Creative Heights: Oregon Artists Dream Big and Their Communities Benefit

Since 2014, these OCF grants have given artists and culture bearers a rare combination of money, time and freedom to dream big.

Imagine you’re given two years and enough money to create something you’ve only dreamed about. The few requirements: To stretch yourself artistically, be bolder than you've ever been, and share what you make with your community.

Would you immerse yourself in Hoyt Arboretum and compose a soundtrack for the trees? Or challenge your hometown's history through sculpture? Paint murals? Create a rock musical? Or an opera?

2014 Creative Heights grantee Oregon Shakespeare Festival presented Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land by Taiwanese playwright Stan Lai.

Oregon artists and culture bearers have delivered all of these projects and more with Creative Heights grants from Oregon Community Foundation. Since 2014, the grants have fueled nervy, inventive work in every region of the state: street art in Joseph, theater in Ashland, dance in Monmouth and music in Phoenix, to name a few examples.

The awards have supercharged the careers of more than 150 Oregon creators. Yet the impacts stretch far beyond the artists themselves. Creative Heights grantees have seeded communities across the state with a living canon of ambitious art and culture projects for Oregonians to encounter and be changed by. Read these Lessons Learned assembled by the OCF research team in February 2025.

Creative Heights has “changed the fabric of Oregon by creating these amazing cultural assets ten to 15 times a year, all across the state, for more than a decade,” said Jerry Tischleder, OCF’s Senior Program Officer for Arts and Culture.

Rare opportunity in Oregon and Nationally

Most arts and culture grants available to Oregon artists are $5,000 or less and come with numerous requirements. Larger ones are usually limited to established artists with a track record of funding. In contrast, Creative Heights grants are $50,000 to $100,000 each, open to early-career artists, and provide grantees with a degree of freedom and flexibility that is rare not just in Oregon but nationally. The investment adds up to more than $1 million per year.

In Southern Methodist University’s 2024 ranking of the top states for “arts vibrancy,” Oregon ranked #8 overall and #4 for arts funding. The Creative Heights program was a key contributor.

"It's a challenging public climate for the arts right now. As philanthropists, donors, board and staff, we continue to give out a million dollars a year because we feel that artists and culture bearers are essential to communities,” said Chey Kuzma, an OCF program officer.

Quincy Davis Lyrics Workshop, 2024 Creative Heights

OCF staff check in with grantees for reflective conversations at the start, middle and end of each project. A recent evaluation of 21 completed projects revealed that Creative Heights succeeds by reducing financial barriers and centering the artist’s vision.

For artists, Creative Heights equals “the freedom to pursue your vision and give yourself the space to breathe and learn and try things. We call it ‘risk capital for creativity,’” Tischleder said.

Sculpture to restore an erased chapter of Lane County history

Talicia Brown has spent dozens of hours speaking to Lane County audiences about the Black families who, in the 1940s, settled along the north bank of the Willamette River, in what is now Alton Baker Park, just outside the Eugene city limits at the time.

To most listeners, the story of the county's first Black neighborhood and its destruction by government bulldozers is shockingly new, said Brown, Founder and Executive Director of the Black Cultural Initiative (BCI), a Eugene nonprofit.

“The fact that 98 percent of people who live here or who were born and raised here don't know this story really speaks to the exclusion and the gatekeeping around storytelling and history making,” Brown said, adding that Eugene’s history as a “sundown town” meant that Black families were not allowed to live within city limits and were forced to live wherever they could.

Greater recognition is coming soon. In September, a life-size bronze monument sculpted by Eugene artist Percy Appau will be installed at the park, on land where the families once lived. BCI received a $100,000 Creative Heights grant that was pivotal to funding the monument and a second commissioned artwork by California artist Lisa Freeman.

The sculpture of a mother, father and three children will not only acknowledge and honor the “Across the Bridge” community but also challenge and expand the story that Eugene residents and Oregonians tell about their history.

“The artistic stretch for us was to create an art piece that means more than just art,” said Irene Rasheed, a BCI program consultant who has coordinated the project.

