If you’ve been feeling like the lines are blurring between the America you imagined and the America we all live with, take a listen. We found some incredible artists and writer addressing the magical thinking, fantasies, and illusions that shaped our world.
This week, we’re diving into the "State of Wonder" archives for one of our favorite guest curators. Corin Tucker spent 12 years in the iconic Northwest band Sleater-Kinney. We asked Corin to look back at the Sleater-Kinney catalog with us, and think about what's changed since she moved from Olympia down to Portland in 1996.
This week we’re handing over the keys for State of Wonder to local musician and small business owner Fabi Reyna. She's the creator of the guitar magazine "She Shreds."
In this week's rebroadcast, we welcome user experience (UX) designer Elena Moon as our guest curator. She has this fantastic way of explaining what works and why. She’s going to lead us through her own work and the designed world, from parking meters to space ships.
Every person who makes something, anything, it doesn’t even have to be particularly artsy, there comes this moment of like, all right, you got this idea, but you have to get it done
Virtual reality may not quite be the tech that all the kids are doing these day, but there are entire communities interacting as we speak in VR worlds. This week, we hear about an 87 year old drag queen is the subject of a new VR narrative documentary, gearheads using VR to learn how to dismantle a car transmission - while the transmission is still running, and the fantastic UX designer Crystal Rutland talks about using VR in her firm’s practice.
The firebrand music critic has a new memoir, chronicling the formative time she spent in a gentrifying Chicago in the mid 2000's.
What is it with humanity, anyway? Seems like, since the beginning of time, we have just been waiting for it to all fall apart. (seriously, how many sci-fi books have you read set in a time of global peace and infinite resources?) And how is it that the best futurists can extrapolate an entire world from just one concept? Listen in as we explore future-tense ideas on technology, the way we treat each other, the way we view ourselves and our environment.
This week, artists whose work — and sometimes even their mere existence— have caused a kind of social friction. In an awesome way. You’ll hear from prolific drummer and polymath Madame Gandhi, actor/director/writer John Cameron Mitchell, musician Black Belt Eagle Scout. Also, the story composer Gabriel Kahane's groundbreaking composition for the Oregon Symphony.
Not so easy keeping up with this week’s guest curator, Rebecca Gates. But fun? You bet. First, there’s her recording career, both in the Spinanes and as a solo artist. (if you haven’t checked out 2012’s The Float, you need to do that) A few years ago, she began a journey into music advocacy, exploring revenue for artists and other messy areas of the post-milennial music industry. She also has a foot in the contemporary art world, through her consulting work and practice in sonic art. This week s...
We’re exploring those connections between art, food, culture, ancestral lands and how it all fuses and fits and makes up who we are. Michelle Zauner of the band Japanese Breakfast talks about her powerful essay in the New Yorker about crying in Asian grocery stores. Artist Demian DinéYahzi shares a poem about survival. Stacey Tran invites us to her storytelling series in which women and femmes of color tell stories about culture, through a potluck-style meal, and the Last Artful, Dodgr talks abo...
What exactly is art supposed to do about the state of the world in 2018? Carry a political flag? Make us forget about bad things? This week we’ve got a pile of stories for you about some of the things art can do in traumatic times. Man-of-all-bands Papi Fimbres talks about meeting the weirdness of 2018 head-on with a radical act of self-care. The hilarious and amazing comedian Caitlin Weierhauser tells us about processing a horrendous tragedy, right in the spotlight. Cult of Orpheus founder Chri...
Come explore — this week, Centennial Mills, the 107-year old site of an old flour mill, gets the treatment from conceptual artist Anne Hamilton, social practice originator Harrell Fletcher and friends create a contemporary art museum inside a K-8 school, writer Cindy Baldwin interrogates parenting with a chronic illness, plus music from Jessica Hernandez and the late, great Richard Swift.
It has been a devastating summer for students and staff at two Oregon that helped thousands of creative Oregonians to find their calling. The Art Institute of Portland and Marylhurst University are two very different schools, but they're both succumbing to big challenges facing all universities. We get the details, then talk to reporter Rick Seltzer of Inside Higher Ed.
Fill up the cooler and buckle up! We are getting you all set up for your weekend summer road trip — lots of great music to keep you moving, including pillow talk with the R&B singer Blossom and MC Ripley Snell. They’ll invite us inside the dreamy world they created for their new EP. We've also got a session with one of our favorite breakout acts of 2018, singer-songwriter Haley Heyndrickx — luminous, wise, and winsome. And we’ll tell some stories about how we get where we’re going, both ON t...
