Member Creativity Takes Many Shapes

By Jake Ten Pas

MAC members make many kinds of art, but in a more reductive sense, there are two basic types of club creators. The first grew up within the community, learning their discipline with MAC as a backdrop, while the second honed their skills beyond these walls, finding inspiration to join after developing a distinctive voice on their own. Like America, the club is stronger when outsiders join their voices to its chorus, and yet its strengths also are evident in the dulcet tones developed from within.

This year’s showcase features both sides of the imaginary coin, and either way you flip it, the community wins when beauty in any form flourishes in the world. Lifelong member Charlene Hannibal is a ballet dancer and choreographer who harnessed the power of her belief in movement to found Open Space, a dance school and company located in North Portland. Painter Ningshu Fang and author and screenwriter Daniel H. Wilson joined MAC in more recent years, and both have found a welcoming new home base from which to pursue their muses.

These artists represent just a few of the many suggestions received by The Winged M for feature in the October issue, so if you don’t see your favorite maker this time around, stay tuned in the months and years to come. Also, don’t forget to keep your eyes open when going about your club routine. You never know if the person on the treadmill next to you is a singer in an alternative rock group, works in stop-motion animation, or might become the next fashion designer to take Portland style around the world.

Ningshu Fang

If home is where the heart is, then what happens when an artist calls many places home? Theoretically, her heart might be divided between far-flung locations or, as in the case of Ningshu Fang, grow to encompass all of them. Born and raised in Shanghai, China, she also lived more than a decade in Japan before eventually moving to the Pacific Northwest. All of these places are reflected in her work, which brings together watercolors, traditional calligraphy, and even origami paper.

“I think my creations have transformed over time. At the beginning, it was lot of Chinese themes and scenery because I was struggling with being homesick at the time. Later on, it evolved to become broader themes about nature, about things that bring us joy. One thing I appreciate so much about the Northwest is the natural beauty that I’ve never seen anywhere else, and also the idea of how we are sustained by all these things around us,” she says.

“Especially during COVID, I think the crisis made us very easily fall into too much focus on ourselves and living in our head. That gave me a very good pause — the time to really look outside and see how much we should appreciate, how little we are, and how humble we should be. We are just a very small part of the circle of life.”

After her parents fled China to establish a life in Japan around the time of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, Fang was raised by

her grandparents. Her grandmother was an art professor and shared her enthusiasm for museums and traditional Chinese forms with Ningshu at an early age. Now, Fang does the same, encouraging her own kids, Eli and Kaia, to pursue art by taking a wide array of classes, and she says her son has been particularly receptive.

“He’s very into animation, loves stop-motion, and makes small videos that tell stories. It’s very interesting,” she says. “He’s big into Laika, and says he wants to work there someday.”

Fang says her own parents didn’t see the potential of her pursuing art, which made moving in with them in Kobe at the age of 18 — traditionally one of liberation and self-discovery — challenging. They pushed her to go to college to land a more pragmatic career, but along the way, her study abroad program took her to Eastern Washington University in Spokane.

“I felt a lot of connection with the Northwest part of America. We used to go to Seattle a lot, and I just had a very good impression, and was thinking, ‘Someday, maybe I want to live in the United States,’” she recalls. But first, it was back to Japan, where she was introduced to her husband, Daniel Barbato, through a mutual friend in 2007. He was living in Shanghai at the time, running a business importing artisan goods, furniture, and antiques to the U.S., and eventually she moved again to join him. In 2016 they relocated to Portland, where Barbato owns and operates Asia America imports on Southeast Taylor Street.

Prior to that, in 2010, they had Eli, which spurred Fang to take a fresh look at her life. “Before I had my kids, I was working corporate jobs, and after that I quit to become a stay-at-home mom,” she explains. “That was the time I started to feel like, ‘What am I now? What should I do?”

Since 2013, she’s been developing her own artistic talents. Both the memory of her grandmother and a creative correspondence with her mother-in-law led her back to painting. The latter “would always send me greeting cards she drew herself to cheer me up, so in return, I started doing handpainted cards. That inspired me to start creating my first larger art projects.”

Now, Fang shows her work yearly at the Lan Su Chinese Garden, and she’s been featured in shows as far afield as New York. She says she’s learned a lot from her audience about what speaks to people via emails she’s received telling stories of what her art means to them.

