It isn’t every day (or every ‘ennial) that one of Portland’s own singular arts figures is chosen for something like the Whitney Biennial.

But lo-and-whazzup, artist MK Guth, Chair of PNCA’s MFA program, was recently selected to join a banner list of visual arts and intermedia greats (including
Spike Lee, Coco Fusco, Robert Bechtle, Sherrie Levine, DJ Olive, Charles Long, Louise Lawler, Matt Mullican, and Oakland’s Neighborhood Public Radio, among others) at March’s big-deal event at New York’s Park Avenue Armory, as part of the affair.

Here’s the cool part, Guth will kick-off her count-down to March with a series of day-long installations at former armories across this fair land (in Portland, Boise, Atlanta, Houston, Cleveland) beginning with a live-art installation here at the Gerding Theater on Saturday, December 15, from 11 am until 7 pm.

Ties of Protection and Safe Keeping, the title of Guth’s installation, explores the image and meaning of hair and will evolve over the course of the afternoon as viewers/participants contribute text on fabric that will be woven into a Rapunzel-like “interactive braid sculpture.” Placing the work within armories, fortress like buildings designed to protect and shelter, Guth is asking visitors to become part-and-parcel of the process, strands as it were, that respond to the question, “What is worth protecting?” Whether from a political, personal, or poetic perspective the question opens up an array of responses nearly as endless as the tress the artist will tend.

The Whitney Biennial, one of the country’s most prestigious surveys of contemporary American art (as celebrated as it is controversial for its biannual anointing of emerging artists and late-career ovations for acknowledged masters, like this year’s John Baldessari) is organized this year by Henriette Huldisch and Shamim M. Momin, and overseen by Donna De Salvo, Whitney’s Chief Curator. This marks the 74th in the series of Whitney Annual and Biennial exhibitions inaugurated in 1932 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney.

Guth is the only Portland artist selected for this once every two year take on the contemporary art moment. We’re thrilled to be able to play some small part in the Biennial—and explore yet one more innovative use for this stunning building.

What a fantastic way to see art: smack-dab in the middle of the Armory, rather than on a pedestral or distanced by frame. Art that intersects with the everyday and invites a level of participation helps art make the transition from the provenance of the few to art with civically valuable, inviting disposition, ignited with an investment of shared values like openness, cooperation and community, tolerance, and respect.

This is a very exciting way for PCS to connect to a major cultural happening in New York. But moreover it speaks to the idea of reuse and the recycling of social capital… the sublime notion that buildings intended to “serve and protect” can not only make the leap from edifice to artifice—but can nurture and give voice to new sets of community values along the way.

Following the artist’s installation here at the Gerding Theater on Saturday, December 15 (beginning at 11 am) Guth will travel on, braiding as she goes to:
Boise Art Museum (December 29)
Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (January
DiverseWorks in Houston (January 11)
Cleveland Institute of Art (January 16)

Stop by. Have your say–see it become part of art history. ‘Tis the season for many things and one of them is root-checking “what is worth protecting.”