LIFE

New Cultural Trust leader is accomplished artist

Tom Mayhall Rastrelli
Statesman Journal

Brian Rogers, the new executive director of the Oregon Arts Commission and the Oregon Cultural Trust, has been on a whirlwind ride since his arrival from Austin, Texas, one month ago. He's been traveling the I-5 corridor between his Portland and Salem offices. He's becoming acquainted with state, business, educational and nonprofit leaders in Oregon's arts and culture community.

"I'm excited about the passion that is here and the creativity," Rogers said. "I'm also excited about learning more about the rural areas of the state. I'm really curious about learning about the Native American population."

Rogers was born, raised and worked for over two decades in Pennsylvania. Before moving to Austin where he worked as a consultant for arts and culture organizations, Rogers built a 21-year career at the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts (PCA). Oregon is making a great first impression.

"People are friendly here," Rogers said. "It's a gorgeous state. I'm really looking forward to driving around to more parts of the state."

Last week, Rogers drove to Humdinger Drive In in Portland.

"It's this amazing little roadside place. The guy behind the counter — old guy, interesting — was really talking up the blackberry milkshake. He said the blackberries are in now and how much he loves them," Rogers said. He grinned as if he could still taste the milkshake he ordered. "So, yeah. It was good."

I met Rogers in a conference room at Business Oregon. The commission and trust fall under Business Oregon's umbrella. The trust raises money and distributes it to the arts through a state tax credit that people receive when they donate to the trust and cultural nonprofits. The commission provides grants, programs and leadership for the arts throughout the state. It's funded by the trust, legislature and National Endowment for the Arts.

RELATED STORY: Cultural Trust awards $35K grant to Salem Art Association

As we visited, Rogers spoke softly with intensity. His salt and pepper hair, business casual attire and genial nature made him approachable.

"I think of him as being a very calm, very relaxed, very easy going person," Richard Linzer, friend and colleague of Rodgers, said. "He's comfortable with himself and comfortable with his professional identity. This shows in his work with staff and artistic organizations. There's a maturity that helps people feel comfortable. It makes him fun to be with and effective."

"He brings a calm steady and measured approach to leadership and collaboration that was very clear from some of our earliest conversations," Bob Speltz, board chair of Oregon Cultural Trust, said. "We saw him a collaborator eager to partner and lead in building an environment in which arts, heritage and humanities organizations are sustained and valued as a core part of our communities."

But Rogers brings more than business acumen to the table.

"He's a very accomplished visual artist," Glen S. Howard, retired managing director, legal affairs and general counsel at the Pew Charitable Trusts, said. "Also, even more directly relevant to his new position is he really knows the arts sector. He knows arts organizations large and small, and the challenges they face and also what it takes for them to be successful and sustainable."

Rogers was exposed to the arts during childhood in Harrisburg, Scranton and Philadelphia. His father was an engineer who worked at the Pennsylvania Medical Society. His dad also wrote.

"He's been working on a book now for 30 years," Rogers said. "It's about a young boy in the coal regions of Pennsylvania but using the story structure from 'The Odyssey.' "

Rogers' mother worked at a bank, but always spoke of an old job at an RCA record plant.

"The house was full of records that RCA would give its employees," Rogers said. "Everything from Frank Sinatra to the Beatles to Three Dog Night to tons and tons of opera."

Rogers still has some of the old opera albums. He enjoys music, but learned to paint instead.

"As a young child, I saw my mom painting a lot. She did it on the weekends. I immediately became interested in what she was doing and the different things she was painting," Rogers said.

He loved art class but, when he reached high school, felt unchallenged. He enrolled in a class at the Art Association of Harrisburg. His teacher, Charles "Li" Hidley, became his mentor and friend for many years.

"He was quite a character in the Harrisburg area," Rogers said. "He was from that era of the New York School, abstract expressionism. I learned a lot about the gestalt, the feeling of the painting, capturing different aspects of mythology or the human experience."

Rogers attended Temple University Tyler School of Art, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting. While earning his master of fine arts at the University of Arizona, he became friends with his professor, Robert Colescott who was known for satirical and comic paintings reflecting the African American experience. Rogers also taught at Arizona, before returning to Pennsylvania, where he worked odd jobs and painted.

"Just like about 99 percent or 90 percent of artists you have to piece together your livelihood," Rogers said.

A friend who worked for the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts took a leave of absence for health reasons He asked Rogers to fill in. Rogers started as a program associate. When the temporary position was up, the program director for visual arts retired. Rogers took that job.

