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Umico Niwa is about to do something to the installation. It’s already been up for three weeks, but that isn't stopping her. She’s been living above the gallery since then, close enough to hear it breathing, or at least to imagine she can. She may be leaving Portland soon, but that's just enough time. She heads to the hardware store down the street for egg-yellow spray paint without removing her apron. While I await her return at ILY2, I step on a tomato. The seeds spit onto the hardwood floor atop a splotch of Klein blue spray paint. The scattered...

Written by Nic Porter   Jules Latimer wants me to feel at ease. I can tell right away. They offer a warm smile, a self-deprecating joke, a generous laugh. They’re wearing a plain white T-shirt, and behind them hangs a slightly crooked picture of a woman napping on the steering wheel of a red sports car — Flaming June by Sir Frederic Leighton meets ’80s car catalogue.Off the jump, Latimer is charming in a way that feels authentic and easy. I later learn “Cool Jules” was hard-won. Their story is one of coming out while being raised in a religious household,...

Written by Carrie Hinton, Photo above by PDX Insectarium   A Youth Arts Program in a Dying Mall daelyn allis lambi usually introduces themself as the director of a youth arts program in a dying mall. For now, that’s Lloyd Center, although its official closure date is August 8. After that, the program will move somewhere else, but the setting feels almost too fitting to ignore: a half-abandoned Portland landmark, a commercial structure the city has already decided is obsolete, still holding a living, strange, deeply intentional creative world inside it. daelyn has history there, too. Their PNCA thesis project...

Written by Catie Keck Margaret Cho encapsulates so many dualities. She’s insouciant and vivacious. She draws you in with effortless charisma while still carrying a softness that feels far quieter in person than the version of herself audiences see onstage. She is deeply thoughtful and yet remarkably loose with her candor, often catching you off guard with the sincerity and generosity behind it. She’s intensely self-aware, but never in a way that feels contrived or performative. Each seemingly opposite part of her complements another: her righteous anger sharpened by her radical openness, her vulnerability deepened by her wit. Trying to...