Image/Idea

An LC Alum Reflects on the Senior Art Images Project

2012-06-06T15:00:00.002-07:00

Untitled (Thoughts), Hannah Berry, 2012, oil on canvas, 40”x 60”

The Senior Art Project is a capstone for Lewis & Clark College Art majors and a point of pride and celebration for all members of the graduating class. These bodies of work are saved for posterity and are now easily accessible in Lewis & Clark’s very own, homegrown Senior Studio Art Archive! In the beginning of every studio art major’s senior year, they are set to the task of composing a body of work that culminates on display at the end-of-year Senior Art Exhibition in the Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art on campus. Every Senior Art Exhibition has a different flavor because it is the sum total of each artist’s thoughts and ideas and physical work, poured into one project over two semesters. Just as everyone senses and reacts to the world in a different way, so every Senior Art Project is a beautifully unique visual (and sometimes video and audio and tactile) culmination of the art major’s entire Lewis & Clark career.

As a member of the 2012 graduating class, it is a privilege to witness how my peers’ projects have transformed from sketches to experiments to masterfully created final projects. In most ways it is entirely similar to capstone and thesis projects in other departments, differing only in spatial accessibility. The studio artist is an architect and her final work is a physical object that exists apart from her. It may be seen and viewed and felt by any viewer, without the artist as mediator (except in the case of performance art, where this concept is entirely reversed). Ideas take shape in paint and paper and ink and plaster and wood and plastic and linen and thread and metal and so on. It is therefore crucial that senior studio art projects be preserved in a medium that has the capacity for high image quality, large image format and easy accessibility.

In the years from 1993 - 2005, senior art projects were documented and archived in the form of 35mm slides, and from 2005-2008 on CD. The slides document exhibits in the old Peebles Art Building, which was torn down in 1995. Images were virtually inaccessible to those who were not able to physically visit the archive. From 2008 until recently, all senior art images were transferred to and stored on an online image database called MDID. It was an improvement in accessibility and damage control, as it is much easier to safely store a digital file than to do so for a delicate slide, yet the convoluted process of uploading images remained an unfortunate hindrance to the archival system. Now the html laden "middle man" has been eliminated and the legacy of the Art Department can grow with ease through Lewis & Clark’s archive, created by the Visual Resources Collection team at Aubrey R. Watzek Library!

Untitled from “Age Old” series, Will Steinhardt, 2012, ink on paper. 9” x 12”

Available through Lewis & Clark's Visual Resources Center, anyone with an LC username and password can navigate the multitude of senior projects by class year (1993-2012 and ongoing), creator, or medium (ceramics, sculpture, painting, drawing, multimedia, performance). Projects from the most recent graduating classes are accessible to the general public as the archive’s Featured Collections. All images are viewable in a large format that showcases an impressive level of detail, approaching the quality of preeminent art databases such as ArtStor. The Lewis & Clark Senior Art Archive presents a unique space where every studio art major’s culminating body of work is displayed in honest detail, stored for posterity and is easily accessible to anyone within the Lewis & Clark community.

With the graduation of the class of 2012 just recently behind us, it is fantastic timing for the beginning of this excellent archive. It was inspirational to witness the long awaited, hard-earned completion of my friends’ and peers’ projects, and it made me proud to see their finished work on the white and tall walls of the Hoffman Gallery. Now we are fortunate to be able to return to previous years and witness anew the beautiful and varied senior projects, each one a self-portrait in its own way, a fragment of that person at the time they were creating that work. The Archive is an invaluable asset to the portfolios of graduating artists and it presents a new, enduring, and incredibly significant resource for the community at Lewis & Clark College.

[The Visual Resources team that created this archive was composed of these smart and wonderful people: Stephanie Beene, Natalie Saing and Hanna White, Visual Resources Center Student Assistants, Anneliese Dehner and Jeremy McWilliams of the Digital Initiatives Dept. @ Watzek Library and the folks at the Lewis & Clark Art Department!]

---Penelope Cottrell-Crawford, Visual Resources Intern and Assistant, 2011-2012 (Lewis & Clark College, 2011, walked with the 2012 graduating class)

Controversial St. Louis Museum of Art decision: Groundbreaking or unethical?

2012-05-31T10:57:00.001-07:00

Should American institutions hold onto dubiously acquired artifacts, even when their countries of origin ask for them back?

