News
An Open Conversation with Tad Savinar and Linda Tesner
Artist Tad Savinar and curator and arts writer Linda Tesner discuss Savinar's new show "M U S I N G S FROM THE FUTURE," showing January 11, 2023 to February 25, 2023 at PDX CONTEMPORARY ART.
The exhibition marks Savinar's 50th year working as a artist.You can listen to the talk here:
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https://youtu.be/zvGhCHGB9KMJoe Rudko | Getty Museum
The Getty Museum recently published an article on Joe Rudko. as well as added his piece "B/W" to their permanent collection.
Congratulations, Joe!You can read the full article here:
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Artist Joe Rudko on the liberating power of collage
https://www.getty.edu/news/cut-and-paste/Tad Savinar | Art Focus KBOO interview
Tad Savinar was recently interviewed for Art Focus on KBOO radio.
"On Tuesday, January 17, 2023, at 11:30am Joseph Gallivan interviews artist Tad Savinar about his new show M U S I N G S FROM THE FUTURE, which is on now at PDX CONTEMPORARY ART though February 25. Savinar talks about the parlous state of politics and the planet, time spent at home during COVID-19, and outsourcing fabrication of his sculptures."
You can listen to the interview here: https://kboo.fm/media/113855-tad-savinar
Read moreJoe Rudko | The Stranger and Portland Mercury
Joe Rudko was the featured artist of the week for both the Portland Mercury and The Stranger. Congratulations, Joe!
You can read his interview for the Stranger with Corianton Hale were they discuss distorting perceptions, breaking rules, and the strange power of memory.Read the full interview here:
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https://www.thestranger.com/visual-art/2022/11/28/78744883/joe-rudkos-ab...OPEN THANKSGIVING WEEKEND
In A Spoon Is, Watt investigates the complex history of a silver spoon from
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the Buffalo History Museum’s collection of Hodinöhsö:ni’ objects.
The photogravure depicts a silver spoon that was rumored to be made from
silver coins received by a Seneca family who sold their land as a result of the Buffalo Creek Treaty.
During this time, Hodinöhsö:ni peoples, including the Seneca, were coerced into selling their ancestral lands.
This led to a rupture between nations and tribes. The event broke with the concept of a “dish with one spoon” often employed between tribes and in the context of treaties to avoid violent conflict. The “dish” represents the land that is to be shared peacefully and the “spoon” represents the individuals living on and using the resources of the land in a spirit of cooperation.
The text around the spoon reveals and amplifies the complicated story of this animate object, while also acknowledging the history of spoons in Hodinöhsö:ni culture. The handwritten language further reflects on spoons as a method of conveyance, community, sustenance, craft, and tradition.Marie Watt | Visiting Artist Lecturer at University of Oregon
Marie Watt will be the Visiting Artist Lecturer at University of Oregon Thursday, November 10 at 4:00 pm. Lectures will be in Lawrence Hall, Room 115, 1190 Franklin Boulevard, Eugene, OR 97403 and will also be live streamed and archived on the UO College of Design YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkb9sZzZWwEXut43HyuC0Xqr6k-DR_YPR
Marie Watt: Calling Companion Species
Thursday. November 10, 4:00 pmMore information:
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https://artdesign.uoregon.edu/art/events/visiting-artist-lecture/marie-wattA Conversation with Anna Gray + Ryan Wilson Paulsen
Please join us Saturday, October 22, at 10:30 am for a conversation with Anna Gray + Ryan Wilson Paulsen on the occasion of their exhibition sandwiches for every meal.
sandwiches for every meal is a gathering of works inspired by searching for moments of quiet attention where we might notice the architecture of rural road signs, fall asleep while reading, accept the feeling of speechlessness, dismantle our old textbooks, watch a rocky shore or the changing qualities of the moon. Where we might explore the possibilities of silence, fish all day, remember what it's like to be part of a crowd or make layered forms of sustenance from simple means.
Please RSVP for the conversation at info@pdxcontemporaryart.com.
Read moreAdam Sorensen | The Stranger & The Portland Mercury
Adam Sorensen was the featured artist of the week for both the Portland Mercury and The Stranger. Congratulations, Adam!