“I started to realize that there are universal stories that can speak to all, and that has guided me in my work. Appreciation is the first step to starting a conversation. They want to know the story behind it. It opens a dialogue for them to get a window into a different life experience or a different culture. At the moment, that is so meaningful to me.

“For my husband, also, returning to the states after living in Asia was a chance to bring the cultures a little bit closer together. A lot of the conflicts we see today come from fear or not understanding. With the development of technology, I think people have become less and less communicative. It’s really important to both my husband and me, who have lived in different places, who have different cultural backgrounds, to be in the role of a bridge, to open those dialogues.”

Listening to Fang talk about building bridges, one also gets the sense that she’s crossed her own. So, does the Pacific Northwest feel like home now? “Yes, I am slowly starting to feel it, and MAC has definitely made me feel like part of the community.”

Daniel H. Wilson

Remember the time giant robots battled outside the Sports Pub? How about when that space virus got loose in the Reading Lounge, resulting in strange mutations? Not ringing any bells?

The mind of a sci-fi writer can be a pretty weird place. Daniel H. Wilson might look like just another dad trying to fend off his daughter’s request for a soda in the Cornerstone Lounge, but behind his bespectacled eyes lies a truly uncommon imagination. When Wilson’s in the clubhouse, who knows what sagas are taking shape while the next table over orders burgers and fries?

“I’m constantly tackling things I’m thinking about metaphorically through science fiction,” says the author of New York Times bestseller Robopocalypse. “A lot of what I was writing about early on was about our love/hate relationship with technology and the idea of what makes us human. You have a robot character that you start adding humanity to it, and at what point does it become a person? You take a human character, and you start stripping away humanity, and at what point has that person lost their humanity? It’s really fun to play with those themes.”

Based on his books’ popularity, it must be fun to read about them, too. His Robogenesis was a Los Angeles Times bestseller, How to Survive a Robot Uprising won a Rave Award from Wired and was chosen by the American Library Association as a “2007 Popular Paperback for Young Adults.” He scored again in 2019 by writing the sequel to Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain, which also became a bestseller. He’s sold a number of screenplays, been invited to speak at science fiction conferences, and even spent time writing for DC Comics.

“I got really lucky. My first novel was a bestseller, and it got picked up to be turned into a film. It never happened, but it was a lot of news, and I got a lot of opportunities all at once. I was a kid in a candy store. I wrote video games. I wrote for … the Earth-Two series. I wrote graphic novels, movies, and television. I mean, I just had a great time exploring how all of these different mediums work,” Wilson says.

Wilson spent his childhood in Oklahoma, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, before attending Carnegie Mellon, where he earned his PhD in robotics. “Growing up, I really liked science fiction and science equally. It turns out it’s a lot easier to get a degree in science than it is to become a science fiction author,” he explains. “Then, when I graduated, I had this opportunity to write science fiction, and I just took it. I kind of assumed at some point I’d circle back and get a real job, and it just never happened. I’m finally coming to terms with the idea that I may not be a scientist anymore. I think I’m an artist. It’s a hard thing for me to acknowledge.”

Wilson’s wife, Anna, is still very much a scientist who wears a number of hats at OHSU. She’s an associate professor of pediatrics, associate director of faculty development, and works in the Department of Pediatrics’ Institute on Development and Disability. She also recently published the nonfiction book When Children Feel Pain on Harvard Press.

Together, they’re raising Cora (12), Conrad (10), and 4-year-old Camille, who quietly scrolls on an iPad during Daniel’s interview, occasionally asking to show her dad something that’s captured her fancy. The family first joined MAC after moving into the neighborhood about seven years ago, and the elder Wilson says it’s served them well.

“It’s amazing to have all these facilities sort of siloed right up the street from us. Having three kids, it’s extremely useful to be able to walk down here and just let them loose and do all the things you do. Sports and eating and swimming and everything.” Knowing his kids are in good hands also allows Wilson the time to find a high-backed chair in MAC’s “library” and get some writing done.

Right now, he says his biggest goal is getting one of his stories onto the big screen before he turns 50. He’s got one script he wrote with Academy Award-winning writer Sian Heder (winner of the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for CODA) attached to direct at Paramount, and another with Reservation Dogs creator Sterlin Harjo at Amazon. Wilson points out that screenwriting can be agonizing because he really never knows when or if a project will make it to production.