Ka Nefer-Nefer mask, St. Louis Art Museum, courtesy of The Atlantic

According to an article written in yesterday's Atlantic, the Ka Nefer-Nefer at the St. Louis Art Museum has now become a controversial centerpiece in the long-standing debate about rightful ownership and provenance of antiquities. As Malcolm Gay, Atlantic correspondent writes:

"In certain respects, the tale of the Ka-Nefer-Nefer follows a familiar script: like many disputed antiquities, the Egyptian funerary mask was unearthed last century and quickly vanished, spending nearly 50 years in obscurity before resurfacing on the European art market in the late 1990s. The St. Louis Art Museum soon bought the mask -- an elaborately tooled cartonnage of blended gold, glass and linen. It has since become the centerpiece in a bitter ownership dispute between the museum, which claims clear title, and Egypt, which charges the mask was plundered from a government storeroom.

But this story went decidedly off-script last year after U.S. officials, acting on Egypt's behalf, entered the fray. The feds informed museum leaders that they believed the mask was stolen, and they intended to use the courts to seize the artifact and return it to Egypt. But where some museums might have simply handed over the goods, St. Louis went on the attack, filing its own a pre-emptive lawsuit that claimed the statute of limitations had expired -- an aggressive challenge from an institution that has repeatedly defied calls to release its grip on this pricey piece of loot."

The story becomes more complicated when we reach its conclusion: "Now comes U.S. District Judge Henry E. Autrey, who on March 31 handed museum leaders a legal victory, and a moral challenge, when he dismissed the government's forfeiture claim, finding it "devoid of any facts showing that the Mask was 'missing' because it was stolen and then smuggled out of the country." (Underline and bold in the original)."

And thus the ethical controversy. Because, as Gay points out, like so many of antiquities, "Viewed in another light, this is a market whose emphasis on the hard-to-find means that plunder is often whitewashed, making it all but indistinguishable from the legitimate market.... Of course, with their legal victory in hand, museum leaders have little incentive to wrestle with this more delicate question. And that's a shame, because to persevere in this litigious and outmoded view of antiquities collecting throws the St. Louis museum out of step not only with its fellow institutions, many of which have negotiated beneficial settlements for similar claims, but also with the American Association of Museums -- which counts the St. Louis institution as a member, and whose updated acquisition guidelines direct members to scrutinize their ancient art collections when "provenance is incomplete or uncertain."

Given the dueling narratives now in the public realm, the Ka-Nefer-Nefer's provenance has never been more uncertain."

Find the full article here. Read the American Association of Museum's stance on antiquities here and catch what the FBI says about stolen art and antiquities here.

PNCA 2012 Gala: "Transformation"

2012-05-19T09:00:00.000-07:00

Stephanie White: Sit Down!, 2010. Image courtesy of PNCA.

The Pacific Northwest College of Art is hosting its 2012 gala on Saturday, June 2nd. The gala will celebrate student thesis work and the "remarkable transformation that PNCA will undertake in the coming years," while raising "essential funds that directly impact students and community." This year the gala will take place on the PNCA campus at 1241 NW Johnson Street. For more information, click here. To purchase tickets, click here.

An interview with Harriet Bridgeman, founder of Bridgeman Art Library

2012-05-08T14:33:00.003-07:00

Image courtesy of Guardian News.

An interview with Harriet Bridgeman, founder of the Bridgeman Art Library, has been featured in Guardian Professional. The Bridgeman Art Library is just one of the great image resources we offer through Watzek Library, here at LC. In the interview, Bridgeman - whose vocation is not dissimilar from what we do here at the VRC - discusses her inspiration behind founding the Art Library, balancing copyright and ownership with the increasing availability of art, and being a "successful business woman in the arts," among other topics. Check out the full interview here. Below are some interview highlights:

"I dreamt up the Bridgeman Art Library while editing an art publication and becoming increasingly aware of the problems of sourcing good quality images at short notice, or indeed at even a modicum of notice. Museums and art collections did not have the rights and reproduction departments which are now regarded as the norm, nor were they conscious of the income they could potentially generate by not having efficient operations in this area. As I knew from personal experience, it was very hard for publishers to source images quickly and before the days of the internet, to even know what to source and from where!"

"I think my passion for art and my entrepreneurial spirit are equally balanced; I am fortunate in that I saw a gap and a challenge in an area for which I had a passion and the two continue to feed into each other."

You can access the Bridgeman Art Library among the Visual Resources offered here at Lewis & Clark College. Check it out @ Watzek Library Subject Guide for Art & Art History

Maurice Sendak, Author of ‘Where the Wild Things Are,’ Dies at 83

2012-05-08T14:22:00.002-07:00

Image courtesy of the NY Times.

"Maurice Sendak, widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century, who wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche, died on Tuesday in Danbury, Conn. He was 83 and lived in Ridgefield, Conn.

The cause was complications from a recent stroke, said Michael di Capua, his longtime editor.

