News

Marie Watt will be a panelist in Quilts, Blankets, and Tapestry: Contemporary Art and Textiles with Aaron McIntosh, Marie Watt, and Ebony Patterson with the Berkley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive on Wednesday, April 21, 4 PM PDT.

Discover the innovative practices of three artists who have turned to textiles—incorporating or referring to them in their work—in this discussion moderated by BAMPFA Director Julie Rodrigues Widholm, presented in conjunction with Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective.

To register please visit:
https://bampfa.org/event/quilts-blankets-and-tapestry-contemporary-art-…

In conjunction with Yamamoto Masao’s current exhibition Bonsai, PDX CONTEMPORARY ART is pleased to present an online showing of a selection of works from the Artist’s earlier series A Box of Ku and Nakazora.

Taking images of everyday occurrences, and oftentimes overlooked moments, Yamamoto Masao makes us further consider what is happening in the world around us— to stop, look, and savor. His undeniable ability to capture seemingly simple, mundane moments and make them feel complex, transitory, and poetic is a hallmark of his practice.

Small silver gelatin prints, hand-toned and slightly worn, present like found objects. Made in editions of 20 or 40, the Artist treats each individual piece as one in its own— slightly scratching through the gelatin surfaces, adding small specks of gold paint, weathering the edges, and toning the images. Purposefully small prints are carried around in the Artist’s pocket to add a natural wear to the image. With each finesse and subtle mark, poetic and mysterious objects are born.

To view the online shop visit: www.pdxcontemporaryart.com/shop
10% of all proceeds from this pop-up will be donated to Portland Japanese Garden.

Georgina Reskala is an Artist in Residence at the Iris Project in Venice, California for the month of March.

Iris Project Residency offers artists, curators, writers, and creative thinkers from diverse backgrounds and disciplines the space and time to push boundaries in their practice, freed from the pressure of production or material exchange. We strongly believe that when creativity is uncoupled from commercial requirements, new directions and insights will emerge, and that these benefits will extend beyond the artist's time at the residency.

Congratulations, Georgina!

We are looking forward to her solo show in May 2021!

For more information: https://www.irisprojectresidency.com/residents/georgina-reskala-6wsby-k…

James Lavadour’s painting Golden, 2018 was acquired by the High Desert Museum through the Oregon Arts Commission Arts Acquisition Fund. Today this work was featured as part of their permanent collection in Artforum's announcement of the High Desert Museum's recent gift of $6 million from the Roundhouse Foundation for capital improvements to increase the number of works on permanent display.

https://www.artforum.com/news/oregon-s-high-desert-museum-receives-6-mi…

Gus Van Sant is an honoree for the 2021 Cinema Unbound Awards!

“The Cinema Unbound Awards is an annual celebration presented by the Northwest Film Center, honoring boundary-breaking multimedia storytellers working at the intersection of art and cinema. We honor artists and nonconformists who are not content to be contained but instead expand the notion of what’s possible. The Cinema Unbound honorees defy expectations and refuse to embrace labels using their creative vision to inspire and push us to look at what is beyond the norm.

The Cinema Unbound Awards represents the Portland Art Museum & Northwest Film Center’s embrace of artistic exploration and commitment to equity and inclusion. Though born out of the tradition of film, the Cinema Unbound Awards expands the reach of cinema as an art form to challenge for whom, by whom, and how stories can be told.

The 2021 Cinema Unbound Awards honorees are Steve McQueen, Garrett Bradley, Gus Van Sant, Mollye Asher, and Alex Bulkley: boundary-breaking multimedia storytellers working at the intersection of art and cinema. The awards will be presented on March 4, 2021, kicking off the 44th Annual Portland International Film Festival running from March 5 to March 14, 2021.”
-Cinema Unbound

This year’s Cinema Unbound Awards will invite viewers to join through both a Drive-In experience as well as a virtual experience. More information about the honorees and on how to attend can be found here: https://cinemaunbound.org/event-directory/cinema-unbound-awards

Congratulations, Gus!

PDX CONTEMPORARY ART is pleased to present the paintings of Portland-based artist Tristan “TK” Irving in the PDX Window Project for the month of February 2021.

Drawing inspiration from a range of sources and time periods, from Rembrandt to Jean-Michel Basquiat, Irving’s work integrates abstraction and modernist sensibilities to create portraits which are bold, graphic, and colorful. Each portrait, oftentimes depicting famous artists or public figures, acts to honor and commemorate. Those he’s painted include Frederick Douglass, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Frida Kahlo, Maya Angelou, Madam C.J. Walker, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, and Stacey Abrams, among others. Irving is best known for his portraits of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, which have been carried at protests and marches for racial justice this summer. 

