My thoughts on receiving the Governor's Arts Award

Image by Jim Leisy from 2013 performance of The Territory at Chamber Music Northwest’s Summer Festival. Marilyn Keller, Darrell Grant, Hamilton Cheifetz

I’m honored and grateful to be receiving this award. I never could have imagined when I first arrived here from New York in 1997 – a young jazz pianist, starting my first University teaching job, and looking for a place to build community, – that I would be standing here more than 2 1/2 decades later, so bountifully surrounded by what I hoped to discover.

I remember how adamant I was when I first arrived that I was not an Oregonian. I was a New York jazz musician who HAPPENED to be living in Portland.

Twenty-four years later, I am ok with being called an Oregonian. More than ok. This is home, and I feel deeply grateful to have had the opportunity to create, to discover, to teach, to learn, and to serve this community.

My friend, visual artist Jessica Hutchins – a fellow transplant – in responding to one of my students who asked her why she chose to start her career in NYC - said "I thought about the conversations I want to be part of, and where they were happening, and that is where I chose to be.”

For me, so many of those rich, important conversations have taken place here in Oregon.

Conversations about place, about history; Conversations about the power of art, about how knowledge can serve a city; Conversations about what makes a thriving jazz community – what makes a thriving arts community, about how we as artists make work that matters, and how we use it to make a real difference.

These conversations with inspiring artistic peers, distinguished teaching colleagues, and inquisitive students have enriched me, challenged me, and sustained me. They have given me purpose, direction, joy, and insight.

There are other conversations as well, necessary though sometimes challenging or painful. Conversations about how we reckon with a shameful racist past, about who has been and continues to be excluded from the Oregon story, Conversations about privilege and prejudice, about how we confront ongoing inequities; conversations about white supremacy and black lives.

These conversations jar. They provoke, incriminate, and unsettle. They demand that we unflinchingly examine ourselves, our actions, our institutions, and our systems. They challenge us to live our principles, to decide who and what we stand for and, when necessary, to change. It is my privilege and responsibility to bring my voice to these conversations, because I am an Oregonian, and because the artist’s tools of creative expression and empathy are integral to finding solutions to the problems we face.

So I see this award as a charge – to boldly imagine, envision, and share my best self, to uphold the example of an esteemed company of individuals whose imagination and vision have brought out the best in this place: Arvie Smith, Esther Stutzman, Mel Brown, Kim Stafford, Lawson Inada, Obo Addy, Lillian Pitt, James DePreist, and so many others It is also a charge to elevate the voices of the brilliant artists who are taking up the mantle of creation. Artists like Intisar Abioto, Sharita Towne, Mitchell S. Jackson, Damien Geter, Edna Vazquez, Anis Mojgani. I am honored to be in conversation with them as they tell the stories and speak the truths that show us a better way forward.

In closing. I want to remind us all that we live in one of the most fertile, abundant places on the planet. We owe a debt to this land and its ancestral stewards to reckon with the truth about our past, to rectify the injustices of the present, and ensure the thriving of the generations to come.

Some 16 years ago I was inspired by the words of Bishop Peter Story about the Truth and Reconciliation process in South Africa to craft my mission statement as an artist. I wrote:

“I choose to believe in the power of humans to change the world. Art is the substance of our dreams and the medium through which resonates our most fervent hopes, highest aspirations, deepest truths, and most profound experiences. Those who create art possess a consequent extraordinary power to communicate, inspire, provoke, inform and to move others to transform society and themselves, and we bear the responsibility to use this power to affect positive change in our communities and the world.”

Thank you for the opportunity to pursue this vision alongside all of you.