Roundly praised, intermittently censored and occasionally eaten, Mr. Sendak’s books were essential ingredients of childhood for the generation born after 1960 or thereabouts, and in turn for their children. He was known in particular for more than a dozen picture books he wrote and illustrated himself, most famously 'Where the Wild Things Are,' which was simultaneously genre-breaking and career-making when it was published by Harper & Row in 1963."

Click here for the full New York Times article.

LC Senior Art recognized in the Wall Street Journal

2012-05-03T09:42:00.001-07:00

Finishing its 19th straight year (15 of which have been held at the Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery), the Lewis & Clark Senior Art Majors have just wrapped up another stellar exhibition.

The promotional postcard for this year's Senior Art Show

This year was especially significant, in the Senior Art Show's recognition among the Portland Art Scene in this article in the Wall Street Journal, published today.

Note the image of 2009 Lewis & Clark Studio Art seniors (Zoe Clark, Caitlin Ducey, and Kyle Thompson), pictured below, along with this excerpt:
"...Lewis & Clark College (where 12128's owner, Kyle Thompson, teaches chemistry, and where the strongest undergraduate exhibition I've seen in a long time was being held)..." (see image below). Placing the Senior Artists among the rising Art Scene in Portland leaves all of us toiling hard at this tiny liberal arts college feeling, well, *recognized*!

Care to see what the students pictured here have produced this year and in years' past? Check out their work in the BRAND NEW Senior Art Collection & Archive Online! The Collection allows you to contact seniors directly, if they have provided their email addresses, and if not, get in touch with me and we can get in touch with them. Browse by tagcloud, year and name of artist, recent images, or do a search.

The Dept. of Art, the Hoffman Gallery, and the Senior Art Majors at Lewis & Clark are truly world class, and I, for one, am proud to work with all three. Huzzah! Visit the Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery's page to view some of the highlights of this year's show.

--Stephanie Beene, Lewis & Clark, Visual Resources Coordinator, Watzek Library

From left, LC 2009 Alums, Zoë Clark, Caitlin Ducey and Kyle Thompson outside 12128, a decommissioned crabber, profiled in today's Wall Street Journal.

Low Lives 4 @ PICA!

2012-04-26T10:00:00.000-07:00

Clockwise from top left: Linda Hutchins, Future Death Toll, Robert Tyree, and Austin Adkins. Image courtesy of PICA.

The international performance-based festival, Low Lives, is in its fourth iteration this year and PICA will be hosting the event this Friday and Saturday. Featuring artists Linda Hutchins, Robert Tyree, and Austin Adkins, along with artist collaborative Future Death Toll, this year's Low Lives combines an interdisciplinary roster of artists with performances in real time. On Friday, Hutchins and Future Death Toll will take the stage - with Hutchins combining rhythmic percussion and drawing, while FDT will demonstrate a "form of mitosis," that is, the group will unify "their heads in a single form of alginate, plaster bandages, and breathing tubes." On Saturday, Adkins - whose interest lies in the pursuit of perfection via repetition - will record a video loop of himself rollerblading. Afterwards, Tyree will perform a 5-minute dance piece choreographed to align with the reading of a piece written by his collaborator, Romanian writer Andra Rotaru.

"Now entering its fourth year, Low Lives is an international festival of live performance-based works transmitted via the internet and projected in real time at multiple venues throughout the U.S. and around the world. Low Lives examines works that critically investigate, challenge, and extend the potential of performance practice presented live through online broadcasting networks. These networks provide a new alternative and efficient medium for presenting, viewing, and archiving performances."

PICA will be hosting the event on Friday, April 27th (from 5:30 to 8:30 PM) and Saturday, April 28th (from 12 to 3 PM). The event is free and is located at PICA's new headquarters downtown at 415 SW 10th Avenue, Suite 300. For more details, visit PICA's website. For more on Low Lives, go here.

Borderland Collective Lecture @ PSU!

2012-04-23T13:30:00.000-07:00

Image courtesy of Borderland Collective.

Via live streaming video, Borderland Collective will be guest lecturing tonight for PSU's weekly Art & Social Practice MFA Lecture Series. The Collective, housed at Texas State University, was founded in 2007 by Ryan Sprott and Jason Reed of West Texas and Ulrich Eigner of Austria. Seeking to bridge the gap between educators, students, artists, and families, the Collective challenges prevailing notions of the contemporary American experience by engaging within communities to provide a realistic portrait of geographic and sociocultural borders in America.

