2016 Contemporary Northwest Art Awards
Feb 13, 2016 – May 8, 2016
The Museum’s fourth biennial awards exhibition, 2016 Contemporary Northwest Art Awards features eight outstanding artists including a two-person artist’s collaborative. Four of the eight artists are immigrants, coming to the Northwest from Asia and Europe and contributing to the exhibition’s conceptual strength with a fresh view of America. Works in the exhibition address global and regional humanist issues —prejudice, belonging, war, the evolution of power, omnipresent technology, and the environment. Ranging from large-scale installations to intimate ceramic portraits, the multimedia exhibition showcases works in combinations of neon, video, glass, drawing, painting, and clay with innovative approaches to both new and traditional media.At the opening reception one artist will receive the $10,000 Arlene Schnitzer prize selected by the Museum’s curatorial staff. From nomination to final prize, the biennial awards process delivers a two-fold benefit: It allows the Portland Art Museum to identify a number of the Northwest’s exceptional talents, and it provides the museum with a far deeper understanding of the new work taking place in the region by both established and emerging artists. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog, artists’ lectures and other exhibit related programs.Bonnie Laing-Malcolmson, The Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Curator of Northwest Art, and invited curatorial advisor Jessica Hunter-Larsen, curator of IDEA Space, Interdisciplinary Experimental Arts, at Colorado College, received over 200 nominations from respected regional arts professionals of outstanding contemporary artists from Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming. Nominees were selected on the basis of quality, innovation, relevance to community or global issues, continuity of vision and dedication to studio practice. Hunter-Larsen and Laing-Malcolmson reviewed the applications to select 24 four finalists, from which the group of seven award winners was chosen.
Organized by the Portland Art Museum and curated by Bonnie Laing-Malcolmson, The Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Curator of Northwest Art.
Using drawing and video, Haven employs words and geometric spatial relationships to illustrate the fragmented bombardment of technology on the human psyche in the new millennium. With language and mixed media, she binds together two- and three-dimensional imagery to create elegant modernist objects that suggest unanswered questions.
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Lead Pencil Studio, Seattle, Washington
Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo use video, sculpture, drawing, installation and photography to reveal spatial qualities of the built environment that influence human behavior. This combination of styles expands the understanding of the constructed surface, which scripts a large portion of human movement and perception.
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Dana Lynn Louis, Portland, Oregon
Louis is inspired by the human body and its connection to timeless and fascinating systems of the natural and constructed worlds—linking time, space, and energy through dynamic multimedia installations. Creating spaces with intimate and large-scale drawings, light projections, and sculptural objects, she uses glass, light, and shadow to achieve a glitteringly magical environment.
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Helen O’Toole, Seattle, Washington
O’Toole creates a prolonged moment where the painting’s vast space evokes an image with a resonating emotional depth. Metaphorically employing the moody landscape of rural Ireland, she channels a deep-seated pain and misery resulting from a past lived amidst a compilation of grudges, suspicion, and violence.
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Akio Takamori, Seattle, Washington
Takamori’s new, 40-foot-long, lyrically painted clay installation addresses the war torn world through the faces of its threatened children. In our contemporary society of a great mix of people, these diverse faces remind us that life begins unblemished by clashing ideologies. Additionally, a series of serene ceramic landscapes quoted from historic Japanese and European paintings provide a hopeful and contemplative view of the natural environment.
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Willem Volkersz, Bozeman, Montana
Volkersz has an immigrant’s fascination with America. Arriving in Seattle from Amsterdam shortly after World War II, he began photographing a newly discovered landscape of billboards, vernacular architecture, and neon signs. Over time, he became fascinated with roadside art and pop culture: larger-than-life advertising figures, postcards, and travel souvenirs. Volkersz creates a charmingly critical narrative around his Dutch heritage and American citizenship.
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Samantha Wall, Portland, Oregon
Wall seeks to communicate the interior emotional state that separates one’s sense of self from their body. Growing up as an ethnically diverse child in South Korea and the American South, she learned to navigate between social and cultural boundaries. Her quietly powerful work utilizes modest materials, such as graphite or charcoal, to build a supple, interlaced texture of marks which are suspended on the surface of paper.
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Join Portland Art Museum docents for a slow looking and art focused meditation experience. This interactive virtual tour invites you to relax, rejuvenate, energize and to try and find a moment of calm. Come along as we connect and create space together for a deeper understanding of artworks on view at the museum.
This program is free and will be presented on Zoom. Closed Captioning will be available.
Register for Zoom and watch on Facebook Live
A woman’s power in the ancient world (and perhaps even today) was always compromised from the outset, and this lecture by Dr. Kara Cooney will address the root causes of this social inequality. Given this social reality in the ancient world, how then did women negotiate their limited leadership roles? Were they able to rule “behind the throne” so to speak? How are we to find a woman’s power when it was so habitually cloaked by a man’s dominance? This lecture will address those questions and ask how much of this ancient reality still touches us today.
Kathlyn (Kara) Cooney is a professor of Egyptian Art and Architecture and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA. Cooney’s research in coffin reuse, primarily focusing on the 21st Dynasty, is ongoing. Her book Recycling for Death will appear in the coming year with American University Press in Cairo. This research investigates the socioeconomic and political turmoil that has plagued the period, ultimately affecting funerary and burial practices in ancient Egypt. This project has taken her around the world over ten years to study and document more than 300 coffins in multiple collections, including Cairo, London, Paris, Berlin, and Vatican City. Her latest book, When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt, was published in 2018 by National Geographic Press. Her next book, The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World appears with National Geographic Books in 2021.
