Critical Messages examines the key environmental issues that face our region and the many ways contemporary Northwest artists are responding to those issues in their artwork. Environmental art is a new kind of mirror, a reflection of our past and a crystal ball holdig visions of the future.In their approach to environmental concerns, some contemporary artists face critical issues head on: growth management as seen in urban/rural conflict; the connection of transportation and urban sprawl; contested sources of energy; mass production and consumption; toxic management of land, watersheds, and waters; and dramatic climate change. Others accent environmental values such as preservation of wilderness and wetlands, sustainability, and biodiversity; some even work this interest interst out through the strategy of artist and nature as co-agents. Finally, some artists have chosen to enhance the impact of current conditions and challenges by capturing their apocalyptic vision through poignant and dramatic renderings. This book reveals the overlapping causes and effects of these issues in the artworks themselves and in the resounding voices of the artistic messangers.

Critical Messages: Contemporary Northwest Artists on the Environment

Arts & Photography

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette University

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.

Frank Boyden: Prints and Books

Roberts, Prudence F.

Boyden, Ian H.

History & Criticism

Preface by Judy Chicago. Hardback 13 1/2 by 11 1/2". 144 pages -130 full color illustrations (52 full color plates, 7 black and white figures and 1 full colored gate-fold), chronology and bibliography.

Camille Patha: Geography of Desire

Matthew Kangas

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.

Frank Boyden: The Empathies

Boyden, Frank

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.

George Johanson: Image and Idea

Hull, Roger

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.

Harry Widman: Image, Myth, and Modernism

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.

James B. Thompson: The Vanishing Landscape

SAYRE, HENRY M.

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.

Henk Pander: Memory and Modern Life

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.

Timeless Renaissance: Italian Drawings from the Alessandro Maggiori Collection

Santos, Ricardo De Mambro

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.

Marie Watt: Lodge

Dobkins, Rebecca J.

Humor & Entertainment

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Books by Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette University