Search results for ""Hallie Ford Museum of Art,US""

Richard C. Elliott (1945-2008) was a nationally recognized mixed media artist who lived and worked in Ellensburg, Washington. Born in Portland, Oregon, Elliott received his BA degree from Central Washington University in Ellensburg in art and economics. During the 1970s, he made meticulous drawings of his friends and other subjects, weaving light and form together to capture a particular moment in time. By the early 1980s, however, he no longer felt that he could express what he wanted to about light and natural structure through drawing. He began to explore primary colors and light active materials, and by 1987, decided to focus on the safety reflector as his medium of choice. During the 1990s and early 2000s, Elliott created a broad range of work that combined safety reflectors with two-dimensional geometric designs: site specific installations, reflectors mounted onto wood and canvas, and numerous public art commissions, including the Hallie Ford Museum of Art. He even experimented with neon in his ongoing exploration of light. During the last year of his life, he turned his attention to a series of computer-generated prints utilizing thousands of different colors and geometric designs.

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Manuel Izquierdo (1925-2009) was a major talent and charismatic personality in Oregon’s modern art movement in the second half of the twentieth century. This book traces his compelling story of poverty-stricken origins in Madrid, his introduction to woodworking by his cabinet-maker grandfather, his childhood escape from Spain following the Spanish Civil War and emigration from France during World War II, and his life as a sculptor and printmaker in Portland from the 1940s to the twenty-first century. Inspired by mythology, nature, and art ranging Goya to Surrealism, Izquierdo’s work is sometimes somber, often festive, and always fascinating with a combination of tradition, modern art, and a world view informed by his odyssey from war-torn Europe to the Pacific Northwest.

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This book on the contemporary painter and printmaker James B. Thompson is a meditation on the possibility of discovering, in an American landscape wracked by the devastation of global warming, flood, drought, and environmental disaster, an uncanny beauty, even a source of affirmation and hope. Thompson's entirely abstract canvases and prints offer themselves up as metaphors for landscape, as terrains full of incident designed to reveal not only a sense of what we have lost but the creative energy necessary to renew our imaginative capacity to move on. They constitute a new sublime, a vision of something infinite that we cannot quite comprehend, even as they seek to convey landscape's very essence. Henry M. Sayre's introductory essay and commentaries on individual works place Thompson's work in the context of landscape painting as a whole and offer the viewer insight into the meaning of the works themselves.

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A ceramic artist and printmaker, Boyden has explored a wide variety of themes in his prints over the past twenty years, including animals, the landscape, and most recently, the human figure. In this suite of 96 drypoints, Boyden set out to depict horrendous and abhorrent images of humanity: "characters from creation's ineptitudes, vagaries, vengeances, and sad jokes." In the process of creating the series of three-inch-by-two-inch plates, the artist came to the realization that a process that was born in anger and disillusionment had metamorphosed into a state of empathy. Included in this exhibition catalog are prose pieces by Kim Stafford and David James Duncan, and well as a discussion with the artist on his use of the drypoint technique.

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Since the 1980s, Oregon-based art collectors George and Colleen Hoyt have amassed one of the finest private collections of Northwest Coast art in the United States. Transformations traces the history of contemporary Northwest Coast Native art since the 1950s. Included are works by some of the region's foremost Native artists of the past half century, including Robert Davidson, Doug Cranmer, Beau Dick, and Susan Point. The collection of over six hundred prints and carvings by over one hundred artists is a promised gift from George and Colleen Hoyt to the Hallie Ford Museum of Art. Richly illustrated with color photographs, the book features a foreword by John Olbrantz, an essay by Rebecca J. Dobkins, and artist biographies by Tasia Riley. Exhibition dates: Hallie Ford Museum of Art, September 17–December 17, 2022

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The Oregon artist Nelson Sandgren (1917-2006) worked in three distinct media - oil painting, watercolor, and lithography - distinguishing himself in each of these modes throughout his sixty-five-year career. Nelson Sandgren: An Artist's Life is the first in-depth study of this mid-century Oregon modernist who was born in Canada, grew up in Chicago, and moved with his family to Oregon during the Depression. As a watercolorist who loved to paint on site, often on the Oregon coast, Sandgren worked in the tradition of Winslow Homer and John Marin. In oil painting, he combined modernist abstraction with Pacific Northwest landscape imagery, in this practice paralleling Louis Bunce, Carl Morris, and other Oregon moderns. As a lithographer, Sandgren was central to the printmaking culture that Gordon Gilkey promoted at Oregon State university, where Sandgren taught for thirty-eight years. Roger Hull provides a detailed biography and a close analysis of Sandgren's key artworks while demonstrating Sandgren's significant place in Pacific Northwest modernist tradition.