"Borderland Collective is a social art project that facilitates the participatory exploration and documentation of geographic and sociocultural borders. Fueled by collaborations between artists, teachers, youth, and families, the group uses art as a means to trouble notions of who holds knowledge and what stories are told, providing an inclusive representation of the contemporary American experience. The collective was conceived of (with great inspiration from the work of Wendy Ewald) on a road trip along the Texas/Mexico border in 2007 by Ryan Sprott and Jason Reed of West Texas, and Ulrich Eigner of Austria. It is currently housed at Texas State University in San Marcos, TX and directed by Jason Reed, Assistant Professor of Photography."

The lecture series is organized by PSU associate professor Harrell Fletcher alongside MFA students of the Art & Social Practice program. The event occurs every Monday night at 7:30 PM at the Shattuck Hall Annex at no cost! For more information on the PSU Art & Social Practice MFA Lecture Series, click here. For more information on Borderland Collective, click here. To see videos of past lectures, go here: http://vimeo.com/channels/136345.

Civic Ware Community Celebration @ LC!

2012-04-23T09:00:00.001-07:00

Image courtesy of Civic Ware.

Come celebrate the semester-long collaboration between Lewis & Clark students and the community members of Village Gardens in North Portland. On Tuesday, April 24th at 4:00 PM, come enjoy a homegrown meal and handcrafted art with the Civic Ware class and Village Gardens in the Albany Quadrangle on the Lewis & Clark campus.

You get a home cooked meal plus a handcrafted bowl and cup for just $15.00. All proceeds go to Village Gardens so please remember to bring cash or checks! For directions to campus, click here.

CraftPerspectives Lecture: Maria Elena Buszek

2012-04-23T09:00:00.000-07:00

Marianne Jorgensen and the Cast-Off Knitters: Pink M.24 Chaffee, 2006. Photo by Barbara Katzin. Image courtesy of PNCA.

Maria Elena Buszek gives a lecture for Museum of Contemporary Craft and the MFA in Applied Craft and Design as part of the CraftPerspectives Lecture Series and the 2011-2012 Graduate Visiting Artist Lecture Series. Buszek is a scholar, critic, curator and associate professor of art history at the University of Colorado in Denver. Her recent publications include the books, Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture and Extra/ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art. She has also contributed to the anthologies It’s Time for Action (There’s No Option): About Feminism and Blaze: Discourse on Art, Women, and Feminism and Contemporary Artists. She has written for the popular feminist magazine BUST since 1999.

For more information on this lecture and others, click here.

"Rock & Religion: The Medium of Worship" @ Cinema Project

2012-04-17T15:00:00.000-07:00

Image courtesy of Cinema Project.

Cinema Project is showcasing films by Peter Adair and Dan Graham for "Rock & Religion: The Medium of Worship" tonight and tomorrow night. From Cinema Project's website:

"Through methods that are astute, striking, and sensitive the film and video work of Peter Adair and Dan Graham offer two very different portraits of American religious and cultural ecstasy. Peter Adair's Holy Ghost People allows the viewer a chance to gather with and observe the ecstatic worship practices of a small Pentecostal community in Scrabble Creek, West Virginia. Shot and presented on 16mm, this ethnographic documentary vividly captures the faithful as they handle snakes, speak in tongues, and demonstrate their deeply committed spirituality. In Rock My Religion, Dan Graham uses a gritty collage of text and found footage to argue that American evangelicalism and rock-and-roll share an ideologically similar and fundamentally experiential co-history. A sharply brooding soundtrack composed of early Sonic Youth recordings collides with the video's dulled color palette to create an unexpected meditative space in which to contemplate Graham's argument."

The screenings are tonight and tomorrow night at the Hollywood Theatre (4122 NE Sandy Boulevard) at 7 PM. Cinema Project also suggests a donation of $7 for each screening, but nobody will be turned away for lack of funds. For more information on this screening and future events, click here.

Pat Boas: Bonnie Bronson 2012 Fellowship award recipient

2012-04-17T09:00:00.000-07:00

Pat Boas: Inside the Interrogation Of a 9/11 Mastermind, detail, 2008. Image courtesy of the artist.

Congratulations to artist and PNCA alumna Pat Boas who has recently been named recipient of the 2012 Bonnie Bronson fellowship. Her work has explored notions of media representations of current events and people and the construction of meaning. Her most recent drawings, Abstraction Machine, examine myriad interpretations of mundane objects via Webdings, "a common symbol font included in most word processing programs." The artist typed descriptions of Webdings symbols into Google Images - the results of which then informed her drawings.

Pat Boas: a from Abstraction Machine (radar), detail, 2011. Image courtesy of the artist.

