In September 2022, Portland’s Old Church Concert Hall needed a reboot. As the venerable downtown institution and its home city emerged from the pandemic and other crises that had devastated the central city’s cultural and economic life, the board of directors of its governing nonprofit organization gathered to ponder its future role. With the community facing unprecedented challenges and transformations, The Old Church, dubbed Portland’s “cultural living room” since 1968, needed to adapt, too. 

But how? To make space for raising and discussing those kinds of questions, board chair Constance Bracewell initiated strategy sessions for the volunteer board members that would give them the opportunity to take a big-picture look at the then-54-year-old organization’s direction and mission. She put the question to the assembled board members. 

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OREGON CULTURAL HUBS: An occasional series

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“What,” Bracewell asked them, “makes us different from other venues that have music on their stages?” She waited for answers.

No one spoke.

“That silence was really loud,” Bracewell recalled in a recent ArtsWatch interview. “It told me that we really needed to be thinking about how, as a nonprofit, we needed to be different” from other concert venues. She knew one thing for sure: “Our job is to take risks that for-profits can’t do.”

Over the ensuing months, what emerged from that silence was a new song for the old institution. Along with its historical role as a concert hall for local and touring musicians, TOC Portland, as it’s recently been renamed, is transforming into a multifaceted cultural hub that aims to support its community in new and different ways. They include:

• a robust community discussion series Bracewell co-founded earlier, before she became the organization’s executive director last year;
• expanded free public arts programming;
• a new art gallery for local artists in the building;
• a new intimate performance space inside TOC for local artists, called the Cheshire Cat Lounge.

Like many other arts institutions, TOC Portland is looking beyond its entertainment bubble, asking what its larger community needs from its arts institutions, and trying to answer the call.

SANCTUARY OF SOUND

Before it was a concert hall and arts venue, the Carpenter Gothic-style building on the northeast corner of Southwest 11th and Clay originated as Calvary Presbyterian Church in 1882, designed by architect Warren H. Williams. Beginning in 1948, it housed a succession of Baptist congregations until 1967, when the by-then-dilapidated structure was put up for sale — a familiar story during that era. But with no buyers, it sat empty and decaying. Demolition loomed. (Read more about the building’s history here.)

Fortunately for Portland’s cultural landscape, one determined woman stepped up to rescue it. Children’s librarian and arts patron Frances Lanier “Lannie” Hurst, an actor and singer in the Portland theater scene, founded an organization to save the historic gem. 

The group succeeded, winning enthusiastic public support and raising more than $150,000 to buy and restore the building for public use. The restoration received an Architectural Heritage Award from the Bosco-Milligan Foundation, and the building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972. It’s now run by a secular nonprofit organization.

“The 300-seat interior is a Victorian blend of Gothic, classical, Renaissance and Baroque styles with vaulted ceilings and hand-carved pews of fir and oak,” wrote ArtsWatch contributor David Stabler in The Oregonian in 2010, the year Hurst died at age 85. “Jewel-colored stained-glass windows bathe the sanctuary in light and a beautifully restored Hook and Hastings pipe organ sits dramatically at the back of the stage.” (Read Stabler’s engrossing story about Hurst’s achievements here.) 

When it reopened in 1968, the refurbished Old Church commenced its incarnation as a secular cultural hub. Bracewell says it even served as a meeting place for the Portland City Council and as the organizing point for the Park Blocks’ famous protests against the Vietnam War, hosting everything from yoga classes to a community thrift store. Other improvements, from disabled access to acoustic enhancements to, recently, fire code upgrades (which required another successful fundraiser) have continued.

From the beginning, one of The Old Church’s primary contributions to Portland culture was its free monthly (later semimonthly) Wednesday Lunchtime Concerts. Initially focusing on classical recitals (which remain frequent), they broadened to include other genres. I was a regular attendee when I lived in downtown Portland, and they introduced me to dozens of local classical, folk, and less classifiable acts. Bathed in the afternoon stained glass radiance, the concerts provide a sweet break in the midst of a work week for some, a welcome moment of live performance for retirees, and occasionally a brief refuge for low-income or homeless residents. They’re a Portland treasure. (You can see many recent archived performances here, and livestream new ones on Comcast Channel 331 or 11.)

The Noontime Concerts signaled the building’s evolution into a robust concert hall, boasting thousands of evening performances of all genres over the year, eventually adding high-end sound equipment in 2016, even hosting live recording sessions, including those that produced a trio of 1990s live albums by MacArthur genius grantee and jazz composer/saxophonist Steve Lacy. Pianist Michael Allen Harrison’s holiday benefit concerts there are a seasonal perennial. Chamber Music Northwest, Fear No Music, Tesla City Stories… the list of local arts organizations that regularly perform in the building is long and ever-growing, including last month’s PNW Music Awards ceremony. 

https://youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries&list=PLYmii959mo23CVp2I0hR_Rt0HzkJGPrgM

CHALLENGES AND CHANGES

The Noontime Concerts and rentals remained The Old Church’s staples when Bracewell arrived in Portland in 2011. She had started out in theater, then worked for a dozen years in film in Toronto and Los Angeles. She also had long experience in freelance design, documentary photography, and working with and for nonprofit organizations, including a nonprofit art gallery at the University of Regina and a Toronto organization that places artists in inner-city schools, which involved grant writing. 

Bracewell also worked with her partner, audio engineering for touring shows. He’d been involved in upgrading TOC’s sound system, which piqued her interest in the venue. She joined the board of directors in 2016, recruited by The Old Church’s then-executive director, Bracewell’s fellow Saskatchewan native Amanda Stark.

That year, Bracewell co-founded TOC’s We Can Listen social justice series, which its website calls “a cultural intersection of storytelling, documentary, music, and personal expression where all voices have the right to be heard.” Hosted by the eminent Portland singer Julianne Johnson, the series has tackled subjects ranging beyond the arts, including social justice topics such as racism, health care, disabled rights, homelessness, immigration and refugee issues, the environment, and gender equality.  

One program I attended involved a panel of agricultural activists, farmers (one a former Alvin Ailey academy and Jefferson dancer), chefs, and historians discussing the achievements of and challenges facing Black farmers in our area.

“We Can Listen is a place where we see each other and find community and connection,” Johnson said in introducing the panel. “It’s an intergenerational gathering where you can find out what’s happening in our community and get involved.” 

Bracewell’s involvement in We Can Listen heralded further moves toward community-oriented programming. After more than six years serving on the TOC board (including two as chair), Bracewell succeeded Stark as executive director in January 2023, shifting her focus from strategic planning to programming and outreach. 

After that consequential 2022 board meeting, “people understood we needed to bring the whole organization into modern times,” she said in a press statement. In the wake of the pandemic, homelessness crisis, and other recent upheavals, that meant responding to pressing community needs by offering TOC’s primary asset: its much-loved downtown space. 

In July 2023, the board added a single, crucial word — “support” — to its mission statement: To produce, present, and support programs that reflect and enhance the cultural life of the community, and to preserve and celebrate the building’s historic architecture.

“Our community needs support in a variety of ways — and our mission guides how we do it,” Bracewell explained. “It’s social service through culture, allied with the arts and a concert hall. TOC has always been a community, grassroots organization. We’re leaning back into that community base and supporting that community.” 

Proposed programs are evaluated by the extent to which they support the community, fulfill the mission, and then whether the organization has the capacity (including fundraising, if needed) to pull them off. 

Bracewell cites as one example BLKBOK, a scintillating Detroit-based solo pianist/composer for whom music, including classical music (his stage name is pronounced Black Bach) provided a means of self expression as well as enjoyment that too few Blacks from low-income neighborhoods can easily access. In the TOC appearance I attended (the first of two), he connected with the demographically diverse TOC audience in a way that few classical-inflected performances could, speaking eloquently between songs about everything from classical music and his mother’s strong positive influence to the impact of George Floyd’s murder.  

The new emphasis became even clearer last year, when TOC served as executive producer of Tipping Point, a documentary film about Portland’s 2020 protests, which won prizes in film festivals across the West Coast before its September 2023 Portland premiere at Alberta Alley. Johnson, We Can Listen, Bracewell, and her predecessor as TOC executive director, Amanda Stark, were co-producers. 

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Community support also includes offering free or steeply discounted rentals to various nonprofit organizations, and providing free offerings such as the Noontime Concerts, a four-concert Summer Music Series presented with Music Portland, and the new art gallery. 

To support the community, it’s important to present as much free and low-cost programming as possible, Bracewell said, yet “all the programs I know that subsidize access to the arts still have a barrier” that discourages some potential attendees, whether it’s the stigma of showing an Oregon Trail card for entry or lack of knowledge about free offerings. “We have to find a way to have it be available for everyone.”  

Those free or inexpensive shows in turn are supported by revenues from market-rate rentals for concerts, weddings, and other events. 

“Anyone renting at TOC is supporting public programming,” Bracewell said. “All concert, wedding, and event rentals go toward allowing us to provide our community art services. We can afford to not make money some of the time [as with the BLKBOK shows], but I have to have a really good argument for losing money. Profit for a nonprofit enterprise shouldn’t be measured only in dollars.”

The announcement of TOC’s new directions also included a reference to updating “outdated policies.” Example: clarifying the recipient of tip jar revenues at TOC’s bar, which had earlier drawn scrutiny from Oregon’s Bureau of Labor & Industries for withholding tips from employees and provoked a lawsuit for allegedly retaliating against a whistleblower who complained about the practice. 

As detailed in a recent Willamette Week story, TOC contended that its bar staff knew the organization handled donations from the jar as charitable contributions to the organization, rather than compensation for the bar staff, and that it fired one of the complaining staffers not for calling out the tip policy, but instead for other “performance issues.” 

Upon becoming executive director, Bracewell immediately changed the tip jar policy: Tips now go to the bar staff, not the organization. TOC’s insurance company settled the whistleblower claim with a $40,000 payment and no admission of liability.

NEW SPACES

Along with the policy and programming changes, TOC has lately added a pair of arts spaces to the building. The Cheshire Cat Lounge “has a casual house-concert vibe,” says the press announcement, “featuring limited seating, blankets on the floor, standing tables, and a capacity of just 60-70” patrons. 

Opened this fall, the lounge features Portland performers. Bracewell sees the intimate space as a return to roots, when the church used to host “all sorts of mom-and-pop recitals, with rents so inexpensive that if you wanted to do something on a stage, you could come to The Old Church like an old-fashioned community hall,” she said. “The board a while back made the decision to upscale,” installing one of the city’s finest sound systems, and thereby drawing bigger name — and necessarily higher cost — performers. “There’s value in that,” Bracewell acknowledged, “and also value in having the kind of [smaller-scale] performances that used to be here.”

To curate local performers, TOC has engaged a new talent buyer who’s a local musician. The organization also leverages community connections from various staff members who are also local working musicians.

“We want to build a reputation with Portland audiences,” Bracewell said, “so that if you look at our calendar and see something you’ve never seen before, you can trust us to come and check it out, and even if you don’t like it, the quality will be high.” 

Last April, TOC joined forces with the artist collective after/time  to create a gallery space in the building. TOC provides the space, installation materials, and staffing, while after/time curates the artists. 

“There’s no other gallery in Portland with a space like ours,” Bracewell said in a press release. “It’s not a white box but a grand historic building with an ornate 20-foot ceiling. You have all this gorgeous Victorian and colonial architecture in fantastic contrast to the artists’ contemporary work,” and that juxtaposition “changes the context of how you view these artists’ work.” 

Bracewell said she hoped to expose these gallery-ready artists to a new audience while providing an entryway to the visual arts for arts lovers who don’t necessarily frequent art galleries. She intends to pay competitive rates to artists, and to local musicians hired to play acoustic music at the exhibit openings, with admission free to the public.

The current exhibition, which runs through Dec. 24, features works by Portland painter Tristan Perrotti, for whom TOC also provided studio space for the creation of some of the paintings. “We keep an artist in the basement!” Bracewell said. 

“I’m thrilled to share these works at The Old Church, a truly one-of-a-kind venue, where viewers will have the opportunity to engage with the full spectrum of my artistic practice,” Perrotti wrote in his TOC artist’s statement. 

The after/time connection has led TOC to connect with Perrotti and other artists. “If you meet with lots of people and collaborate with lots of people,” Bracewell said, “magic happens.” 

This month’s other TOC events include Harrison’s valuable, long-running Christmas at The Old Church, along with a  diverse variety of other performers, some familiar, some on their way up.

Next year, Bracewell contemplates hosting community-building events such as the Portland Winter Light Festival and a possible collaboration with Portland Radio Project, and to presenting more free concerts outside next summer. 

Going forward, TOC hopes to increase the amount of free and low-cost programming to help support a still-healing community that needs such opportunities to come together around the arts. “We have to sell tickets to pay our staff,” Bracewell said. “But we want to create more opportunities for people to be in the space without buying a ticket.”

Bracewell said that after a first year of reconfiguring the organization and adjusting its mission, and a second “exploring and evolving our identity and story,” the watchword for her upcoming third year as executive director will be “nurturing. We want to nurture our relationships — with funders, with artists, with the community.”

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Want to know more about TOC Portland? Take a virtual tour here. See upcoming shows here. Donate to TOC Portland here. Read more stories about Oregon cultural hubs.