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James B. Thompson: Fragments in Time explores the development of Thompson’s work over the past two decades, from his Certain Situations series of the mid-1990s to his more recent Forgotten Biography of Tools series from 2015. Bob Hicks best describes Thompson’s work: “[it] grapples with the perplexing issues of cultural and geological change. [Thompson] ranges freely through ancient and forgotten forms to confront the mysteries and fractures of the universe, investigating not just the abandoned and the unknown, but the limits and possibilities of the art forms, often with understated wit.” James B. Thompson was born in Chicago in 1951 and received his MFA from Washington University in 1977. Since 1986, Thompson has been a member of the art faculty at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, where he teaches courses in painting, printmaking, drawing, and design. His art has appeared in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and is included in public and private collections throughout the United States and Europe. Thompson is recognized as one of the most interesting and innovative artists in Oregon, and the Hallie Ford Museum of Art is proud to honor him with this twenty-year retrospective.

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Mel Katz is a highly regarded Portland sculptor and teacher whose work is firmly rooted in the principles of geometric abstraction. He moved to Portland, Oregon, in 1964 to teach at Portland State University, where he taught for the next thirty-two years. He helped found the Portland Center for the Visual Arts in 1971, one of the first alternative artist spaces in the country. Originally trained as a painter, Katz has produced a remarkable body of work over the past fifty years that reflects his unique journey from painter to sculptor, working in many different media, including polyurethane, fiberglass, wood, formica, steel, and aluminum. Katz has been featured in numerous one-person and group exhibitions throughout the United States, including the First Western States Biennial. He was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the Portland Art Museum in 1988 and was included in the traveling exhibition, Still Working, in 1994. His work is included in the collections of the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Portland Art Museum, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Oregon Arts Commission, the City of Seattle, and many national corporations.

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Timeless Renaissance features 74 recently rediscovered drawings from the 16th through the early 18th centuries. The book offers a fascinating glimpse of Count Allessandro Maggiori (1764-1834) as an art collector and reveals the cultural and historical importance of the collection he assembled in his villa near Monte San Giusto. All of the works were clearly influenced by Raphael's 16th-century Renaissance ideals of beauty, which were further developed throughout the 17th century by Bolognese masters such as Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni, and Domenichino. The Maggiori collection embraces this Neo-Renaissance, or "Timeless Renaissance." Mostly gathered in the years of the Napoleonic dominion over the Italian peninsula, the drawings selected by Maggiori subtly reveal the emergence of Italian collective identity and a new civic awareness before Italy became an autonomous state. Deeply indebted to the seats of Catholicism in Rome and Bologna, the works represent a tradition opposed to the ideals of post-revolutionary France. They are distinctly Italian.

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Harry Widman: Image, Myth, and Modernism chronicles the life and times of the highly regarded Portland painter and teacher, who taught for 36 years at the Pacific Northwest College of Art (formerly the Portland Art Museum School) and served as interim dean during a critical period in the college’s history. Responding to the work of artists as diverse as Wassily Kandinsky and Robert Motherwell, Widman forged a mature style that combined an abstract vocabulary and sensibility with social and political commentary.

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George Johanson – painter, printmaker, and teacher – was born in Seattle, studied art in Portland, Oregon, and lived in New York in the early 1950s before returning to Portland. Whether in New York jazz clubs and slaughterhouses, in Mexican villages, at the Rose Festival held each year in Portland, at rehearsals of the Oregon Symphony, or in life drawing sessions with artist friends, making images on paper has been a basic element for Johanson throughout his life. The haunting power of Johanson’s art originates, almost always, in drawing. Johanson’s art is concerned with memory and recollection, dream and fantasy, biography and autobiography, physical and imaginative detachment yet sensual engagement. He is also the painter of fires that break out in city buildings or spew from volcanoes, and he often sets fire’s rampage alongside human lassitude and seeming indifference.

