This week on "State of Wonder," Portland gets its first shoe festival, the Coast gets a big new music festival with Stackstock, Deer Tick gets a new acoustic sound and more.
A pair of Nike Air Force 1 sneakers sit on a shelf along the "Wall of Fame" at Index PDX, a sneaker consignment store in Chinatown, Portland.
Elayna Yussen / OPB
Sneaker Week Takes Flight - 1:30
How has no one thought of this before? Sneaker Week is a brand new celebration of the street style and informed design that put Oregon at the center of the sneaker universe. Elayna Yussen went out to meet the organizers at Portland's kicks-centric coffee shop Deadstock and Pensole Shoe Design Academy. Get out in front of this one — it's going to be a blast.
Bobbito Garcia and Stretch Armstrong, in the booth.
NPR
Hip-Hop DJ Bobbito Garcia's New Podcast - 5:32
We were out of our minds with excitement to hear Bobbito Garcia is coming for Sneaker Week. (We hear he's locked in for Kick Flicks II, on the Tuesday schedule.) He is not just the author of a couple of good books on sneaker culture and the star of EPSN's "It's the Shoes," he's also been blowing our minds all summer co-hosting the new NPR Podcast, "What's Good with Stretch and Bobbito." Garcia has reunited with DJ Stretch Armstrong for long-listens with people like Dave Chappelle, Stevie Wonder and more. We've got a bit of their conversation with Bob Boilen from NPR's All Songs Considered.
Karen Madsen chairs the board of Arts of Clark County, a volunteer group aiming to facilitate new conversations about arts venues in Vancouver and surrounding areas.
April Baer / OPB
Rethinking Arts Spaces in Vancouver and Beaverton - 10:28
It's not just you. Everyone in the metro area is traveling farther and paying more to make and experience art. This week we're checking in on efforts to create new arts centers in Vancouver and Beaverton, on the eve of a big Sept. 23 summit meeting in Clark County. Makers and arts organizations are scrambling to claim square footage amid the new building boom. There are some highly advantageous options coming down the pipeline, but also a lot of problems to get worked out along the way.
Book Readings and more of Brian Doyle's novels can be found at Powells Books here in Portland, Oregon.
Oregon Art Beat
Lasting Grace: Remembering Brian Doyle - 16:21
Friends of the late, much-missed writer Brian Doyle will gather this Thursday, Sept. 21, at First Congregational Church in Portland to read and laugh and cry and remember. The program is a who's who of Oregon literary greats: Barry Lopez, Kim Stafford, Kathleen Dean Moore, as well as friends from afar like David James Duncan. Literary Arts will record the event, and we look forward to bringing you some of the readings in weeks to come.
David Christensen / opbmusic
Ages and Ages Sings Songs for Disaster - 17:35
On Sept. 23, a brand new music festival will bring some of the region's hottest bands to one of its coolest locales: the Oregon Coast. Paying tribute to the nearby Haystack Rock, the Stackstock Music Festival in Cannon Beach is being headlined by the Decemberists' Colin Meloy, Pure Bathing Culture, and our favorite purveyor of infectious hand claps, Ages and Ages. To celebrate, we're listening back to a live session we and opbmusic recorded with them around the release of their 2016 album, "Something to Ruin." It's themes of gentrification, displacement, natural disaster, the end of civilization, and how to weather the chaos seem even more appropriate now then when it came out. You can watch the opbmusic session here.
Master printer Frank Janzen finishing up several prints for the artist James Lavadour at the Crow's Shadow Institute of the Arts.
Aaron Scott / OPB
Master Printer Frank Janzen Looks Back On 16 Years at Crow's Shadow - 27:45
Frank Janzen collaborated with Oregon's best artists for 16 years — everyone from established masters like Rick Bartow to rising stars like Samantha Wall. Now he's getting ready to hang up his spurs as the master printmaker at Crow's Shadow Institute of the Arts. Janzen shares what it's like to collaborate with creative minds and the stories behind the works that will make up Crow's Shadow's 25th Anniversary Retrospective, opening at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem this weekend.
Watt designed and conceived large scale works for her new show at PDX Contemporary, "Companion Species".
April Baer / OPB
Marie Watt Explores Comfort and Community through Blankets - 38:41
Marie Watt makes a power play with a new exhibition at PDX Contemporary. She's created big installations before, stacking blankets high to invoke tribal tradition and a place on the continuum of history, but her new work involves 20-foo-long rafts of fabric, overstitched with giant wolves and a forest of phrases invoking comfort and connection. She tells us about the sewing circles that made it happen, and the challenges of realizing ideas at such a large scale.
John McCauley and Ian O'Neil of Deer Tick performing live at OPB
opbmusic
Deer Tick Goes Acoustic - 35:06
When you're a raucous, high-energy live band known for living loud, sometimes the scariest thing you can do is slow your roll. Deer Tick turns down the volume and goes acoustic for one of their two new studio albums and tour. Here are videos of their full opbmusic session in front of a studio audience. The band swings through Portland Nov. 5.