News

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.

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“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, 12-5pm

412 NW 8th Ave, Portland, OR 97209

All programs are free and open to the public and are ADA accessible. Face masks are recommended.

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

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/

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
4000 Bridgeway Ste 100
Sausalito, CA 94965

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-s…
https://walkerart.org/calendar/2022/heather-kravas-and-victoria-haven-s…

(Image: solid objects residency, Oxbow, Seattle, 2018. Pictured: Cecilia Eliceche and Heather Kravas. Photo: Anna Fotheringham.)

We have a new address!

1825 B NW Vaughn Street
Portland, Oregon
97209

After 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.

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.

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-a…

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.