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Cultural life in Yamhill County hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels of activity, but the engine is revving louder these days. People are making plans, holding rehearsals, scheduling

summer art camps. We won’t see a full-scale Aquilon Music Festival or Terroir Creative Writing Festival until probably next year, but optimism is in the air. To begin this week, a delightful

new exhibit at the Chehalem Cultural Center in Newberg addresses a question that’s been on my mind since mid-March 2020: What will artists do with this? How will they spend their time? How

will a historic, life-changing pandemic translate to the stage, page, and canvas? _From Gesture to Jester: Finding the Reality of Memory, _by Molly Van Austen and Joe Robinson, begins to

answer those questions with sketches and sculpture — work done while living the quarantine life. Robinson owns East Creek community art studio outside Willamina, where this summer he’ll host

workshops and camps that give participants a chance to fire ceramics in his 40-foot anagama wood-fired kiln. His large, beautiful pots are positioned around Chehalem’s Parrish Gallery, and

in the show notes he reflects on his art, “a process that can only be accomplished when many hands come together, a coming together that our society deeply craves as the pandemic has forced

us into isolation. “As artifacts of process and community,” he continues, “these vessels display the evidence of micro-geology driven by humans and recorded in stone through flame.” Weaving

among Robinson’s majestic ceramics is a single, 175-foot-long roll of paper on which Canby artist Van Austen used graphite and colored pencils to record, day by day, her memories and

imaginings over our pandemic year. COVID-19 wasn’t her first pandemic; she also lived through the polio epidemic of the mid-20th century. “The isolation makes me concentrate on others,” she

states in the show notes. “Each image in this long drawing is a meditation on some dear person in my life.  That brings me joy and sadness. Memories prolong life and intensify our emotions.”

Sponsor There is no right or wrong way to take it in, although if you want to go in the order she drew them, proceed left to right; or you can go Manga-style and start on the right end.

Take time to linger, because there are treasures and mysteries here: more than 120 figures, mostly human, although skeletons and cats figure into the mix. There are also a few pandemic masks

of various kinds. Best of all, look for art in the art, including portraits of famous creators, such as K_ä_the Kollwitz, Judith Leyster, and Dorothea Tanning, among others. You’ll also

find Mexican surrealist painter Frida Kahlo in the company of a gentleman who is not husband/artist Diego Rivera. It took me a few swings through to see it’s Russian revolutionary Leon

Trotsky, who visited the couple while he was on the run from Stalin’s thugs and was intimate with Kahlo. There’s plenty of time to catch the exhibit, which runs through June 18. If you’re

lucky, you might have a chance encounter with the artist herself; I’m told she regularly wanders through to add a few strokes here and there. Time, however, is running out to see local

acrylic painter Anna Tooze’s Pacific Northwest floral art, which brightens the Central Gallery through May 29. All pieces by Tooze and Robinson are for sale, and all may be viewed in an

online gallery. CHEHALEM ART WING LANDS $300,000: An update on the $5 million Performing Arts Wing project at the Chehalem Center, which in November was included among 11 arts infrastructure

projects that got a thumbs up from the Oregon Cultural Advocacy Coalition. Last week, center director Sean Andries announced the center had received matching gifts of $300,000 each from the

Marie Lamfrom Charitable Foundation and Newberg residents Nick and Kathy Tri. The center terms the gifts “a turning point.” To date, $3 million has been raised for the project, which

appears to be on schedule for completion in the spring of 2023. LIVE THEATER ON AN ACTUAL STAGE: Later this month, Gallery Players of Oregon in McMinnville will pull up the curtain on a

shortened 2021 season that will include live theater on the stage, where it belongs. I’ll have more on this next week, but for now know that Willamette Valley theater artist Lance Nuttman is

in rehearsal for the one-actor show _Novecento_, which was among the COVID casualties of the 2020 season. Tickets are on sale now. This show will go on. Sponsor