Speaking more generally about his profession, and perhaps only unintentionally touching upon the uncertainties of life as a writer, Wilson says: “I’ve never thought that my job as a science fiction author is to predict the future. Actually, I think it’s much more important to predict and find interesting ways in which people interact with technology, and ideally something you’d never expect. Technology is only one-half of the equation. The other half is the society in which the technology lands. My job is to entertain people and also to make them think. That’s really what I try to do.”

Charlene Hannibal

“Dancers look like dancers when they’re dancing all day,” Charlene Hannibal says.

If it sounds like she’s stating the obvious, additional context is required. Mainly, a life spent in ballet, chasing unattainable perfection as reflected in the faces of exacting teachers, personal insecurities, and sometimes dangerous compulsions.

Hannibal knows what it’s like to spend every waking moment either dancing or wishing you were. She’s obsessed over the reactions of her instructors, been shamed for the shape of her body, and gone through withdrawals when injuries of overexertion kept her off the floor.

“I can’t ever remember a time when dancing wasn’t my favorite thing to do. I loved performing,” she says. “Once I hear the music, the way that dance makes me feel is the most emotionally connected to the world or myself that I ever feel. Just like I’m right-handed, I’m a dancer. It’s part of my identity, and at probably the age of three or four, I had no doubt in my mind that’s what I wanted to do with my life. It was a calling, and sometimes a burden.”

As a tall child, Hannibal was told that she didn’t fit with the other dancers, and when she started to develop curves, those also were viewed as problematic. Still, she persevered, and after training with Oregon Ballet Theatre, she danced professionally for many years in Portland with OBT and the Bay Area for companies such as Company C Contemporary Ballet, Oakland Ballet, and a small company called Imagery.

“The beauty of live performance, of dancing or other performing arts, is you don’t have time to get stuck in your head. You have to keep going. As an anxious person, that’s been the best for me. You have to stay in the moment,” Hannibal says. “When I retired from performing, I had knee surgery, and it was the first time in a long time that I stopped dancing. It was horrendous! I was used to taking classes six days a week since I was 10, and then all of a sudden I was 30, and it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, my body’s not moving. My brain’s going to explode.’”

Fortunately, it didn’t. Instead, Hannibal rehabilitated herself. She fell back on yoga and other practices she’d developed growing up at MAC. She and her husband, software director and DJ Colin White, had two children, Winston (9) and Millie (7), and life managed to carry on.

But dance never left her, and as soon as Hannibal was able, she got back to it. In 2020, she and two partners incorporated Open Space, which opened its doors in April 2021. While Hannibal hopes to nurture children for whom, like her, dance is a must, she also works hard to make sure that the experience is more sweet than bitter.

“I think we’re building a culture where the respect is really mutual with our students. We still hold them to a very high standard. You’ve got to show up every day and be ready. You’ve got to get your sleep and take care of your instrument. You’ve got to work diligently on your craft when you’re in the studio,” she says.

“But I’m never going to tell a kid to lose weight, ever. I don’t talk about it. If someone has an eating issue — that comes up a lot in dance — they can come to me, but we do not have body standards because, in my opinion, your body’s your body. You’re going to do the best you can. The earlier you mess with it, the worse it gets as you become an adult. Our approach is just, work your butt off, and your body will probably look really amazing.”

As a mother who works long hours, Hannibal is acutely aware of how little time there is in the day. At the moment, she’s preparing for the Open Space company’s performances of the NOT-Cracker — a whimsical, nontraditional holiday show — on Dec. 11 and 12 at The Royal Durst Theatre in Vancouver, Washington. She doesn’t want her students, or her children, wasting time stressing about what they can’t control. That makes Winston’s interest in gymnastics all the more satisfying to her as a lifelong athlete and artist who has suffered for her passion.

“I could not be more excited about the Gymnastics Program at MAC. It’s exactly what I would hope for, for Winston. They push them hard; he’s practicing nine to 12 hours a week, but they’re kind. He constantly has a smile on his face, and they’re always giving him high fives.” Hannibal gives credit to Rob Saliski and the rest of the Gymnastics staff for creating a positive culture with strong discipline and clear communication that avoids the severity she experienced growing up.

“He’s becoming friends with all of his little buddies, and I think the whole thing about MAC is the community. I kept my membership because of my family. My parents, my sister, and my nieces and nephew, they all come to see him compete. When we have the MAC banquet, they get awards, and there’s just such a sense of celebration and community. Also, there’s excellence.”

Learn more about Fang at shanghaidragonfly.com, Wilson at danielhwilson.com, and Hannibal at openspace.dance.