Scratchpad: Astoria has a whole lot of art going on

Published 6:15 am Thursday, July 24, 2025

Fascinating stuff passes over the desk of the Coast Weekend editor.

None more so than materials that emphasize the amount of art being created right here on the North Coast.

Today’s edition highlights the 2025 Astoria Open Studios Tour, which is the 15th. It is an excellent once-a-year opportunity to peek inside the creative home-bases of almost 50 artists.

Annie Eskelin, the hard-working executive director of Astoria Visual Arts who coordinates the annual effort, describes the number of artists as “extraordinary.”

One of the delights of the tour is the lack of boundaries. Mixed media proliferates, with fiber art, metal and stone sculptures, raku ceramics and found-object creations.

Jessamyn Grace West, another of the terrific “movers and shakers” in our coastal art world, is rounding up information for the city of Astoria to quantify all this.

Many know West from her leadership at the Astoria Arts and Movement Center. She is helping the city to find better ways to acknowledge the way the arts boost and diversify the North Coast economy.

The city identified supporting the arts in 2023 as one of its goals. Over my quarter century here, I have observed community leaders work to stem losses in our traditional economic double bill of fishing and logging, while welcoming a third leg, perhaps best labeled as “historical tourism,” to our economic repertoire. The arts makes our fourth attraction; it is well overdue that we fully acknowledge this.

West has set up a survey to collect information at https://astoria.art. She is seeking details of the various categories of artists, as well as making sure she has an up-to-date list of art venues and events. Aug. 1 is the deadline. 

All this should not be a surprise.

Janet Hutchings, Astoria Artwalk coordinator for the Astoria Downtown Historic District Association, kindly sends Coast Weekend a monthly list of participating galleries to help the newspaper promote the second Saturday event. In our July 10 edition, our coverage filled three colorful pages. To help, she provides her master list of addresses. It identifies 28 establishments that display or sell visual art. Twenty eight!

• Thanks to Alana Kujala who took time to share photos and a cute video online of the Missoula Children’s Theater production of “Snow White” at the Liberty Theater in Astoria July 12. That program — casting a kids’ show and staging a production six days later — is simply remarkable.