"I became really intrigued with the work, the combination of government and arts and culture was fascinating to me," Rogers said. "All through history art has been a part of government, church and religion. They're very intertwined."

He was exposed to the statewide and national art landscapes and learned how government funding impacts arts education. Rogers learned the business from the ground up, serving as fellowships manager, program director for art museums, deputy director of administration and, finally, deputy director of PAC. Speltz sees Rogers' 21 years at PAC as a strength.

"During the time in Pennsylvania, he served under five governors both democrat and republican," Speltz said. "He has a lot of experience navigating state government and has a successful track record there."

Over the years, Rogers did small consulting jobs working with organizations and other state's arts councils and giving board retreats.

"What I realized is that I enjoy that type of work," Rogers said, so he made the decision to leave PAC. "I was really ready for a change. I really enjoy a challenge. The timing was right in my life to do that."

One of Rogers' favorite positions at PAC was program director for fellowships. Over 1000 artists applied each year. Rogers worked with the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation to combine their review process with PAC to save artists time.

"It was great to see, hear and watch all the artists' work," Rogers said. "It was really eye opening to have that vantage point ... There were a lot of thematic things that were occurring."

He also learned from the jurors comments, which helped improve his own painting. His chosen medium is oil.

"I enjoy the richness that oil can give you, a lot of layers and complexities," Rogers said. "The subject matter is really about relationships between people, the connection of history and stories and how they impact our lives, our culture."

Richard Linzer and his wife, poet and writer Anna Odessa Linzer, have known Rogers for over two decades. In addition to working with Rogers on commission and consulting work, they've become collectors of his work. Annie and Rogers trade her poems for his paintings.

"I find his paintings wonderfully mysterious, highly evocative, and challenging," Richard Linzer said. "There is a surreal quality to his work, very dream like, as if he were mining the unconscious for images and meaning ... Over the years that I've known him, there have been very few late evenings when he's not in the studio painting."

Rodgers spoke of a painting he made of the Oneida Community Mansion House in upstate New York. Oneida was a Christian community founded in the mid-1800s that practiced communalism.

"The top portion of the painting is the mansion and below that is an idealized environmental scene with a lake and trees," Rogers said. "It's really about a community trying to find itself. It had problems, no doubt about it. There were a lot of issues ... Things are idealized, but the practice of how it turns out isn't always up to that standard."

Rogers has inherited a fractured arts community. In the wake of former OCT and OAC Executive Director Christine D'Arcy's firing in Oct. 2013, numerous board members resigned in protest. Rogers hopes to use the strategic planning process as a way of listening to the arts and culture community, as they move forward together.

"For the arts commission it will be learning a lot from constituents, organizations that we work with, the artists and other stakeholders, meaning other funders, legislators, local officials, community people in general, and that will help inform how the arts commission will build a plan and address some of that," Roger said. "There will be issues that come up in every community. Funding is always number one on people's minds who run any nonprofit. Soon after that it's about arts education ... What I'm really curious to hear about are the other issues that are here in Oregon and how the commission might play a role in addressing as many as possible."

"The trust is very similar," Rogers said. "The other layer is working with the cultural partners. I've spent some time with them already — humanities, heritage and history — seeing how we can work together and build an even stronger relationship and network."

Adam Davis, Executive Director of Oregon Humanities, has been impressed with Rogers.

"He's a good listener and has a lot of experience with strategic planning," Davis said. "I think that's needed now, how to think comprehensively about the place of culture in this state ... I know in Pennsylvania he did a lot of strategic planning and good bridge building around arts, humanities and heritage. I'm looking forward to that happening here."

"They're very supportive of the idea of the (strategic) planning and addressing what comes out of the planning process," Rogers said of the trust and commission. "It will be public. There will be public meetings. There will be a lot of people that are engaged in it at different levels. That really helps guide a statewide agency like this."

Rogers estimates that the process will take nine to 12 months and result in a three to five-year plan.

"I'm a big believer in making it a living process where you annually go back to the board of the both the trust and the commission and talk to them about what was accomplished, what is currently going on and what is the future and have some flexibility to make some course changes," Rogers said.

"Brian has the ability to come in and turn a page if you will, bring fresh eyes, his unique perspective and the opportunity to reforge and in some instances restrengthen or revive relationships with lawmakers, citizens of the state and the 1,300 art and humanities organizations that populate our state," Speltz said. "There's something unique and special about being new, not forgetting where we've been ... but giving them permission to dream big, to ask questions about who we are, where we want to go and how were going to get there."

TRastrelli@Statesman Journal.com, (503) 983-6030 or follow on Twitter @RastrelliSJ