"Pat Boas is an artist, writer, and educator based in Portland, Oregon. Her drawings, paintings, prints, and digital projects explore the play between words and images, the activity of reading, the nature of codes, and the arbitrary quality of the systems we use to communicate. With sources that include: children’s homework exercises, newspaper headlines, op-ed columns, web icons, crowd-sourced image banks, Shaker spirit drawings, and natural history illustrations, Boas scrambles and reshapes information to release hidden stories from familiar grammatical structures.

Boas is also an accomplished writer, publishing articles and reviews in Art Papers and artUS, and she was a contributing editor of Artweek from 2002 to 2006. A committed educator, Boas is assistant professor of Art Practice in the Department of Art at Portland State University, where she has coordinated the MFA in Contemporary Art Practice program since 2007."

The Bonnie Bronson fellowship award is generally given "to a working Northwest artist in recognition of artistic excellence and to encourage intellectual and creative growth." The award ceremony will take place tomorrow night, April 18th, from 6 - 7:30 PM at Reed College's Gray Lounge in the Kaul Auditorium and is free and open to the public. For more information, click here.

Delaney Allen's "Painting a Portrait" at Nationale

2012-04-16T12:00:00.000-07:00

Delaney Allen: Self Portrait No. 1, digital pigment print, 2011. Image courtesy of Nationale.

- “I’m just a guy trying to put his life back together” —Tom Berenger’s character in "Major League"
- Why do I continue to let fruit rot?
- List making (random girls I’m not going home with; my encounters in Las Vegas (or lack thereof in such a populated, drunken city); places I was last to leave from)
- Lyrics for “Another Saturday Night”
- Various notes from Drake interviews

Pacific Northwest College of Art alum Delaney Allen is now showing Painting a Portrait at Nationale (811 E Burnside). On view until April 29th, the solo exhibition is just one of many at Nationale, while the gallery and specialty shop ceases artist submissions to focus on their own roster of artists including Allen, Carson Ellis, Rikki Rothenberg, and Liz Harris, among others. Allen's Painting a Portrait is an attempt at uncovering identity outside of the context of our imagined communities -

"His photographs are not so much traditional portraits but evocations of his journeys, mindset, interests, and experiments. Revealing through concealing, delineating through obscuring, faces are masked, bodies camouflaged, and romantic landscapes blurred through car windows. The resulting visions are innately personal yet, at the same time, reverberate with an elementary spirit. Loneliness, emptiness, confusion, and longing- Allen’s days unfold like scrawls from a hidden notebook. While we never see his face, we are handed a foundation, and through his palette of de-saturated colors and hazy lighting, the feelings of a single man emerge."

Nationale gallery hours are from 12 PM - 6 PM, Wednesday through Sunday. For more information on this exhibit and future events at Nationale, click here. To see more of the artist's work, click here.

RACC Public Art Opportunity: Industry & Art ~ Workers, Nature, and Environment

2012-04-16T09:00:00.000-07:00

Kevin Edward Brown: 972xx No. 1, Inkjet print on paper, 2011. Image courtesy of MDID.

"The Regional Arts & Culture Council, on behalf of Industry & Art (sponsored by the Working Waterfront Coalition of Portland) invites artists currently living in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana to submit up to three (3) digital images of existing original artwork for the 2nd Annual Industry & Art juried exhibition and sale to be held at Vigor Industrial on Swan Island, 5555 N Channel Avenue, in Portland, Oregon. The goal for this exhibition is to celebrate the beauty, skill, diversity and professionalism of industrial workers through artists’ perspectives, and promote an awareness of our region’s thriving working waterfronts.

The event is also a fundraiser to support industrial job training programs and habitat restoration. The first annual Industry & Art exhibition was held September 22-25, 2011. Over 40 artworks by regional artists were featured (see list of artists and awardees below) and over $40K in artwork was sold, with $25K raised for education and the environment. Winning artists received cash awards of $3,000, $2,000 and $1,000 respectively for first, second and third place.

Applications must be submitted using the CaFÉ website (www.callforentry.com). The deadline for submissions is Friday, June 1, 2012, 11:59PM Mountain Daylight Time." For more information, click here.

[O U T E R] Space Gallery hosts "Friday the 13th ARTY"

2012-04-13T15:24:00.004-07:00

Image courtesy of [O U T E R] Space Gallery.

Don't forget to enjoy the sunshine this Friday afternoon at the Friday the 13th ARTY! Celebrating springtime, superstitions and Portland’s artistic and musical finest on Friday, April 13th, 3–9pm.