You can read his interview for the Stranger with Corianton Hale discussing nature’s grandeur, studio rituals, and the spirituality of painting here: https://www.thestranger.com/visual-art/2022/10/03/78560771/adam-sorensen...
Read moreNick Blosser | Ortlip Gallery Houghton University
Nick Blosser's exhibition "Territory" is now open at Ortlip Gallery at Houghton University in Houghton, NY.
More information about the show can be found here: https://www.houghton.edu/alumni/nick-blosser-exhibit-territory/
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Houghton University is proud to announce the exhibition of artist Nick Blosser’s paintings titled “Territory” on display from September 2nd through October 9th in the Ortlip Gallery at the Center for the Arts in Houghton, NY. All are welcome to attend the exhibit’s opening reception on September 2nd from 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. with a Gallery Talk beginning promptly at 7:00 p.m. Light refreshments will be served. If you are unable to attend that evening, the gallery is open Monday through Saturday from 9:00 a.m.- 6:00 p.m.Blosser received both his Bachelor and Master of Fine Arts degrees from The Ohio State University and went on to teach Art at Milligan College in Johnson City, Tennessee from 1991-2021. He has exhibited extensively throughout the country from New York City to Portland. In 1985 he received the prestigious Rome Prize and was selected as a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. He has received multiple fellowships and endowments including the 1991-92 National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowship. He is represented by PDX Contemporary Art Gallery in Portland, Oregon.
In recent years, the subject of Blosser’s paintings is what some might call “the everyday.” Blosser writes, “Each painting could be a new experience because I was getting my ideas from a source that provided ever replenishing motifs – nature. And, I could still use my love of form, shape and color and their abstract possibilities, but wed them with stuff from the natural world that many people encounter on an everyday basis but take for granted. From that time forward every new painting became a unique experience, and I’ve never become bored with painting nature as a starting point.”
To more fully appreciate Blosser’s work one must suspend realism and view it as abstract. In other words, Blosser removes layers of what the literalist perceives, distilling his subject to the raw, bare essence. Somehow, by this stripping process, he draws out a far deeper beauty that many of us are prone to overlook. Richard Cummings wrote in the July 2011 issue of Ruminate Magazine that part of Blosser’s artistic brilliance is his ability to make his subject matter something that we all can relate to and feel a sense of familiarity with. Cummings states, “Far from a sentimental experience of nature, Blosser peers more deeply, seeing beyond the outward forms, allowing us a glimpse of the spiritual essences of the rolling hills and countryside. The trees, the bushes and even the hills are filled with presence and beauty. Though his subject is northeast Tennessee, the world that Blosser reveals in his egg tempera and watercolor landscapes describe the subliminal mystery of every landscape. His work points to the ‘more’ of existence and rejects the ‘only’ of the superficial.”
Read moreConversation with Adam Sorensen and Sara Krajewski
Sara Krajewski, Portland Art Museum's Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, speaks with artist Adam Sorensen about his show "Water Color", landscape painting, and climate change at PDX CONTEMPORARY ART gallery in Portland, Oregon, September 22, 2022.
The full conversation can be watched here: https://youtu.be/WhRDT4kPLJk
Read moreMarie Watt | Stelo Arts
Gather: Marie Watt and Cannupa Hanska Luger at Stelo Arts.
How are we connected? What are the ties that bind us? These are some of the questions that Cannupa Hanska Luger and Marie Watt have been talking through via their joint residency with Stelo. As we celebrate the culmination of their multi-year residency, you are invited to the exhibition Gather, on view at Stelo August 13 - November 27, 2022. Visitors to the Stelo flex space will engage with pieces from Luger and Watt’s individual art practices, as well as their first collaborative art work, Each/Other. Watt and Luger merged their practices to create this sculpture with hundreds of people from around the world.
