Basalt launches new issue

Arts journal launches latest issue with interactive events

April 30, 2019 LA GRANDE, Ore. –  The award-winning Basalt: a journal of fine and literary arts, published at Eastern Oregon University, will hold several events this month in celebration of its new issue.

“This issue of Basalt is yet another successful partnership among local and regional arts programs which my colleagues in Art and Writing at EOU have forged over the past several years,” Editor David Axelrod said. “The results are a powerful statement of community resilience at the core of art and literature.”

Kaila Farrell-Smith, a contemporary Klamath Modoc visual artist based in Modoc Point, Ore., curated the art portfolio in the issue. Her practice focuses on channeling research through “a creative flow of experimentation and artistic playfulness rooted in Indigenous aesthetics and abstract formalism.” Her work explores space in-between the Indigenous and western aesthetics, and her selections for this issue of the journal feature young indigenous artists.

Farrell-Smith will visit EOU art students in their studios on May 9 and deliver an art talk at 6 p.m. that evening in Huber Auditorium in Badgley Hall. The lecture is free and open to the public.

The next day, Eden Redmond of Signal Fire Arts will join Farrell-Smith and Axelrod for a Reading in Place Walk. Weather-permitting, students and other attendees will depart from Loso Hall Lobby at 10 a.m. for a hike in the Grande Ronde Valley.

Reading in Place, a program created by Signal Fire Arts, is a guided discussion led by local artists, musicians, writers, activists and scientists. Each hike offers an opportunity to learn about social justice and ecological issues. The May 10 Reading in Place hike will feature short texts based on Signal Fire’s 2019 theme “Navigate Together.”

Later in the afternoon, writers featured in Basalt will read from their work in the Nightingale Gallery in Loso Hall. Cameron Scott, David Memmott and Elizabeth McLagan will present alongside Farrell-Smith and editors David Axelrod and Jodi Varon. The reading begins at 4 p.m. and is free and open to the public.

In addition, the journal will host a launch event in Wallowa County featuring Christina deVillier and Molly McCarty, as well as David Axelrod’s new collection of essays, “The Eclipse I Call Father.” The reading will begin at 7 p.m. on May 22 at Fishtrap, 400 East Grant Street, Enterprise.

Copies of the new Basalt issue will be available for purchase at all venues, with all proceeds going to cover costs of production. For more information, please contact David Axelrod at daxelrod@eou.edu.