[O U T E R] Space Gallery presents BODYMOVEMENTSPACEGESTURE. The outdoor gallery exhibition features work by student and professional artists:

Em Young, Flynn Casey, Freddy Robles, Hannah Berry, Jeff Hartnett, Kathryn Hart Wlodarczyk, Louise Trueheart & Nikima Jagudajev, Samantha Sarvet, Sara McCormick, Olivia Erlanger, and is co-curated by Abigail McNamara & Spencer Byrne-Seres.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a free BBQ, a DIY Bazaar, the release of LC’s first fine arts publication – artEXPO, and live music from local bands.

LINEUP

4pm Shiner

5 pm Eidolons

6 pm The Robinsons(Kevin & Anna of Viva Voce)

7 pm Youth

8 pm Grandparents

The Hoffman Gallery, showcasing the Senior Art Exhibition will hold extended hours. Additionally Tony Chrenka & Flynn Casey present 100% solid BOLD at the Arnold Gallery.

RACC opportunity: Call for "Visual Chronicle of Portland"

2012-04-13T13:26:00.001-07:00

Debra Beers: 82nd and Boise St., Pastel, charcoal, and conte pencil on paper, 2011. Image courtesy of the RACC.

The Regional Arts & Culture Council is calling for submissions - specifically, "prints, drawings, paintings on paper and photographs—to purchase for the Visual Chronicle of Portland collection." The Chronicle is an effort to cull together representations of the region and create a living archive to house these works, while reflecting "a diversity of populations, artistic disciplines and points of view." So far, the Chronicle - which is owned by the city of Portland - has seen its collection grow to 280 works by 160 artists since 1985. These pieces can be viewed in all over the city, in publicly accessible spaces in City of Portland and Multnomah County offices.

"The collection can be viewed as a timepiece that provides a visual narrative of greater Portland, and is meant to reveal our city’s distinctive personality as seen and interpreted by artists who are intimately familiar with the region. This collection also represents a living archive and RACC is committed to engaging and expanding the communities of artists and the range of artistic and cultural expressions that make up the Visual Chronicle of Portland."

NOTE: Applicants are encouraged to connect directly with project staff with questions about the collection and the submission process. If you are new to the submission process, or are unfamiliar with preparing digital images, we strongly encourage attending the collection orientation session which has been scheduled for Tuesday, April 24th from 5:30pm – 6:30pm at RACC (411 NW Park Avenue, Suite 101). This is also a great way to get additional background on the Chronicle. Contact Keith Lachowicz at klachowicz@racc.org to reserve a spot.

For more information, click here. To see the current collection, click here.

Ask the Artists with Catherine Opie and El Anatsui

2012-04-09T15:51:00.001-07:00

Image courtesy of art21.org

In anticipation of the sixth season of Art in the Twenty-First Century, the series is enabling viewers online access to the first episode and the chance to ask artists Catherine Opie and El Anatsui questions! The submission deadline for questions for Catherine Opie is tonight by 6 P.M. EST, and for El Anatsui: April 18th by 11:59 P.M. EST. Questions may be submitted in one of three ways:

1) Leave a comment here. Be sure to indicate which artist—Catherine Opie or El Anatsui—your question is directed to.

2) Tweet a question using the button below. Be sure to include the hashtag #art21preview.

Tweet #art21preview

3) Submit a question using the Ask the Artists form. Questions will only be published if selected.

For more information, click here. The first episode, Change, is below in its entirety.

LC Senior Art Exhibition

2012-04-06T14:02:00.000-07:00

Hannah Furlong: In Contact, detail, 2012.

As the capstone experience for graduating art majors, the Senior Art Exhibition represents more than just students’ studio art experiences. For students of the liberal arts, the exhibition is the culmination of diverse undergraduate careers, with work infused by lessons in philosophy, mathematics, music, and computer science.

Bringing together artwork made by 27 graduating seniors in the Department of Art, the Senior Art Exhibition opens April 6 at the Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art at Lewis & Clark.

The 2012 Senior Art Exhibition will feature the following students: Chelsea Ambrose, Carl Alexander Berger, Hannah Berry, Julia Condon, Ali Crowley, Olivia Erlanger, Hannah Furlong, Nina Giselle, Kati Haas, Knhik Haefner, Noelle Ho, Marian Kidd, Meilani Kirkwood, Lynsey Lacher, Matthew Bennett Laurents, Kevin McKimmy, Abigail Rose McNamara,Katlyn Mundal, Liam O’Connor, Karla Ortiz, Will Steinhardt, John Tolles, Michelle Van Orsow, Elana Webb, Sula Willson, Kathryn Hart Wlodarczyk, Maozhu Zhao.

