Not so easy keeping up with this week’s guest curator, Rebecca Gates. But fun? You bet.
First, there’s her recording career, both in the Spinanes and as a solo artist. (if you haven’t checked out 2012’s The Float, you need to do that)
A few years ago, she began a journey into music advocacy, exploring revenue for artists and other messy areas of the post-milennial music industry. She also has a foot in the contemporary art world, through her consulting work and practice in sonic art.

This week she’s bring us some perspective on
-The economic realities of music revenue
-How art fairs are changing the game for gallerists and artists
-Building a creative life around community…and more.

We’re exploring those connections between art, food, culture, ancestral lands and how it all fuses and fits and makes up who we are. Michelle Zauner of the band Japanese Breakfast talks about her powerful essay in the New Yorker about crying in Asian grocery stores. Artist Demian DinéYahzi shares a poem about survival. Stacey Tran invites us to her storytelling series in which women and femmes of color tell stories about culture, through a potluck-style meal, and the Last Artful, Dodgr talks about finding her place in the hip hop firmament.

What exactly is art supposed to do about the state of the world in 2018? Carry a political flag? Make us forget about bad things? This week we’ve got a pile of stories for you about some of the things art can do in traumatic times. Man-of-all-bands Papi Fimbres talks about meeting the weirdness of 2018 head-on with a radical act of self-care. The hilarious and amazing comedian Caitlin Weierhauser tells us about processing a horrendous tragedy, right in the spotlight. Cult of Orpheus founder Christopher Corbell dreams up new myths and narratives for a troubled world, and the Manila Sound shows the way through a time of martial law.

Come explore — this week, Centennial Mills, the 107-year old site of an old flour mill, gets the treatment from conceptual artist Anne Hamilton, social practice originator Harrell Fletcher and friends create a contemporary art museum inside a K-8 school, writer Cindy Baldwin interrogates parenting with a chronic illness, plus music from Jessica Hernandez and the late, great Richard Swift.

It has been a devastating summer for students and staff at two Oregon that helped thousands of creative Oregonians to find their calling. The Art Institute of Portland and Marylhurst University are two very different schools, but they're both succumbing to big challenges facing all universities. We get the details, then talk to reporter Rick Seltzer of Inside Higher Ed.

Fill up the cooler and buckle up! We are getting you all set up for your weekend summer road trip — lots of great music to keep you moving, including pillow talk with the R&B singer Blossom and MC Ripley Snell. They’ll invite us inside the dreamy world they created for their new EP. We've also got a session with one of our favorite breakout acts of 2018, singer-songwriter Haley Heyndrickx — luminous, wise, and winsome. And we’ll tell some stories about how we get where we’re going, both ON the map and OFF. One remarkable guy, living outside Eugene, Orego, is one of the country’s foremost cartographers. We’ll hear how he shares his vision of the world through handmade maps. Plus, a pianist throws his grand piano onto a trailer to play across Eastern Oregon and back again.

This time we live in is a feast of audio storytelling. You can find a podcast for any interest — from Harry Potter to stories of death-defying survival — and it turns out Oregon is a hotbed of homemade shows. We’re taking this as an opportunity to talk to them about their shows and to spotlight some more of our favorites made in Oregon:

We gathered some of Portland’s brightest minds at the creative event space the Nightwood to ask: What would buildings designed by and for women look like? Developer Anyeleh Hallová of project^ and Amy Donohue, a principal with Bora Architects talk us through big picture issues. And we check out a couple of case studies: Alicia McVey and Maren Elliott of Swift Agency join us for a look inside their headquarters — a study in transformative design. Rose Ojeda, Director of Housing Development for Hacienda CDC shared details of a multi-generational housing complex in development at the former site of a strip joint. We also get a word with our host for the evneing, Nightwood founder Michelle Battista. Her lady-led collective employs a range of artisans in food, wine, and design for a vertically-integrated event experience.

This week on “State of Wonder,” some of the Northwest’s most prominent writers come together to share stories and memories of the man the “New Yorker” called “the Portland sage,” Brian Doyle, who died in 2017 at the age of 60. We hear readings and tributes by David James Duncan, Robert Michale Pyle, Kathleen Dean Moore, and others.

This week's show is guest curated by Victor Maldonado.. An interdisciplinary artist who works in paint, as well as more ephemeral mediums, he also teaches at PNCA in Portland. We talk with Victor about what shaped his life and practice, from growing up crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, to finding an invisible college of peers to support and sustain his work, to the students who now look to him for advice on building a sustainble life in art.