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Frank Boyden is a highly regarded Oregon ceramic artist and printmaker who has created a stunning body of work based on the flora and fauna of Oregon. Boyden has explored a wide variety of themes in his prints, including animals, the landscape, and most recently, the human figure. An essay by Prudence Roberts places Boyden's work within the context of regional and American art. Ian Boyden discusses his father as a printmaker and book collaborator.

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Louis Bunce: Dialogue with Modernism explores and assesses the art and life of the iconic Pacific Northwest modernist painter and printmaker who engaged with American and European modern art from Surrealism to Post-Modernism. Based in Portland, Oregon, Louis Bunce maintained strong ties with artists of the New York School, counting Jackson Pollock as colleague and friend. In his fifty-year career, Bunce (1907-1983) created a wide-ranging body of work that both reflects and illuminates twentieth-century modernism. He pioneered serigraphy as a fine art in the Northwest and as a painter infused painterly abstraction with references to the topography and light of the Northwest.

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Marie Watt is an American artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and Portland, Oregon. Born in 1967 to the son of Wyoming ranchers and a daughter of the Turtle Clan of the Seneca Nation (Haudenosaunee), she identifies herself as "half cowboy and half Indian." Formally, her work draws from Indigenous design principles, oral tradition, personal experience, and western art history. Her approach to art-making is shaped by the proto-feminism of Haudenosaunee matrilineal custom, political work by Native artists in the '60s, a discourse on multiculturalism, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art, as well as a strong belief in interaction with her audience. Like Jasper Johns, she is interested in "things that the mind already knows." Unlike the Pop artists, she uses a vocabulary of natural materials (stone, corn husks, wool, cedar) and forms (blankets, pillows, bridges) that are universal to human experience and noncommercial in character. Marie Watt: Lodge offers the first comprehensive view of her work, covering a period extending from the mid-1990s to the present.

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Henk Pander has lived in Portland, Oregon, for 45 years but describes himself as a "reluctant immigrant" from his native Holland. He has maintained a cultural double vision. He records and interprets American technology, materialism, topography, and disaster in paintings and drawings that radically revise aspects of traditional Dutch painting in order to make hard-hitting American art. At the same time, he frequently paints specifically European scenes and subjects. His painted narratives range from memories of Nazi-occupied Holland, to a conflation of the American West with Deep Space, to the burning of the New Carissa off the Oregon coast. Combining personal and art historical memory with the subject matter of modern life, Pander creates works that are profound in their seriousness, dramatic intensity, and expressive power.

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Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts at 25 explores the first twenty-five years of a remarkable nonprofit printmaking and traditional arts studio based on the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in eastern Oregon, the only such center located on a reservation community in the United States. Art historian Prudence Roberts, drawing from conversations with CSIA founder, the artist James Lavadour, narrates the institute’s history from its beginnings through the establishment of a professional quality printmaking program and an international reputation. Native American art scholar heather ahtone and curator Rebecca Dobkins trace the development of indigenous printmaking in North America, further contextualizing this story. Over sixty color plates will illustrate selected work from the dozens of artists, indigenous and non-indigenous, who have completed residencies at CSIA since its founding, including luminaries of contemporary Native American art Rick Bartow, Joe Feddersen, Jeffrey Gibson, Edgar Heap of Birds, James Lavadour, Lillian Pitt, Wendy Red Star, and Marie Watt.

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Breath of Heaven, Breath of Earth: Ancient Near Eastern Art from American Collections encompasses the geographic regions of Mesopotamia, Syria and the Levant, and Anatolia and Iran, and explores several broad themes found in the art of the ancient Near East: gods and goddesses, men and women, and both real and supernatural animals. These art objects reveal a wealth of information about the people and cultures that produced them: their mythology, religious beliefs, concept of kingship, social structure, and daily life.

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