The artists asked participants to embroider messages while considering “if acts of collaboration help heal broken bonds with the environment and with each other.” The artworks on view will be large in scale, sculptural, and will involve video and sound. Visitors will be encouraged to spend time in the space being with the work, and connecting with the potential for art to engage our hearts and minds.___
“Vivid Dream (Awakening) is in many ways a prototype and a test. It is a project I’ve been wanting, dreaming, to realize for some time. Gather is the perfect venue for its debut. The piece itself is the result of gathered stories, gathered jingles, and or gathered relationships.” - Marie
Opening Event: Saturday, August 13, 2-5pm.
From 2:30-3:30pm Stelo co-leader Tia Katcharian will lead a walk-through conversation with the artists and local fabrication supporter Neal Fegan from Camp Colton, and Shir Grisanti, founder of c3:initiative.August 13 - November 27, 2022
Gallery hours: Friday - Sunday, 12-5pm412 NW 8th Ave, Portland, OR 97209
All programs are free and open to the public and are ADA accessible. Face masks are recommended.
Read moreEllen George | NINE Gallery
Visit Ellen George's solo exhibition at NINE Gallery, These Small Gentle Shapes, open August 5 - 27.
NINE Gallery is located inside Blue Sky Gallery.
122 NW 8th Ave Portland, OR
Gallery hours: Wednesday - Saturday from 12 - 5 pm
Blue Sky requires a mask while inside the gallery.Artist statement for These Small Gentle Shapes:
I hand-form these sculptures using dense gypsum casting stone. It’s a durational process. I am rolling, folding, manipulating soft lumps of the mixture in the palm of my hand. I wait for the subtle changes that signal time is beginning to run out before turning to stone. It feels like listening for something that is silent.
Although I have intention, each sculpture, using time and gravity, has the final say in its own making. Placed on its supports, each continues to move until it stops.
I’m given a period of focused, satisfying engagement. In the end, these small gentle shapes are the result of letting go, letting them happen.
For additional information: https://www.blueskygallery.org/nine-gallery
Read moreJames Lavadour's My Twin in Order / Reorder: Experiments in Collections at Hudson River Museum
Order / Reorder: Experiments in Collections, a long-term installation at Hudson River Museum in NYC, has opened on June 17, 2022 and will run through September 3, 2022. This group exhibition features My Twin, a painting by our represented artist James Lavadour. The exhibition will explore new approaches to looking at American art that reconsider past and present expressions of American identity.
Order / Reorder ranges across genres from portraiture and figural studies to still life, landscape, and abstraction. Rather than structured chronologically, the installation is designed to spark discussion through juxtapositions of styles, outlooks, and eras. Viewers are challenged to find connections in unexpected groupings of objects.
James Lavadour has been living and working on the Umatilla Reservation in Northeast Oregon. Curator Prudence F. Roberts wrote the following about the visceral feelings that Lavadour’s paintings evoke in conjunction to his identity:
“His paintings are shaped by a deep knowledge of the land that has surrounded him and his ancestors for generations: a knowledge that lives within him as a kind of cellular memory. Thus, in painting, his gestures unleash that memory. The acts of laying down paint, of scraping, of building up layers, often over long periods of time, replicate the ways in which natural forces and human histories have shaped the rivers and cliff faces, the rocks, and the hills that he sees on his almost daily drives. In his works, past and present collide in forms, spaces, and actions built of paint. They speak to place and they speak to history.”
For more information about Order / Reorder please visit: www.hrm.org/exhibitions/order-reorder/
Read moreD.E. May: Making a Mark | Contemporary Drawings at The Portland Art Museum
Georgina Reskala | Upstart Modern
Karpa de Nepantla, a two person exhibition with Georgina Reskala and Beth Davila Waldman, will be opening at Upstart Modern in Sausalito, California on June 2.
“Responding to the concept of psychological borders and borderlands, artists Georgina Reskala and Beth Davila Waldman present a selection of individual works negotiating the open space between two cultural worlds through the lens of issues such as gender, race, and colonialism. Both Reskala and Waldman bring the depth of their personal perspectives as women of color and mixed LatinX origins to their artwork in “Karpa de Nepantla.”
An Artist Talk with SF Moma Assistant Curator of Photography will be by invitation only, with a recording to follow.
