Shine A Light
Portland Art Museum
Portland, OR
2014
Molly Sherman, Nolan Calisch and I (as part of our collaboration Public Doors and Windows) organized a distributed “book fair” that took place in various locations inside of the Portland Are Museum. There were twelve participating book organizations (one of them wasn’t an organization but instead an author, Julie Ault). Each of those participants had a “book station” in which to display and sell their books during the night of Shine A Light (an event created by the PSU Art and Social Practice Program in collaboration with PAM) and the following day. Each of the book stations (for lack of a better term) was designed and built by either a sculpture or architecture undergraduate student from Portland State University. The students consulted with the book entity that they were paired with to find out their interests and needs, while also considering formal and sculpture concerns in regards to what they want to construct. In this way the students who wouldn’t normally have access to showing their work in a museum context had the ability to do that and at the same time fulfilled a functional need. All of the students were been paid a small fee to produce the structures and were credited in the publication that went along with the event as collaborators on the project.
