Bohemia City Marshal swearing in
COTTAGE GROVE – Resident and local historian Dave Light will be sworn in as the Bohemia City Marshal by Judge Martin Fisher at noon on Friday, March 14 at the Cottage Grove City Hall Chambers.
The Bohemia City Marshal is a tradition that honors the lawmen of 19th-century mining towns.
Bohemia Mining Days has honored this tradition by recognizing a ceremonial Bohemia City Marshal, a symbolic figure who represents the adventurous and resilient spirit of the town’s mining history.
“While Dave won’t enforce any laws, he’ll be stepping into a piece of local history, continuing the legacy of those who came before him,” said Matthew Hewlett, executive director of Spirit of Bohemia Mining Days, in a news release.
Light will join the ranks of past marshals such as Michael Roberts, Christina Hester, Bob Ehler, Gary Williams, and Henry Issacs.
Willamalane receives $10K grant
SPRINGFIELD – The Two50 Youth Center in Springfield recently received a $10,000 grant from WaFd Bank’s Washington Federal Foundation.
The grant will be split between two Willamalane Parks and Recreation District programs.
Tiny Ducks Preschool’s playground project will receive $5,000, while the Two50 Middle School Program will receive the other $5,000 to help pay for a new audio system, virtual reality set, and potentially a new storage space.
“As the sole park and recreation district serving Springfield’s growing and diverse 70,000-plus population, Willamalane is committed to equitable access, walkability, and supporting communities from historically under-resourced regions,” said Dani Thompson, fundraising and development manager for Willamalane. “We maximize every dollar while offering affordable programs and services like childcare, youth sports, after-school programs, family-friendly events, and food pantry access.”
Two50 is a free club for Springfield middle schoolers located in the Bob Keefer Center with daily after-school hours. Kids can do homework, hang out with friends, and play video games.
Tiny Ducks Preschool provides both part-time and full-time preschool programs, focusing on early STEM education and literacy.
Creswell photographer featured
EUGENE — “Love For the Arts,” an exhibition of landscape and nature photography by photographer and writer Bob Keefer, opens Monday, Feb. 17, and runs through mid-March at Eugene’s Midtown Arts Center, 174 E. 16th Avenue.
A longtime arts writer at The Register-Guard and later at Eugene Weekly, Keefer works in an unusual photographic medium: hand-colored black and white photography.
The practice of using paint to color black-and-white photographs dates back to the earliest days of photography in the 1830s. By the beginning of the 20th century, commercial photography studios in the United States, Europe, and Japan were producing thousands of hand-colored photos, from tourist postcards to elegant family portraits.
More than 25 years ago, Keefer began experimenting with hand-coloring his own black-and-white photos. He worked first with traditional darkroom prints and then with intensely colored and highly transparent Marshall’s Photo Oils, which were used in those early 20th-century studios.
More recently, he has been working with black-and-white carbon pigment inkjet prints on fine watercolor paper or canvas, coloring them with acrylic or oil paints. His work—mostly of landscapes and wildlife around Oregon—ranges in size from 6-by-9-inch images on paper to 24-by-60-inch images on canvas.
Keefer’s work has been shown in galleries around the Northwest. One of his hand-colored photographs is in the permanent collection of the Art About Agriculture program at Oregon State University. He has enjoyed artist residencies at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest near Blue River, Oregon, and at the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts in Saratoga, Wyoming. In 2022, he co-curated RURAL, a major exhibition of work by rural Oregon artists, at Umpqua Valley Arts in Roseburg.
“My work grows out of a fascination with the interplay between the cool modernist process of photography and the more personal art of painting,” the artist says. “My hand-colored photographs are made the old-fashioned way – no Photoshop – using acrylic and oil paints and brushes on large black and white prints.”
Among his artistic influences, Keefer says, are the late-19th- and early-20th-century landscape painters and photographers, from Albert Bierstadt to Carleton Watkins, who documented the American West. “I strive to incorporate some of the romanticism they found here – as well as the contemporary reality.”
Gallery hours are 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Monday through Friday. Admission is free.