In the 1940s, Black people in Eugene were not allowed to own property, and most white landlords refused to rent to them. Shut out of the city, several Black families established homes and the area’s first Black church on the north side of the river. The settlement was located across an earlier version of the present-day Ferry Street Bridge, giving the community its name.

The sculpture of a mother, father and three children honoring the “Across the Bridge” community in Lane Country.

The new monument is the result of a years-long push for recognition begun by Lyllye Reynolds-Parker, who lived Across the Bridge as a child, and for whom The University of Oregon’s Black Cultural Center is named. Before Reynolds-Parker died in 2024, she enlisted Brown and BCI to lobby local officials and raise funds to restore the long-erased community to public memory.

Appau, Brown and Rasheed consulted with former residents, now in their 80s, and descendants to determine the monument’s design. Rather than depicting specific individuals, the sculpture represents five founding Across the Bridge families: The Reynolds, Nettles, Mims, Washingtons, and Johnsons, including the Johnsons’ adopted daughter, Pauline Gibson.

The Across the Bridge families built homes from tents and wood scraps. They lived without running water, sewer services, and electricity and endured floods from the river. Yet elders told Brown that they enjoyed carefree childhoods in the close-knit community, looked after by parents and neighbors who embodied dignity and strength amid unceasing discrimination and struggle.

Appau sought to capture that warmth and resilience, Brown said. In his sculpture, the parents sit with straight backs, their heads lifted. The mother cradles their infant, as an older son and daughter stand close by.

In 1949, Lane County Commissioners voted to demolish Across the Bridge to make way for the Ferry Street Bridge. Some families received no notice before bulldozers showed up, displacing 101 people, 65 of whom were "colored" and 36 of whom were white, according to a Eugene Register-Guard story.

“This kind of stretch — where the art that we build, promote, and participate in effects community change — is a vehicle for social healing,” Rasheed said. “Because this is not just about the history of these families. This is the history of Lane County. This is the history of Eugene. This is our joint history, regardless of race or color.”

Transformative support for a forest-inspired musician

For Julian Saporiti, a musician and cultural historian, the $51,000 Creative Heights grant he received in 2023 allowed him to do more than stretch artistically. It transformed how he thinks, communicates and creates.

Those changes continue to unfold on the trails of Hoyt Arboretum in Portland, where Saporiti walks for up to six hours a day. With his guitar and sound-recording equipment in tow, he captures bird, wind and water sounds. He uses them to compose songs that reflect forest ecology and what the trees can teach us about how to survive the times we live in.  

“That’s everything from inspiration for coming back stronger when you’re dealing with a down period in your life, to holding on to something tangible and real when it feels like everything is shifting and shaking and unaffordable and depressing,” Saporiti said.

Throughout the process, OCF was “completely trusting, which is absolutely phenomenal,” he said. “We met all the grant benchmarks, but the pressure of meeting those benchmarks completely evaporated in the process of doing it, to the point where I have no idea what I wrote [in the original grant application]. And that's a beautiful gift that they gave me.”

Prior to receiving the Creative Heights grant, Saporiti founded No-No Boy, a musical project featured by the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings record label. With No-No Boy, he transformed his doctoral research — he has a Ph.D. in American Studies — into folk songs that share complicated stories of war, immigration, identity, empire and race.

Similarly, Saporiti has shared his forest compositions with audiences at Hoyt Arboretum, where he will play monthly concerts May through September. Another performance is scheduled for May 15 at the Walters Cultural Arts Center in Hillsboro.

In writing and sharing his songs, Saporiti hopes listeners in Oregon and beyond will find the same inspiration he has found in the forest.

“The trees have been there forever, and even when they’ve been gone for millions of years, they’ve come back,” he said. “Hopefully that provides a little perspective and a little bit of psychological and emotional courage for people.”

What you can do: 

• Learn more about Creative Heights on the OCF website and in this 10th anniversary video. 
• If you have a donor advised fund and would like to support arts and culture in Oregon, please contact your donor relations officer.  
• If you’re new to OCF, our philanthropic advisors can help you make the most of your giving.