Oregon Mushroom Stories
Role: Producer, project coordinator, grant writer
From 2012 to 2013, I helmed a large multi-faceted multimedia project focused on the surreal, fantastical beauty of mushrooms and the knowledge of growers, foragers and fanatics in Oregon. The project had many components:
Videographer Giselle Kennedy and I made three documentary shorts about Oregon mushroom foragers, farmers, and educators.
Artists Stef Choi and Tony Candelaria made an interactive 6-feet-in-diameter zoetrope sculpture that presented a fungi lifecycle.
Chef Naoko Tamura prepared a meal where every course highlighted one mushroom, and many components of the meal included Japanese ingredients made with mold like soy sauce, miso, and koji. We called the meal the Mushroom, Mold & Yeast Feast, and ice cream maker Salt & Straw and wine maker R. Stuart and Co. pitched in with creative yeasty/fungal contributions.
I held a free public educational fair called The Mush Fest at The Cleaners at The Ace Hotel in downtown Portland. I thought of it like a giant interactive science fair for kids and adults alike. Across two days, we presented the zoetrope, screened the documentary shorts, gave tastes of various mushrooms, taught how to grow mushrooms at home, presented lectures by mushroom researchers, and more. We had 1,000 attendees.
Artist Stef Choi, designer Gary Robbins of Container Corps, and I produced The Mush Book, a small chapbook about the mushroom lifecycle and our favorite wild varieties that grow in Oregon.
I documented the full project in real time at oregonmushroomstories.wordpress.com where I also collected people’s personal mushroom hunting stories, interviewed artists whose work includes mushrooms, and showcased mushroom focused art happening around the world.
Why all these various interwoven but distinct components? We wanted to involve an ecosystem of artists approaching the topic of mushroom celebration and discovery from various vantages. We wanted to mirror the symbiotic web under he forest floor. And we wanted to inspire as many people as we could to participate in their own wild ways.
Mushrooms and mycelium are critical to the health of our environment and give unique character to our land, our histories, and our meals. They thrive in our climate, both the wet west side of the Cascades and the dry eastern expanses of Oregon. Mushrooms live in my mind in the same liminal territory as the narwhal, a realm where fantasy and reality overlap, where the music of childhood unexpectedly keeps playing into adulthood. We wanted to put these far flung magical yet everyday creatures on everyone’s minds.
Oregon Mushroom Stories was funded by the Regional Arts and Culture Council and Celebration Foundation with support from Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Organic Valley, and Ace Hotel Portland.