The reception is this Friday, April 6th, from 5:00 - 7:00 PM at the Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art located on the Lewis & Clark campus. It is free and open to the public. The Hoffman Gallery gallery hours are from Tuesday through Sunday, 11 AM to 4 PM. Parking on campus is free on the weekends. For more information, click here.

2009 LC Studio Art major featured at RECESS

2012-04-06T06:30:00.000-07:00

Zoë Clark: R&B Songs, 2012. Image courtesy of RECESS.

Founding member of 1 2 1 2 8 and 2009 studio art graduate Zoë Clark is showing R&B Songs at RECESS gallery. According to the artist

"R&B songs are exceptional in their ability to transform our perceptions and mood. Although lyrically they may be simplistic, often bordering on cliché, they are able to transport us out of our everyday life and into our vision of love. The honesty within these songs speaks to an often-repressed part of our psyche, the part of us that is uninterested in acknowledging the complications of reality."

The opening reception of R&B Songs is tonight at RECESS (1127 SE 10th Avenue) from 7 - 10:30 PM. RECESS’s primary members are Brennan Broome, JP Huckins, Chloé Womack, and Tori Abernathy who live and work in Portland, OR. For more information, click here.

Day Job @ PNCA

2012-04-05T15:10:00.000-07:00

Mary Lydecker: Westgate Shopping Center (Asheville, NC) / Glacier National Park (MT), collage, 2011. Image courtesy of PNCA.

This Thursday, PNCA will present Day Job, a group show curated by Nina Katchadourian of PNCA's Drawing Center and funded by a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Featured artists include Chris Akin, Pasquale Cortese, Elizabeth Duffy, Caroline Falby, Alex Gingrow, Tom Hooper, Alexa Horochowski, Michael Krueger, Shawn Kuruneru, Travis LeRoy Southworth, Mary Lydecker, Raul J. Mendez, Julia Oldham, Alex O'Neal, Roberto Osti, Zach Rockhill, Luis Romero, Alfred Steiner, Justin Storms, Harvey Tulcensky, and Jonathan Wahl.

The show explores the production of art in the context of an economically trying system. More pointedly, "Rather than subscribing to the idea that non-artistic work is by definition disruptive to an artist’s practice, Day Job looks at the ways in which the information, skills, ideas, working conditions, or materials encountered in the work world can become a source of influence. The exhibition also addresses the ways in which contemporary artists support themselves in an economic climate that often demands particularly diverse and flexible solutions to staying afloat."

The opening reception is Thursday, April 5th from 6 - 8 PM. The exhibition runs until May 15th. For more information about this exhibition and other upcoming events at PNCA, click here.

Student Art Exhibit: Laura Nash

2012-04-04T22:00:00.000-07:00

image courtesy of Watzek Library News

Visit the Western corner of Watzek’s 3rd floor to experience Laura Nash’s (LC 2013) installation, The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, on display through April 10. The installation combines banners of printed text, recorded readings of texts such as House of Leaves and Finnegan’s Wake, and projections of text. Nash created this piece during the course of ART 227, Special Topics in Studio Art.

Lorna Bieber: Image Myths @ the Cooley Gallery

2012-04-04T12:00:00.000-07:00

Lorna Bieber: Two Trees, Gelatin silver print, 68 x 42 in., 2004. Image courtesy of the Cooley Gallery.

The Cooley Gallery at Reed College will be showing an exhibition of artist Lorna Bieber's work from April 10th to June 3rd. Bieber's process as an artist is compelling. The following is taken from artist's website:

"Her complex, many layered method of production includes: collage, paint, copier and computer technology, as well as traditional and non-traditional photographic techniques. By altering the 'root' picture in these ways, Bieber creates new 'branches' whose archetypal narratives are utterly different from the original, bringing the observer to see the known world in dramatically unexpected ways."

It is through careful arrangement that Bieber is able to incite viewers with a familiar sense of belonging. Primarily working in the themes of memory, dreams, and nostalgia, Bieber summons viewers to recreate meaning for themselves, in turn, adding a powerful, magnetic dynamism to her work.

For one week, the artist will be in residence, working with Reed College students and faculty, and through the Open Galley Program, with Portland Public School students.

While the exhibit opens on Tuesday, April 10th, there will be a reception and talk with the artist on Saturday, April 21st, 5 PM at the Cooley Gallery on the Reed College campus. For more information, click here. For more information on the artist, click here.

PICA Opening Party and Reception

2012-04-04T09:00:00.001-07:00

image courtesy of PICA

Come help celebrate the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art's move with an opening party and reception this Friday at 415 SW 10th Ave, Suite 300 from 6:00 - 10:00 PM. The event is free and open to all ages.

