Andrew Proctor, Literary Arts’ executive director, is trying to remember a quote. Something from someone named Helen, he tells me over the phone. It turns out to be by culture writer Anne Helen Peterson, and it goes, “Communities without art—in all its various, ridiculous, beautiful forms—are communities that are dying.”

It’s apt to Proctor’s ethos on where arts culture currently stands in our city, our state: the flatlining of the Oregon Arts Commission’s funds for arts organizations over the past nearly two decades, the outrageous struggle for artists and institutions of all sizes to survive as the National Endowment for the Arts gets cut to pieces. The damage is serious, somewhat grim—but nothing’s a lost cause, yet.

“It’s not a sum total, it’s a signal,” Proctor says, among many othe

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