2025 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the closing of the Fairview Training Center, the institution for people with developmental disabilities, run by the State of Oregon, which operated in Salem between 1907-2000. Like many 20th century institutions, Fairview has a contested legacy. Last year, Bruce Burris, an artist who works in collaboration with neurodiverse artists, received a grant from the Creative Heights Initiative of the Oregon Community Foundation. The resulting effort, Our Fairview, is an ambitious and amorphous undertaking involving a constellation of activities—such as art events, workshops, and conversations. The organizers hope Our Fairview… will stir up further public interest and come to a deeper understanding of the institution’s legacy both in the past and into the present. 

Early in May, I traveled to Salem to sit down with Burris along with Project Manager Jill R. Baker and Researcher Paul Meuse—both of whom are also working artists—to learn more about Our Fairview… We discussed their findings thus far and the project’s upcoming public event, Entwined: Legacy and Memories, which will take place on June 7th at Portland Arts Collective.

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Burris’s passion for this work stems from a number of factors, including his personal history with institutionalized family members and his ongoing work with neurodiverse artists. 

According to Burris, the primary drivers for Our Fairview… are twofold: to “dust off” the existing public history of Fairview Training Center—such as the recent documentary on Oregon Public Broadcasting—as well as, “to specifically reach out to artists to add their ideas to this very much still living thing.”  For the team, this requires big thinking and creativity. 

“We’re really trying to just broaden the opportunity for people to express themselves around this institution,” Burris emphasized. The Our Fairview… website functions as a repository for the project where resources and information about its various prongs live and grow. 

Though Fairview Training Center shuttered a quarter of a century ago, the organizers of this endeavor continued to speak about the presence of the institution as alive in the minds and shared experiences of many. This is especially salient for Burris, Baker, and Meuse as all three are artist-organizers at Living Studios, a program of the social service organization Cornerstone Associates that operates at sites in Salem and Corvallis. Living Studios provides Willamette Valley-based neurodiverse artists—a population sometimes referred to by comparable studio programs as artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities—with space and professional support to make work.  

Burris underscored, “We work everyday with people who experienced Fairview Training Center in some way. It is a living place, still.”

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The team find themselves faced with the unique task of unpacking institutionalization as a framework that at once imprints on memories but equally obfuscates individual histories. As part of the project Baker and archivist Paul Meuse dove into the file boxes put in the state archives after the institutions’ closure and made a curious discovery. 

“There was one folder I was really excited about because it was titled, ‘savant idiot or unusual residents (Russell Childers) 1979’,” said Baker. 

Childers was a Fairview Training Center resident for most of his life. His court-ordered placement at Fairview in 1926 was against his family’s wishes. His self-taught wood carving practice ultimately helped catalyze his release from the institution in 1965. Childers possessed a knack for carving compelling characters, such as his work The Wee Mother and Child (1971), which depicts a charismatic child holding hands with a solemn mother. After his release he experienced considerable professional recognition and success prior to his death in 1998. 

“I thought, ‘Oh, there’s going to be more people in here’,” continued Baker, speaking about her hopes of finding more information about other burgeoning artists at Fairview Training Center in the archives. “And it was just Russell Childers,” she said. 

In our conversation, Buris mused “…[h]ow was it that Russell Childers is the one artist in a hundred years that was enabled and supported enough to have that kind of existence there?…We know of other artists that were there.” 

Organizers of Our Fairview… are considering this tough question through Russell Childers’ Toolbox by clay creating replicas of Childers’ carving tools with Living Studios artists. Childers’ original toolbox was wooden, fitting for his medium of choice, and is presently housed in the Willamette Valley Rehabilitation Center’s collection in Lebanon, Oregon. 

Another similar project, Institutional locks, spearheaded by Jess Felix and Angel Black, engages participants in crafting ceramic locks and keys in order to reflect on the common presence of these functional objects at Fairview Training Center. In this way, rather than probing for personal information from Fairview residents, the team approaches the history of Fairview through expressive means, with an eye toward the nonverbal lived experience and trauma history of past residents. 

The interwoven nature of Fairview Training Center remains central to this work. Baker pointed out that memories from Fairview are also held by folks who worked in the facility and people who lived nearby. As per the undercurrent of this project, her concern lies in considering memories that continue to circulate as well as those which are out of mind. Baker asks: “[h]ow can we bring that all together and invite people that haven’t contributed to that story or just want to talk about it?” adding, “because everywhere we’ve been, especially in Salem, somebody has a story about Fairview…”

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Public workshops are another integral part of Our Fairview…. Knowing that communal grief space would be necessary, Burris invited Marne Lucas, founder of the Bardo Project, to take on this facet of the work. Through the Bardo Project, Lucas works to holistically celebrate and provide care for the legacy of terminally ill artists. Drawing on this experience with grief, mourning, and legacy, Lucas and collaborators Colesie Tharp and Dardinelle Troen, also end-of-life doulas, will host a ritual and art-making gathering aimed at honoring the stories of those who intersected with Fairview Training Center. 

As Baker noted, “Daily log books from Fairview record the fact that many individuals of all ages died while living at Fairview. They would be transferred to the crematorium at the State Hospital and their remains would be held indefinitely until claimed by a family member. People were forgotten.” This reality necessitates nuanced attention and community care. 

I spoke with Lucas, Tharp, and Troen briefly about the June 7 event. I learned about their efforts to provide accessibility—namely by hosting the event at ADA accessible venue, Portland Arts Collective, providing low tables, chairs and cushions for seating, as well as opportunities for structured as well as unstructured engagement that will allow for more free-flowing and non-compulsory participation. Lucas said that the venue even offers an enclosed outdoor area as respite for indoor sensory overload. The event itself will involve an opening meditation and ritual with Troen as well as an altar-building activity with Tharp.

“There’s going to be complicated feelings about life at Fairview Training Center,” said Lucas. “We all know that it has a really difficult, challenging legacy, but to be able to share in community, I think, leads to further healing.” 

When I asked the event organizers what healing meant to them, Lucas said that she believed healing is the capacity to “let feelings surface, no matter how challenging they are” and to be able to reframe them and move forward with them. “It’s also this constellation” said Troen, noting that healing might involve changes in perspective over time, relationships and integration in community. She added that ritual space offers an avenue for healing work to be held collectively.

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Following the cue for sensitivity to personal trauma history, I have chosen not to include any specifics of the challenging legacy of Fairview Training Center in this story. However, the 2010 Oregonian article, “Erasing Fairview’s horrors” by Sara Gelser Blouin—who is now an Oregon State Senator—offers a starting place for learning.

Stepping back, the existence of Our Fairview… seems nothing short of miraculous given diminishing arts funding, federal pushback against DEI, and the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, Ronald F. Kennedy Jr.’s stigmatizing rhetoric around autism. In our interview, Burris spoke about applying for funding through the Creative Heights Initiative at least three times prior. He received this grant in 2024 with funding that will last through September 2026.

“When you do reach a point where you’re receiving a level of support, it really is exciting and an incredible opportunity to do things that you’ve been thinking about for so long,” said Burris. Had he not been selected to initiate the project this year, the chances of funding this work may not have materialized at all. 

This project is “political by nature,” Meuse said, connecting history with the current day, honoring the nonlinear nature of time in memory and how this impacts society moving forward. “We’re talking about, what rights do people have? We’re talking about what society we want to live in? Where are people now?”

“I guess I must feel like I’m optimistic, roughly, around a lot of this information because I know how important it is for this information to see the light, to encourage other people to become involved in it,” said Burris.  

As someone with such a long career working with neurodivergent artists, perhaps Burris knows better than anyone that the present offers reasons to be hopeful about the future. As our conversation ended, he added, “It is fun and joyful. It really is. Not all the time, of course. How could it be? But we have those moments…”

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Entwined: Legacy and Memories is a free public event and will take place at Portland Arts Collective, 122 Northwest Couch Street Portland, OR 97209, Saturday, June 7 · 12 – 4pm.

Visit Our Fairview…’s website to learn more about the project, history of the Fairview Training Center, and to stay updated on forthcoming events.