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The one thing that New Yorkers like more than talking about Portland might be talking about Portlanders talking about New Yorkers.
The New York Times just wrote about Paige Powell's new exhibit at the Portland Art Museum, writing, "Powell arrived in New York in 1980 from the Pacific Northwest, looking like a granola version of Edie Sedgwick."
The first time Paige Powell went to New York City, she got picked up by Andy Warhol to work for his Interview magazine. She was an anomaly then.
"They were interested in me because no one there had been to Portland or met anyone from Portland. I was a fascinating creature to them. They needed an ad salesperson, and I told them that when I worked at the Washington Park Zoo [now the Oregon Zoo] in the chimp enrichment program, we'd been very successful selling elephant dung for fertilizer. They figured that if I could sell dung, I could sell ads for Interview."
Over the next decade, Powell photographed Warhol and his inner circle at intimate dinner parties and dated Jean-Michel Basquiat. Then she packed away the footage and prints for decades.
The Ride and Beulah Land, which opened last Thursday at PAM, was our Visual Arts pick in WW's 2015 Fall Arts Guide. In it, Powell debuts footage of everyday Warhol at his studio, large prints of Basquiat in true renegade form and a closet-sized nook lined completely with her snapshots of New York City in the 1980s.
As the Times pointed out, "Powell returned to Portland in the '90s to focus on animal rights advocacy work." Welcome back to the Northwest.
GO: Paige Powell's The Ride is at Portland Art Museum, 1219 SW Park Ave. Through Feb 21.
Willamette Week