This lecture is sponsored in part by the European American Art Council of the Portland Art Museum and the Mary Ausplund Tooze Endowed Visiting Professor of Islamic & Ancient Art Fund at Portland State University.
Join Portland Art Museum docents for a slow looking and art focused meditation experience. This interactive virtual tour invites you to relax, rejuvenate, energize and to try and find a moment of calm. Come along as we connect and create space together for a deeper understanding of artworks on view at the museum.
This program is free and will be presented on Zoom. Closed Captioning will be available.
Register for Zoom and watch on Facebook Live
In the autumn of 1889, a group of avant-garde artists formed a brotherhood to promote a radical new direction in art. Adopting the name Nabis—Hebrew for ‘prophets’—they sought to capture subjective experience and emotion in their paintings, drawings, and prints. They drew their inspiration from things close at hand—daily meals, family members and pets at rest or play, hushed interiors, and private gardens. In this lecture, exhibition curator Mary Weaver Chapin introduces the four artists featured in this exhibition and delves into their varied and sophisticated use of private domestic life as the locus for artistic inspiration. Yet the domestic world was not always what it seemed; suppressed secrets, hidden affairs, and familial tension bubble beneath the surface, challenging the viewer to construct the unspoken narrative of these small but powerful images of interiors, gardens, and the city of Paris.
Mary Weaver Chapin joined the Portland Art Museum in 2012. She oversees a large and varied collection of more than 20,000 prints, posters, and artists’ books that date from the fifteenth century to the present. She is responsible for the care, collection, research, and exhibition of prints, and oversees the Haber Study Center in the Vivian and Gordon Gilkey Center for Graphic Arts. She is the founder of the Portland Fine Print Fair, and serves as the president of the national professional organization Print Council of America.
Chapin has curated numerous exhibitions at the Museum including the loan shows Private Lives: Home and Family in the Art of the Nabis, Paris, 1889-1900 in partnership with the Cleveland Museum of Art (2021), an exhibition and catalogue that explores the work of Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, and Félix Vallotton; Paris 1900: City of Entertainment with Paris Musées, Museums of the City of Paris (2019); and David Hockney: A Rake’s Progress, presented in partnership with the Hockney Foundation and the Portland Opera (2015), among others.
Chapin is a graduate of Wellesley College and earned her doctorate from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She writes and lectures widely on the graphic arts from the eighteenth-century to the present, and is the author of the catalogue raisonné of the graphic work of contemporary artist Warrington Colescott.
Join Portland Art Museum docents for a slow looking and art focused meditation experience. This interactive virtual tour invites you to relax, rejuvenate, energize and to try and find a moment of calm. Come along as we connect and create space together for a deeper understanding of artworks on view at the museum.
This program is free and will be presented on Zoom. Closed Captioning will be available.
Join Portland Art Museum docents for a slow looking and art focused meditation experience. This interactive virtual tour invites you to relax, rejuvenate, energize and to try and find a moment of calm. Come along as we connect and create space together for a deeper understanding of artworks on view at the museum.
This program is free and will be presented on Zoom. Closed Captioning will be available.
Register on Zoom and watch on Facebook Live
Vuillard’s mother, Madame Marie Vuillard, was a constant in her son’s life and in his art. More than five hundred paintings in which she is depicted, made over a period of four decades, are testament to this. Vuillard and his mother shared a series of modest rented apartments, a Parisian co-habitation lasting until her death in 1928. In these rooms Vuillard and Madame Vuillard operated mutually supportive, parallel working practices: Vuillard put his mother and her small sewing business ‘in the picture’, while she posed for his pencil and camera or printed his photographs. In this lecture, Dr. Francesca Berry will foreground the substance of Madame Vuillard’s role in the practical undertaking of her son’s art, whether that was as model, technician, advisor, financier or servant. Berry will argue that, together, Vuillard and his mother brought a petit-bourgeois woman’s experience of domesticity into visibility as a complex, alternative motif to the domesticated femininity otherwise favoured by the Nabis.
Dr Francesca Berry is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art History, Curating and Visual Studies at the University of Birmingham. Before joining Birmingham in 2005, Francesca studied for her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at University College London. She proceeded to a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Royal College of Art and Victoria & Albert Museum. Francesca is currently chair of the editorial group of the Oxford Art Journal and has served on its board since 2010. Francesca specialises in interior and domestic space in French modernist art, visual culture and design, particularly from a feminist perspective, and has published many articles in this field. She was curator of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts’ 2018-19 ‘Maman: Vuillard and Madame Vuillard’ exhibition and co-author of its catalogue. Francesca is currently writing a book, contracted to Bloomsbury Academic, entitled Édouard Vuillard and the Nabis: Art and the Politics of Domesticity.
Join Portland Art Museum docents for a slow looking and art focused meditation experience. This interactive virtual tour invites you to relax, rejuvenate, energize and to try and find a moment of calm. Come along as we connect and create space together for a deeper understanding of artworks on view at the museum.
This program is free and will be presented on Zoom. Closed Captioning will be available.
The Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Curator of Northwest Art