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Colored Pencils Celebrates with EcoTrust

from press release



Kick off Western New Year 2010 or shoo away Tiger Year 4707 at Colored Pencils Art & Culture Night.

In a Pacific gateway city like ours, settled on the confluence of two majestic river systems and whole lot of intercultural history – both kinds of parties are necessary. Date: January 28, 2011. Tickets are $15 including food and non-alcoholic beverage and are available at eventbrite.com or at the door. Hosted by Ecotrust at
721 NW 9th Avenue, Portland 97209. Colored Pencils is Portland's multicultural family room.

Some background: Colored Pencils is a Last Friday celebration led by traditional and contemporary painters and poets; presented by acclaimed as well as emerging musicians; and delivered by our city’s grandest elders, our tiniest dancers, and everyone of all ages, abilities, and orientations in between. Colored Pencils is a world of cuisine, lots of laughter, even unexpected tears. At bottom, we are a vision of a New Portland, an ethos and aesthetic generously drawn from our city’s newcomer and settled communities’ enormous joint bank account of social, cultural, and spiritual capital.

For 2 years running, Colored Pencils has been a community-building process and a monthly production, a demonstration of what a Bigger Us would taste, look, sound and sway like. Our monthly all-volunteer events ($132,000 in-kind) have been celebrated by nearly 2700 firmly established and just-arrived Portlanders.

Colored Pencils’ culinary, fine, and performing artists are from City River and from all points south and east – from Mexico, Central, and South America; from Western and Eastern Europe; from Africa and Arabia, from Asia and a string of island nations stretching across our deep blue Pacific right up to she blends with our rich and silty River Columbia.

Ecotrust’s Colored Pencils: 2011’s very first Last Friday, also the final Friday before beginning Rabbit Year 4708, warms up at 6pm with Bangkok cuisine and a reception for Colored Pencils artists. Performing arts begin, as always, at 7pm with a Northwest tribal invocation, a petition for blessing our evening together. Colored Pencils events are playful. Dance along in folk Iraqi, with urban salsa, or in bold Bollywood, if you dare. Or just clack along with the beat with Dhanya sticks (representing Hindu Lord Durga’s swords chasing away some very bad demons). If January 28 is your birthday or wedding anniversary or if you’re our event’s eldest elder, be ready to say so.

To learn more, check out the Colored Pencils website

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