Oregon College Of Arts And Crafts

Your Opportunities

AUDITIONS

CSD Summer STAGES program seeks “Once on This Island” cast — Auditions will be held from 3 to 5 p.m. Wednesday, June 29, at the Main Stage Theater (Buchanan Avenue entrance), Corvallis High School, 1400 N.W. Buchanan Ave., Corvallis. “Island” is a theatrical Caribbean adaptation of the popular fairy tale “The Little Mermaid.” Auditions are open to all, and it is suggested that participants have some performance experience in music, theater or dance. Please come prepared to sing 16 bars of music with an accompanist (bring your own sheet music) and be prepared to learn a short dance piece. For more on the show and to listen to the soundtrack, go online to www.mtishows.com/show_detail.asp?showid=000135. Information/questions: Elizabeth Wyatt, elizabeth.wyatt@corvallis.k12.or.us .

Cottage Theatre needs a “Lobby Hero” — Cottage Theatre will hold auditions for its production of Kenneth Lonergan’s gritty and funny crime drama, “Lobby Hero,” at 1 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, July 9-10, at the theatre, 700 Village Drive, Cottage Grove. Roles are available for three men and one woman, and the play’s characters are all in their 20s and 30s. The Chris McVay production will run for six weekend performances, from Sept. 9-18. Information: 541-942-8001 or www.cottagetheatre.org .

CALL TO ARTISTS

Giustina Gallery seeks community art for exhibit — Submission deadline is Wednesday, June 29. Giustina Gallery is hosting a free (nonjuried) community art exhibit open to all people who live or work in Linn and Benton counties. All ages and skill levels are encouraged to participate, with a limit of one piece per person. Bring artwork and entry form to Giustina Gallery. The exhibit runs from July 5-28. Applications/information: Tina Green Price, 541-737-2402, or http://oregonstate.edu/lasells/gallery.

Giustina Gallery seeks fabric and fiber art for “Favorite Things” — Submission deadline is Thursday, June 30. In conjunction with Quilt County, “A Few of Our Favorite Things” fabric and fiber art exhibit is a juried show featuring current work of Oregon fabric and fiber artists expressing and expanding the bounds of quilting. Work accepted for exhibit will exemplify innovation in use of fabric, fiber, weaving, quilting and surface design techniques as well as excellence in artistic composition and craftsmanship. Work must have at least 50 percent fiber or fabric. The exhibit runs from Sept. 1-30. Applications/information: Tina Green Price, 541-737-2402, or http://oregonstate.edu/lasells/gallery.

Why We Need Art | The Year of Living Virtuously (Weekends Off)

, Edited by Frank McEntire and published by University of Utah Press in 2012. I am pleased to be among the writers asked to contribute to the book.

The assignment has left me no time to write a new post this week, but it reminded me of a talk I gave in 2002, a few months after 9/11, when I was asked to be the commencement speaker for the Oregon College of Art and Craft . It resonates with many of the conversations I’ve been having this week, and I thought I would share it with you.

Why We Need Art (and Why We Make Art … or We Don’t)

Commencement Address to Oregon College of Arts and Crafts

Portland, Oregon, May 2002

This ceremony comes at the completion of a great labor, of several years of study, concentration, and work, but it most fully marks a beginning, a commencement: you step across the threshold into what you hope, we all hope, will be your life’s work. Up until now your main teachers have been standing beside you, flesh and blood: your fellow students and the members of an extraordinary faculty who have mentored and nourished and provoked you, and they will continue to care about you and respond, when asked, to what you do, but your more daily teachers from here on out will be your own experience: your curiosity, commitment, perception, and, often, your frustration.

Many different things draw us all together today, but one thing we all have in common is that we not only believe but know that art matters. This is not a knowledge shared by all Americans; too often art is seen as something peripheral or dispensable: a luxury. And yet when the chips are down, when we are struggling with the deepest challenges of human existence, we turn to art to make sense of our lives. We were painfully reminded of this just a few months ago when, in the aftermath of the tragic events of September 11th, poetry immediately replaced the banal chatter of jokes and trivia on the Internet. Auden’s poem “ September 1, 1939 ,” Yeats’s “ The Second Coming “: these and so many other poems circulated among us like life-rings thrown out to the drowning. We clung to these words, distilled from previous chapters in the world’s book of horrors, and they helped make some small bit of sense out of what was literally insensible. These words from days gone by spoke to us at a moment that we were struck dumb by the present.