UO in Portland White Stag Block
At a ceremony in the fall of 2006, the Naito family turned over the keys to the White Stag Building to the UO, marking a new direction for Portland's Old Town and giving the university a place to enhance many long-running and successful Portland-area programs.

Summer in the City

Summer in the City is a series of short-term, intense art and design workshops held at the University of Oregon’s new White Stag facility in Portland, Oregon. Students may register for an individual workshop or take several in succession.

For a list of current courses, please see the online Class Schedule, then select a term to search for ART 408 or ART 508 sections.

Who Can Take These Classes?

Anyone interested in art as a social practice, product design, installation, or professional development for artists can take these classes.

• Community members will have an opportunity to get to know the excellent faculty of the UO Art Department, as well as the beautiful new facilities at the White Stag Block in Portland.
• Artists, designers, and practitioners who are already interested and knowledgeable can take this opportunity to expand their experience and goals.
• UO students wanting to take a summer course that enriches or complements their primary studies.

Course Descriptions

ARTM 4/508 Professional Practices
Monday June 16–Friday, June 20, 9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.

Students will be introduced to resume, artist statement and bio development, applications to professional exhibitions/competitions, photographing small three–dimensional work, and post-academic resource possibilities

ARTD 4/508 Dollar Store Hack
Monday, July 7–Friday, June 11, 9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.

All materials and objects for study are to be acquired from a typical Dollar Store. Each student is to develop iterative functional product design solutions born from a select few items of their choosing. This course employs the current fascination with the 'hack' concept. As a consumer culture with retail markets flooded with product choices, designers inevitably now see these flush product markets as palettes from which to develop new designs. Mass production technologies and innovations have eased the flow of products into the consumer markets so much so that we now have this new pool of materials, forms, and objects to design from and with. Our current design culture is familiar with sampling, appropriating and adaptation. We now address the loaded issues of designing with design and co-opting the results of the entire design and production formula for our own hand made means. This is a course about creative design problem-solving with a series of parameters uniquely presented by Dollar Store product choices. This is also a course exploring the ability for innovation to elevate the common to a bright and poetic place, and a simple study of home goods gone mad.