This time we live in is a feast of audio storytelling. You can find a podcast for any interest — from Harry Potter to stories of death-defying survival — and it turns out Oregon is a hotbed of homemade shows. We’re taking this as an opportunity to talk to them about their shows and to spotlight some more of our favorites made in Oregon:
We gathered some of Portland’s brightest minds at the creative event space the Nightwood to ask: What would buildings designed by and for women look like? Developer Anyeleh Hallová of project^ and Amy Donohue, a principal with Bora Architects talk us through big picture issues. And we check out a couple of case studies: Alicia McVey and Maren Elliott of Swift Agency join us for a look inside their headquarters — a study in transformative design. Rose Ojeda, Director of Housing Development for Ha...
This week on “State of Wonder,” some of the Northwest’s most prominent writers come together to share stories and memories of the man the “New Yorker” called “the Portland sage,” Brian Doyle, who died in 2017 at the age of 60. We hear readings and tributes by David James Duncan, Robert Michale Pyle, Kathleen Dean Moore, and others.
This week's show is guest curated by Victor Maldonado.. An interdisciplinary artist who works in paint, as well as more ephemeral mediums, he also teaches at PNCA in Portland. We talk with Victor about what shaped his life and practice, from growing up crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, to finding an invisible college of peers to support and sustain his work, to the students who now look to him for advice on building a sustainble life in art.
Twenty years ago, Elliott Smith opened a door into a hypnotic new world. The album, “Either/Or” marks a turning point in Smith’s transition from Portland rock journeyman to international star. We sat down with Smith’s friends, peers, and a live studio audience in 2017 to talk about “Either/Or” and Smith’s legacy.
If you’re sitting in a dark room with a cattle rancher, a fish biologist and an English professor, watching a sci-fi film shot on a $200,000 budget, chances are good you're at the Eastern Oregon Film Festival. Filmmakers come from all over the country to share their work, listen to Northwest bands, and learn to throw hatchets at artists' brunches — a combination that has landed it on the list of the world's coolest film fests in "MovieMaker Magazine" multiple times. The little fest is playing ou...
On the eve of a grand literary celebration, we remember the life, writing, and transformative thinking of an Oregon literary titan.
Tanya Barfield grew up in Portland and first caught the theater bug from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. But even though her plays have been performed around the country and got her nominated for a Pulitzer, they had never been staged in Portland until 2016. That year, we spent an hour getting to know Barfield’s work and exploring her ideas. Dive in with us!
Pulitzer Prize winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen on refugee families and walking in his mom and dad’s shoes. We’ve also got reading recommendations from people whose professional lives let them spend long, uninterrupted, stretches of time between the covers. And we hear an acoustic set with a London-based singer-songwriter who slows down to really look life with a Dylanesque clarity.
This week we turn our face toward the void with one of Oregon's great painters, the band Typhoon, a mother and son who share a unique creative language, and a new play that explores a new dimension to urban displacement.
Do we sound a little verklempt this week? Our show is full of fond farewells, from Paul Simon's goodbye tour to our own producer Aaron Scott's departure for green Field Guide pastures. But it's not all tears. Before Aaron goes, he'll tell what he’s learned reporting on arts for the better part of a decade. We also chirp with the writer who followed Paul Simon’s life story, and mix it up with one of the top practitioners of pop criticism working today. Reconsidered: Johnny Cash's "At Folsom Priso...
Had enough of the status quo? This week’s wonders are shaking it up: the greatest modern artist who ever called Portland home, a director who set the bar higher, two friends turning fan-favorite songs upside down, and ladies calling time’s up on tech. Painfully Honest Job Descriptions for Women in Tech — 1:15 Backfence PDX is about to welcome some storytellers from the tech world to the MainStage for an evening of home truths on May 12. #MeToo isn’t just limited to Silicon Valley. We heard about...
Today on "State of Wonder," we talk finalists for the Oregon Book Awards in fiction, poetry, graphic literature, and more. "Strange the Dreamer" with Laini Taylor — 1:42 Laini Taylor possesses an epic imagination. In her best-selling “Daughter of Smoke and Bone” series, she dreamed up a world where a girl who has a monster as a foster parent gets caught up in an epic war with not-so-benevolent angels. And now she is starting a new series with “Strange the Dreamer,” the story of a day-dreaming li...
We went live this week for Design Week Portland at the hottest new event space in Northeast Portland: the Nightwood. And we invited some exciting people in architecture and development to talk about homes and work spaces designed by women. Sit back for a deep-dive at the big-picture issues shaping the built environment. [slideshow: design-week-at-the-nightwood-society,left,5ada733e9245030158d5cd95] Cultivating Creative Space at the Nightwood - 1:55 Michelle Battista is the founder of the Nightwo...
This week on "State of Wonder," Soul'd Out sues Cochella, three native playwrights soar at Oregon's biggest theaters, poet Shayla Lawson's love letter to Frank Ocean, and the quiet heartache of Black Belt Eagle Scout. Soul'd Out Festival Sues Coachella A David and Goliath showdown might soon come to a federal courtroom near you. This week, Portland’s homegrown Soul’d Out Music Festival filed a suit against one of the west coast’s giants: the Coachella Festival in Indio California and its affilia...
