a move to stock up for a yet-to-be-announced reinvention next year, organizers say—a moment of rethinking as the fest inches toward its 40th birthday. Still, the lineup isn’t lacking, with local legends LaRhonda Steele and Ural Thomas and the Pain booked. And you better believe they’re still putting on the city’s main fireworks display on the Fourth.
MOVIES Frida
4PM SUN, JULY 6 | TOMORROW THEATER, $15
The Portland Art Museum’s movie theater on SE Division Street is celebrating Frida Kahlo’s birthday (she would be 118 today) with a screening of director Julie Taymor’s 2002 biopic. Salma Hayek got an Oscar nom for starring as the Mexico City painter famous for her cutting self-portraits. Portland photographer Alexandra Gómez is hosting the screening, and will give a brief talk about self-portraiture before the movie.
MUSIC Shoshana von Blanckensee
7PM WED, JULY 9 | POWELL’S CITY OF BOOKS, FREE
After graduating high school, Hannah and Sam flee Long Island for the promised queer haven of San Francisco in the ’90s in von Blanckensee’s debut novel, Girls Girls Girls. They don’t have to hide their lesbian romance anymore, but their relationship falters as they take to stripping to make ends meet, which leads further into the world of sex work. Soon the place that was open enough for them to express their true identities grows less accommodating than they’d dreamt. Von Blanckensee will chat with Portland author Kimberly King Parsons.
Elsewhere…
- Pastel artist Pace Taylor’s “shreds of Americana, recontextualized within a decidedly queer aesthetic,” in writer Martha Daghlian’s stunning profile. (Portland Mercury)
- You can once again watch that one show about that one place, “where young people supposedly went to retire,” on Netflix. (Oregonian)
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