Public Program

  • The City Dance of Lawrence and Anna Halprin and Where the Revolution Began
  • GRANTEE
    Randy Gragg
    GRANT YEAR
    2008

The City Dance of Lawrence and Anna Halprin, Auditorium Forecourt Fountain (Ira Keller Fountain), Portland Open Space Sequence, 2008, Portland, OR. Courtesy of Randy Gragg.

The City Dance of Lawrence and Anna Halprin and Where the Revolution Began illuminates and celebrates the generative collaboration between architect Lawrence Halprin and choreographer Anna Halprin that resulted in the "Portland Sequence" at the city’s Lovejoy Fountain, Pettygrove Park, and Forecourt Fountain. Completed between 1965 and 1971, the sequence set bold new precedents for the design of public space worldwide while sparking the renowned 1970s renaissance of downtown Portland. The City Dance, a unique combination of art, urban activism, and historic preservation, was conceived to inform the public about the Halprins' importance to Portland and to launch a new conservancy devoted to the Sequence's restoration and future application for landmark status.

Producer Randy Gragg has written on culture in the Northwest for over twenty-five years, seventeen of them as the art and architecture critic at The Oregonian, Portland's daily newspaper. He has been a catalytic champion of historic preservation projects and bold design efforts ranging from the saving of the Gordon House, Oregon's only building by Frank Lloyd Wright, to the creation of an international design competition for Portland's award-winning new aerial tram. Gragg has organized other multidisciplinary collaborative efforts, among them: Multiplied Light and Betweenness, a pair of residency programs in which designers worked with Portland's world-renowned Bullseye Glass and Columbia Wire & Iron to produce chandeliers and partitions for public and corporate spaces; and "Core Sample in which he organized over 100 independent artists to form an "arts institution for a week" to produce thirty exhibits, installations and performances city-wide, complete with educational programming and collectors' tours. After completing a 2005 Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, he is currently developing Portland Spaces, a new bimonthly city design magazine.