Upstart Modern
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4000 Bridgeway Ste 100
Sausalito, CA 94965Victoria Haven | Walker Art Center
solid object/SANDWICH and solid objects/VOIDS, is a collaborative performance project by Victoria Haven and Heather Kravas, taking place May 12 and 14 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
“Honoring individual and communal practice, solid objects is a multiyear collaborative project between Seattle-based choreographer Heather Kravas and visual artist Victoria Haven that unites the forces of dance and drawing. Each brings a range of influences: with roots in feminist and punk aesthetics, Kravas generates ecstatic and meticulous physical states; Haven activates space through architectural interventions for the performers to embody.
For this Walker premiere, they offer complementary presentations created for the stage and public spaces: solid objects/VOIDS and solid objects/SANDWICH. Viewed independently or as a whole, the works illuminate each physical space and audience as its own transitory and charged universe.
The onstage performance solid objects/VOIDS proposes necessary expressions of radical intimacy and devotion with architecture, light, bodies, and objects. The piece includes a new electro-acoustic score and sound installation by composer Zeena Parkins, lighting design by Madeline Best, and costumes by womxn’s rites. Featuring Kravas and company members Aretha Aoki, Cecilia Eliceche, Joey Kipp, Jennifer Kjos, opal, and Symone Sanz in collaboration with three of Minnesota’s most distinctive dancer/choreographers: José A. Luis, Judith Holo Shuǐ Xiān, and Chris Schlichting.”
For more information:
https://walkerart.org/calendar/2022/heather-kravas-and-victoria-haven-so...
https://walkerart.org/calendar/2022/heather-kravas-and-victoria-haven-so...(Image: solid objects residency, Oxbow, Seattle, 2018. Pictured: Cecilia Eliceche and Heather Kravas. Photo: Anna Fotheringham.)
Read morePDX Has A New Address
We have a new address!
1825 B NW Vaughn Street
Portland, Oregon
97209After nearly 25 years, our chapter in the Pearl District has closed and we will be moving into our new location on 1825 B NW Vaughn Street Portland, Oregon 97209.
We are excited to welcome you into our freshly completed gallery space for the opening of Calling Invisible Doctors, an exhibition of new work by James Lavadour. Our tentative opening date is April 15th, please call or email us to confirm before arriving as construction is still in progress and plans may change. Additional information about the exhibition to follow.
We will be spending the next two weeks moving and settling into our new space and during that time will have limited access to telephone and email. Please leave us a message and we will reach out to you as soon as we can. For urgent matters you may contact Jane Beebe at (503) 913-3754.
Thank you for your continued support and we look forward to seeing you soon.
Read moreMarie Watt | Knapp Chair, Visiting Scholar at the University of San Diego
Marie Watt will be the Knapp Chair, Visiting Scholar at the University of San Diego this month.
Join February 16, 2022, for a public lecture at the Humanities Center at 5 PM (PST). The lecture will also be accessible via Zoom (https://www.sandiego.edu/galleries/exhibitions/hoehn-family-galleries).
This lecture coincides with "Storywork: The Prints of Marie Watt", a major survey exhibition organized by the University of San Diego and the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation.
Read moreD.E. May Archiving Project | The Oregonian
Keen writer and arts and architecture appreciator Briana Miller finds ten great shows around Portland with a wide range subjects from Black Lives Matter to Swedish log cabins to D.E. May archives in today's Oregonian.
Read the full article here: https://www.oregonlive.com/entertainment/2022/01/10-shows-in-portland-ar...
Read moreExtended: The World of Jeffry Mitchell Pop Up and Online Shop
The World of Jeffry Mitchell Pop-Up
The pop-up is also available to shop online: https://pdxcontemporaryart.com/shop
A portion of the sales from the pop-up will benefit the Portland Art Museum’s Connection Campaign for the Mark Rothko Pavilion. The pavilion will connect the Portland Art Museum’s two historic buildings on all four floors and integrate universal design principles throughout the campus to ensure that all people will enjoy improved access throughout the buildings to the Museum’s entire art exhibition and programmatic spaces. At its core, it underscores the Museum’s greater mission — building community through the arts.
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