"Space is for art. Our new hub is a laboratory for artistic possibilities, an open kitchen for the work of making contemporary art happen. It is flexible, responsive, and generative. It is a provocation for future activity, here and out in the world. Together, we'll welcome artist Glen Fogel for his exhibit My Apocalyptic Moment, and we'll look ahead to a busy spring and an incredible future for PICA."

For more information, click here.

Wendy White @ PSU tonight!

2012-04-04T09:00:00.000-07:00

Wendy White: Turun, 2011, 84.5 x 108 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

Wendy White will be guest lecturing at tonight's edition of PSU's MFA Studio Lecture Series. Not to be confused with their other lecture series, the MFA Art & Social Practice Lecture Series, the Studio Lecture series seeks to "bring together artists from a variety of disciplines to explore the subjects of their own work before a live audience."

White graduated from the Savannah College of Art & Design in '93 and has since participated in numerous group exhibitions, two-person exhibitions, and solo shows in Düsseldorf, Madrid, Chicago, and more. Her paintings on single and multiple canvases - as well as her "text constructions" and play with conventional notions of displaying art - explore process, as opposed to finality: "Successful paintings to me maintain an awkward, muscular energy that threatens to fall apart at any time...I attack the canvas with a series of direct, semi-calculated gestures that I then build on intuitively, adjusting my speed and cadence to construct areas of levity and density." Recent reviews have placed her with the likes of Matthew Barney, Agnes Martin, and Dorothea Rockbourne - in reference to her artistic "athleticism" and kinship to cryptic abstraction.

"Wendy White has had solo exhibitions at leo Koenig in New York, Galeria Moriarty in Madrid, Van Horn in Dusseldorf, and Andrew Rafacz Gallery in Chicago. She has participated in group exhibitions at Harris Lieberman Gallery, Nicole Klagsbrun, Fredericks & Freiser, and John Connelly Presents, all in New York; Country Club Projects in Los Angeles; The Bemis Center in Omaha; Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art; CCA Andratx in Mallorca, Spain; Fred Gallery in Leipzig, Germany; Galerien Markus Winter in Berlin; Aschenbach & Hofland in Amsterdam; amd Motus Fort in Tokyo. Her work has been reviewd in Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times, Artpapers, Time Out New York, New York Magazine, and The Brooklyn Rail. White holds an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, and a BFA from the Savannah College of Art & Design. She received a 2008 grant from The Artista Fellowhip in New York, a 2005 George Segal Painting grant, and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation studio grant in 2004. Her work is included in Vitamin P2: New Perspectives in Painting, published by Phaidon. White is represented by Leo Koenig and lives in New York City."

Tonight's lecture will take place at 7:00 PM at the Shattuck Hall Central Auditorium, room 212. The event is free and open to the general public. For more information on the series and upcoming lectures, click here. For more information on the artist, click here.

Nina Katchadourian lecture @ PSU tonight!

2012-04-02T14:29:00.002-07:00

image courtesy of PICA

Tonight, Portland State University is hosting artist Nina Katchadourian as a guest lecturer for the Art & Social Practice MFA Lecture Series. Katchadourian's interdisciplinary approach to her work - both in terms of media and subject matter - is also implicated in her work as a professor (Bard College, UPenn, and NYU, among others), curator, and extensive lecturer. Her work is fitting for the Series, which seeks to bring in lecturers whose work explores the intersection of art and social practice.

"Nina Katchadourian was born in Stanford, California and grew up spending every summer on a small island in the Finnish archipelago, where she still spends part of each year. Her work exists in a wide variety of media including photography, sculpture, video and sound. Her work has been exhibited domestically and internationally at places such as PS1/MoMA, the Serpentine Gallery, New Langton Arts, Artists Space, SculptureCenter, and the Palais de Tokyo. In January 2006 the Turku Art Museum in Turku, Finland featured a solo show of works made in Finland, and in June 2006 the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs exhibited a 10-year survey of her work and published an accompanying monograph entitled "All Forms of Attraction." The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego presented a solo show of recent video installation works in July 2008. In February 2010 she was the artist in residence at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in Dunedin, New Zealand, where she had a solo show entitled "Seat Assignment." She is currently at work on a permanent public piece, commissioned by the GSA, for a border crossing station between the US and Canada. Katchadourian is represented by Catharine Clark gallery in San Francisco."

The series is organized by PSU associate professor Harrell Fletcher alongside MFA students of the Art & Social Practice program. The event occurs every Monday night at 7:30 PM at the Shattuck Hall Annex at no cost! For more information on the PSU Art & Social Practice MFA Lecture Series, click here. For more information on the artist, click here.