As part of the PDX Window Project, Irving will be offering 20” x 16” commissioned portraits for $500 each. If clients wish to commission a piece, they can email info@pdxcontemporaryart.com for more details. The artist will work from a photograph of the client’s choosing.

The PDX Window Project is viewable from the sidewalk 24 hours, 7 days a week, on the corner of NW 9th and Flanders. The window itself is on 9th avenue.

Irving's work in the PDX Window Project was featured in The Skanner: https://www.theskanner.com/news/newsbriefs/30956-pdx-window-project-fea…

Marie Watt's piece, Blanket Story: Indian Territories, Round Dance, Grandmother, 2016, is a part of a group exhibition at Kasmin Gallery in New York City. The show, Between the Earth and Sky, was reviewed in the New York Times.

"An exhibition of twenty-two monolithic sculptures that brings together examples of the form spanning from 900 A.D. to 2019. The presentation demonstrates how stelae, herms, and columns have acted as repositories of meaning or markers of time and place across many cultures since prehistory, as well as the way in which the expressive possibilities of this format continue to resonate with sculptors working internationally today. Be they analogues for the human form, waypoints, sentinels, support structures, memorials or otherwise, their metaphorical and formal potency abides."
-Kasmin Gallery

Read the full review in the New York Times here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/28/arts/design/monolith-mania-gallery-k…

Image Credit:
Visitors at Kasmin with Marie Watt’s columnal “Blanket Story: Indian Territories, Round Dance, Grandmother” (2016), Credit: Marie Watt and Marc Straus; Nina Westervelt for The New York Times

Anna Gray + Ryan Wilson Paulsen are exhibiting work at Congress Yard Projects.

"Congress Yard Projects’ first exhibition of 2021, hard & SOFT will submit the artworks to continuous display outside, throughout the wet dragging days of late winter. This turns our previous format on its head from the summer series of weekend long exhibitions where artworks susceptible to the elements are moved inside nightly. Rather, hard & SOFT will run for 1344 hours, from late January til Spring Equinox, showcasing works that stand resolute under the weight of the grey dripping sky, alongside works that embrace weathering transformation and decay. On view will be a range of works from the most obstinately impervious, to those that might melt, fade, or rot away in reaction to the elements, as well as some that depend upon the impacts of duration and exposure for their full potential. At times, the exhibition will be only open to viewers when it is raining, and others just available after dark, to make the most of the existing perceptual conditions."

hard & SOFT
Exhibition Jan 24 – March 21, 2021

Opening Sunday January 24 11-5pm

For more information visit: https://congressyardprojects.wordpress.com/
or on Oregon Live: https://www.oregonlive.com/entertainment/2021/01/art-shows-a-bit-more-i…

A collaboration between Loro Piana and Marie Watt, "Companion Species: Blanket Stories, Generations, Acknowledgement," is now on view at Loro Piana, coinciding with the opening of their new Meatpacking District store in New York City. Loro Piana will feature three sculptures, by Marie Watt as a collaborative reflection on community and environmental stewardship, generational respect, family history and the myriad symbolic meanings of loved – and lived-in – textiles.

Blankets are an essential component of Loro Piana and Watt’s respective histories.
At Loro Piana, blankets were among the first products ever produced. To this day, they remain an important element of the company’s legacy: blankets are an ultimate expression of warmth and comfort. Within Watt’s oeuvre, blankets symbolize safeguarding, established traditions, familial heirlooms, and physical entities to which memories may be imprinted and embedded. Together, the brand and the artist believe in weaving together textile and form to tell stories from our vast yet inextricably connected global community.

The Blanket Stories sculpture, in particular, consists of nearly fifty thoughtfully layered and stacked blankets donated by a diverse group of Loro Piana’s friends, partners and family. Donations were submitted from around the world and each blanket arrived with an anecdote from its owner; their narratives range from humorous to heartwarming, with every single anecdote illustrating a deeply personal sentiment that is as once individual in experience yet universal in feeling. These stories are written on hang tags attached to the piece, and can be viewed on Loro Piana’s website as well.

For more information on the project please visit : https://www.loropiana.com/blanket-stories/en/
Featured in the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/14/t-magazine/wine-wallpaper-sol-lewitt…

"Companion Species: Blanket Stories, Generations and Acknowledgment" is on display from December 14th, 2020 to January 31st, 2021 at 3 Ninth Avenue, New York City.

Our current exhibition, Ferocious Mothers, was reviewed in Oregon ArtsWatch.
Read the full review here:https://www.orartswatch.org/ferocious-mothers-a-theater-split/

Ferocious Mothers is open by appointment though January 2, Wednesday- Saturday from 10am - 4pm.