Matthew Trueherz, Portland Monthly (Oregon) Journalist Profile

Articles

Fighting Trump’s NEA Cuts One Theater Ticket at a Time

3 weeks ago | pdxmonthly.com | Matthew Trueherz

You’re reading a past edition of our weekly Things to Do column, about the concerts, art shows, comedy sets, movies, readings, and plays we’re attending each week. Read the current installment. Sign up to receive it in your inbox. theater usually works, quite reliably, on the notion that history repeats itself.
6 Art Gallery and Museum Shows to See in Portland This Summer

3 weeks ago | pdxmonthly.com | Matthew Trueherz

Portland’s galleries and museums look like mirrors this summer. Shiny things, reflective things, and several inspiringly inventive approaches to photography—with and without the use of cameras—make a convincing case that it’s not just personae and digital doubles out there.
Maggie Nelson’s Follow-Up to ‘Bluets’ and ‘The Argonauts’

1 month ago | pdxmonthly.com | Matthew Trueherz

You’re reading a past edition of our weekly Things to Do column, about the concerts, art shows, comedy sets, movies, readings, and plays we’re attending each week. Read the current installment. Sign up to receive it in your inbox. It’s not entirely true, but one reason Maggie Nelson gives for writing Bluets—that she kept telling everyone she was writing a book about the color blue, and eventually had to deliver something—is my favorite book-writing alibi.
A Heady Ode to Free-Wheeling Hippie Food Fit for 2025

1 month ago | pdxmonthly.com | Matthew Trueherz

Hot dogs and hamburgers aside, if there is a modern American cuisine, it grew from sprouts. Of what? Who cares! It grew from carob, nutritional yeast, tempeh, and other things mainstream America didn’t yet know were edible in the twentieth century, like seaweed. Cuisines change with time, and America’s has gone by a few names.
The Broadway Pop Stars of Tudor England in ‘Six’

1 month ago | pdxmonthly.com | Matthew Trueherz

You’re reading a past edition of our weekly Things to Do column, about the concerts, art shows, comedy sets, movies, readings, and plays we’re attending each week. Read the current installment. Sign up to receive it in your inbox. Henry VIII met his fourth wife, Anna of Cleves, before OkCupid, Christian Mingle, or Match.com. They didn’t have such things in Tudor England, not even for such a powerful lad.
Portland Spring and Summer Plays and Dance Performances

1 month ago | pdxmonthly.com | Matthew Trueherz

Shakespeare winds up on most theater calendars, one way or another. And his 400-and-something-year-old plays show up a few places in Portland this spring and summer: BodyVox is reworking two plays as dance, leaning into the interplay of mortality and joy; later in the season, a touring Broadway production swaps out Romeo for aughts pop jams. Outside of Shakespeare, the theme of looking back and rehashing old masterworks carries into most of the city’s programming.
Jess Ackerman: Between Making Art and ‘Making It’

1 month ago | pdxmonthly.com | Matthew Trueherz

A lot of life happened to Jess Ackerman in 2023. That February, the rising-star Portland painter had their first solo show outside the city, at Glass Rice Gallery in San Francisco. Just four months later, they had another at the local gallery Chefas Projects. Messy, exuberant scenes filled both—of dirty dishes, all-too-joyous layer cakes, cigarettes, house plants, and wine bottles that glinted with cartoony, star-shaped highlights.
Robert Crumb, America’s Pervert

1 month ago | pdxmonthly.com | Matthew Trueherz

You’re reading a past edition of our weekly Things to Do column, about the concerts, art shows, comedy sets, movies, readings, and plays we’re attending each week. Read the current installment. Sign up to receive it in your inbox. Robert Crumb has been called a lot worse than pervert, but it’s proven to be the stickiest epithet thrown at his monumentally influential career, for better and worse.
5 Standouts from the TEDxPortland 2025 Lineup

1 month ago | pdxmonthly.com | Matthew Trueherz

TEDXPortland organized its 13th annual conference around the word continuum. Time, that is, generally speaking—how we work with and against it, spend it, mark it, and try desperately to make the most of the hours we get. The regional event is an offshoot of the larger, international conference “Big TED,” and both revolve around a certain air of surprise and mystery. You don’t know much about what the show will entail until you’re in it.
Collages of Assimilation, 50 Years After the Vietnam War

1 month ago | pdxmonthly.com | Matthew Trueherz

You’re reading a past edition of our weekly Things to Do column, about the concerts, art shows, comedy sets, movies, readings, and plays we’re attending each week. Read the current installment. Sign up to receive it in your inbox. Before the internet’s oceanic memory, a paper shredder could render the most sensitive documents meaningless. Though in retrospect those cuts seem less final. As the Vietnamese American artist Dinh Q.