June 2020 Newsletter

The Third Way

Dear Friends of Cerimon House,

The board and staff of Cerimon House recognize the systemic racism and continued violence against communities of color made manifest in the recent deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and so many others over generations. Seeing our Portland community, and the nation we love, struggling with the continued tragic fallout of centuries of racism while simultaneously being imperiled by a global pandemic is deeply troubling. Our Diversity & Inclusion Statement (printed in full below and found on our Web Site home page) is now, even more than when it was adopted by the board many years ago, important to reflect and act upon. Each of us must do more to ensure we are carrying into action the aspirations of this statement.

While Covid-19 keeps us apart, and we see division fomented in our streets, more than ever, we all crave connection. As part of this, we hunger for the inspiration, conversation, and joy provided by our most valued poets, musicians, dancers, visual artists, and storytellers.

But artists can’t do this well from home. And they still cannot do it safely in public.

We need a third way.

Cerimon House is building that third way. Our huge main hall, with facilities that allow a small group of people to perform safely, is now a platform for small groups to perform high-quality events, and have them captured on video for live streams and evergreen concert videos.

Cerimon House is proud to announce its inaugural event for June 12, with a trio performance by three top Portland jazz artists: Tom Grant on piano, Ron Steen on drums, and Perry Thoorsell on bass. This threshold event is foremost a live stream produced in partnership with Artslandia, a Portland institution and woman-owned business supporting the arts with stories and services. Cerimon House will also produce a full concert video for you — and thousands of others — to enjoy for years to come. These videos will help sustain the musicians — and will inspire us all.

Cerimon House’s commitment to creating sustainable arts communities still persists, in a time of pandemic and unrest, because we are committed to a new normal: a third way to elevate the voices and talents of our community’s artists.

Ticket information at this link

Be Well,

Will Patton
Chair, Cerimon House

PS Join us! Support the artists, the community and our third way! We are excited to let you know that this month Cerimon House has received a Paycheck Protection Program loan from the Federal Government and our friends at Umpqua Bank, as well as a generous grant from Oregon Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities as part of the 2020 Coroanvirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act of 2020. The loan and grant are wonderful news, but we still need your support more than ever. Please show your support and donate today.

DONATE

Cerimon House's DIVERSITY & INCLUSION STATEMENT

As a Humanities organization, Cerimon House believes that the diversity & inclusion of our community is a fundamental strength of our region. Our mission is best fulfilled when we embrace diversity & inclusion as a value and a practice. We also recognize that various groups of people over time have faced barriers of exclusion, and that the effects of this exclusion is perpetuated today through current conventions and institutions, as well as in the current advantages and disadvantages that individuals experience in their daily lives. This pattern extends to involvement in the cultural arts and the humanities. We maintain that achieving diversity requires an enduring commitment to inclusion that must find full expression in our organizational culture, values, norms, and behaviors. Inclusion requires more than avoiding discrimination; it also involves taking affirmative steps to include previously excluded populations in all aspects of the organization, from leadership to audiences. In addition, Cerimon House will not tolerate nor condone discrimination due to age, race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, veteran status, or disability. We aspire to make inclusion a daily practice, and diversity a core and abiding strength of our mission.

Introducting our new offerings from Third Way Productions, inside Cerimon House

A Socially Distant Tour of Cerimon House's new Third Way Production Studio offerings. Featuring Billie Eidson and Tom Grant

Meet Our Board Member, Keith Pitt

Keith Pitt has been a Board member since 2013. Mr. Pitt is a partner at the Portland law firm of Slinde Nelson Stanford, where his practice focuses on general civil litigation and business transactions. Keith is licensed to practice law in Oregon, Washington, and California. He holds degrees from the University of Oregon (1992, B.A., English), and the University of California at Berkeley School of Law (1997, J.D.).

Keith is active in the community, recently completing three-terms (2007-2016) as the Presiding Officer (a volunteer position) for the City of Portland Civil Service Board. He also served on the Board of Directors for Third Rail Repertory Theatre (2005-2008). Keith resides in the Irvington Historic District of Portland, Oregon with his wife, Stephanie, and their daughter Stella. He recently completed the construction of an Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) at his residence, along with his mother, Sharon Nielson, and enjoys living at the property as a multi-generational family.

We appreciate Keith's passionate heart and dedication to the cultural arts and humanities. He is always a strong leader when we meet a challenge, guiding us to consider finding the Third Way solution. Please join us by saying thank you to Keith for his seven years of service to Cerimon House. We are so grateful for you Mr Pitt!

The Third Way: Socially Distant but Deeply Connected. Our first socially distant event with poet and musician Aaron Spriggs was a huge success and we loved having his energy inside the building after such a long period of quiet. Laura Lo Forti from Vanport stopped by to get a photo afterwards. We were so honored to offer the Vanport Mosaic Festival a Third Way to offer a performance platform to Aaron.

We want to thank all of the staff and volunteers at Vanport Mosaic for curating such a powerful festival. We were blown away by everything we watched. You can still see much of the content on their website and Facebook pages. Please support the artists, storytellers, organizations and participants as much as you can. We'd also like to thank Open Signal, we had a great time working with them on this project and we look forward to working with them more in the future.

VANPORT MOSAIC FESTIVAL 2020 - May 8- 30

A Season of Hope, Imagination and Possibility

Curated by Story Midwife Laura Lo Forti

www.vanportmosaic.org

“What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? What if our America is not dead, but a country that is waiting to be born?...”- civil rights lawyer and Sikh interfaith leader – Valarie Kaur

For the past five years, the Vanport Mosaic Festival has engaged hundreds of people in extremely rich programming of memory activism opportunities over a two-week period. Through oral history screenings, live storytelling, poetry, music and theater performances, tours, art exhibits and dialogues, we have amplified the personal experience of individuals and communities impacted by the long-endured inequalities across American economic, social, and civic systems.

Started as an effort to commemorate the little-known history of Vanport, a multi-racial temporary city in Oregon destroyed by a flood on Memorial Day 1948, the Festival (and the Vanport Mosaic organization) is rooted in lessons shared by the Vanport survivors, collected as a participatory oral history project since 2014 and preserved as a living archive. For a taste of this beautiful and collaborative exploration of silenced histories, and collective celebration of community strength and resilience, we invite you to watch the short documentaries: Legacy of A Forgotten City - The Vanport Mosaic Festival 2017: https://vimeo.com/254799611 And A Call For Memory Activism: The Vanport Mosaic Festival 2018 https://vimeo.com/304067047

In an effort to prevent the spread of the virus, we join the countless organizations who canceled or postponed their events. Yet, the story of Vanport and the many other silenced histories that surround us are more critical than ever. Who is accounted for and who is not in time of crisis? What are the lessons of resilience and solidarity that can inform how we respond to today's crisis as a city, as community and as individuals? How do we sustain hope and resilience in these challenging times?

The Spirit of Vanport lives on through a virtual season of hope, imagination and solidarity.

The Festival events in the physical space are canceled, but what we are not going to cancel is the opportunity to amplify critical perspectives, especially at the time when we need them the most to imagine and work towards a “new normal” rooted in justice and social solidarity. We will not cancel our annual commemoration of the Vanport flood nor the celebration of our artistic and cultural gifts to each other. In this moment of scarcity, we can still generate financial support for our collective of artists, historians, media makers, cultural organizers and activists who year after year co-create and expand on our rich mosaic.

We will invite “attendees” to contribute to a fundraising campaign that will be equally split among each Festival contributor. Those who are in a position to forgo their portion will leave it in the collective fund as a gesture of solidarity to those among us who are struggling the most.

The Festival 2020 as originally planned meant to explore the critical question: Who gets to be American? What does it mean to be an American today? More than ever, we need to reckon with the gap between our ideals and our reality. And more than ever we need to gather around our stories in their complexities and contradictions, and together write a new chapter where we all belong and thrive.

Please visit the Vanport Mosaic Website and Facebook Page for program schedules and individual festival event details.

This multi-disciplinary event was awarded the Oregon Heritage Excellence Award, the Spirit of Portland Award by City Commissioner Nick Fish, and the Columbia Slough Watershed Council’s Achievement Award.

The Virtual Vanport Mosaic Festival is made possible by the generous support of:

MCDD

Office of Community and Civic Life

Regional Arts and Culture Council

Oregon Cultural Trust

And the collaboration of: Cerimon House, Open Signal, and CymaSpace

ABOUT THE VANPORT MOSAIC
In these times of dangerous collective historical and cultural amnesia, remembering is an act of resistance. The Vanport Mosaic is a memory activism platform that amplifies, honors, presents and preserves the many silenced histories that surround us in order to understand the present and create a future where we all belong--

ABOUT VANPORT

Vanport, between Portland and Vancouver, was built in 110 days in 1942 to accommodate the influx of wartime shipyard workers, becoming the second largest city in Oregon. More than 100,000 people called the community home between 1942-1948, including 6,000 African Americans -- three times as many as had lived in all of Portland two years before. Vanport was also home to returning World War II veterans, returning Japanese internees and Vanport College, which became Portland State University. On Memorial Day in 1948, a flood wiped out the entire city within a matter of hours, displacing over 18,500 residents -- one-third of them Black. This tragedy forced the overwhelmingly homogeneous city of Portland, and the state of Oregon, down the path toward interracial progress.