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Body blogger builds community through art

Artist in Residence

By Joseph Gallivan

The Portland Tribune, Oct 23, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009

To an outsider – which is most of us – South Waterfront can seem comically bare. What is it so far but four condo towers and a clinic? Some soggy sward. An empty train. A Japanese restaurant, a dry cleaner, a pristine bodega and a coffee shop that looks like it was designed by Franco Zeffirelli?

There is life here, however. Linda K. Johnson, a respected movement artist, can be seen on weekdays in her sawed-off orange jumpsuit. She “walks the property” creating a “movement journal.”

That means that she converts her response to whatever she encounters – a smell, a perching bird, a kayaker paddling – into a movement, which she performs as she walks. She strings the moves together, adding several more every day – and will do, for just over a year.

It’s a kind of body blogging, and for now the audience consists mostly of construction workers, whom she says have accepted her, and residents, most of whom have been in their towers a year or less.

She’s seen them wave from their balconies, and she waves back.

Last year, it dawned on this Portland-born child of a real estate agent that “this brownfield site was being transformed into the city’s first true vertical neighborhood.”

With a certain chutzpah, last fall Johnson approached the developers Homer Williams of Williams & Dame Development and Mark Edlen of Gerding Edlen Development, with the idea of creating an artist-in-residence program for the district.

As primary artist-in-residence she will create art, curate a monthly series of other artists, and produce several large events over 13 months.

The developers agreed to give Johnson and her guest artists, who change each month, a stipend and use of a 2,000-square-foot unleased retail space as a temporary studio.

“It’s interesting to get an artist’s perspective, to see things through a different pair of eyes,” says Williams, who was a driving force behind the development of the Pearl District. He’s proud of the Kenny Scharf totems on Jamison Square because they hide ugly streetcar pylons and get people talking.

Art through participation

Johnson says her work is focused on civic spaces and is designed to get people to re-see common things in their environment.

“The point of the program is to create temporary installations and performances, time-based work that is site-relevant (a stronger term than site-specific) that addresses place and community,” she explains.

She also mentions “social practices,” which is art where the public actively participates.

In other words, art that makes the viewer work.

The first monthly guest artist was composer and conceptual artist Tim DuRoche. During the month of September he worked on his project “Whyte Spaces,” recording sounds (birdsongs, playground chatter, lunchtime noises, etc.) at popular Portland places, such as the South Park Blocks farmers market, the Eastbank Esplanade and Pioneer Courthouse Square.

These are all public meeting places that are important to Portland’s sense of itself as a city.

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