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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As a closing program to Ansel Adams In Our Time, join us for a screening and audience Q&A of two films by filmmaker, Faith E. Briggs that open conversations around the lack of representation of BIPOC communities in outdoor spaces. Working in collaboration with Mobile Projection Unit, Briggs will be showing This Land, a short film committed to changing the conservation conversation as it follows Briggs on her run of 150 miles through three U.S. National Monuments that lay in the thick of the controversy around public lands. Following This Land, Briggs will also be premiering a recent short documentary film made in collaboration with REI about outdoor adventure company Camp Yoshi, founded by local chef Rashad Frazier.
We encourage guests to bring their own chairs for the screening.
Faith E. Briggs is a creative producer, filmmaker and podcast host passionate about sharing contemporary stories that widen the spectrum of representation and help us all see our own possibilities. Her favorite feelings are a tie between sun on skin and warm mud oozing between bare toes. She is grateful for the life changing knowledge of literary grandmothers such as Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Cade Bambara and many more. She is a partner and director at Camp 4 Collective.
Free and open to the public. All ages welcome.
The Portland Art Museum is collaborating with the City of Portland’s “Supporting Community Healing with Art” initiative and many partners to transform the Madison Plaza into a vibrant creative space activated by and for youth. We are honored to center the ways in which community healing can be realized when youth are empowered to lead, create, dream, and express themselves through their artistic expressions. Poetry, open mic, print-making, journaling, art-installations, DJ workshops, free ice cream, and more! Join us to celebrate our youth in their artistry, resilience, and power. Featured partners include: The Numberz.fm, I AM M.O.R.E., IPRC, and NAYA Many Nations Academy.
Sign language interpreters will be present.
Schedule for the day will be posted on July 26th.
August 2, 4, 6 | 10am – Noon & August 9 | 10am – 11am
This short course will cover the basic principles of stop motion animation and will provide participants the essential skills needed to create their own animated films using a simple (and mobile!) setup. We will discuss how to create different kinds of animated movement, experiment with some different materials (objects, drawings, our homes, ourselves!), and watch plenty of films. Participants are encouraged to think creatively about what we choose to animate. How can we experiment with our materials and methods to tell different stories? What can a coffee mug say that a cookie jar cannot? The course is designed for participants with little-to-no animation experience, but those who do have some experience will be prompted to create more complex works. More than anything, we’ll have fun watching films, discussing animation techniques, and making films!
Materials Participants will need to have available/acquire:
- An Android or iOS smartphone
- The Stop Motion Studio app by Cateater (this is free). Available on Google Play or Apple
- A phone tripod with Bluetooth remote control (~$20 on Amazon. Here’s a good example)
- A clear work surface (a sturdy table or desk — preferably not carpet)
- For the first day, a pile of beans! (These could be jellied or dried — you’re welcome to bring something similar, like dried pasta or coins. We’re looking for a small pile of similarly-sized objects.)
- A Google Drive account (for sharing our films!)
- Access to additional materials of your choice (clay, paper, charcoal are great options — we’ll discuss this further in class)
- A roll of blue painter’s tape.
Instructor: John Summerson
Ages: 14 – 19 years of age
Tuition: $185
Please join us in partnership with Montavilla Jazz, for an inspiring night of live music activation in the Madison Plaza at 8:00 PM, followed by a film screening in the Museum Courtyard at 9:00 PM.
Montavilla Jazz presents Call + Response, a collaborative effort of three local jazz artists paired with three local filmmakers. In the first few months of 2021 project participants Noah Simpson, Micah Hummel each composed, performed, and recorded seven to ten minutes of original music. Filmmakers Shilpa Sunthakar, Jeff Oliver, and DeeJuliano Scott responded with visual “scores” with access to production facilities and the Independent Filmmaker Kit provided by our project partner Open Signal.
Each artist had total creative freedom within the Call + Response framework. The result: three entirely original collaboratively conceived short works of art-music-film. The shorts are compiled as one longer film which will premiere at an outdoor “screening”, projected by Mobile Projection Unit at the Portland Art Museum courtyard in downtown Portland on Friday, August 20. In addition to the mobile projection premier, the film will be shown both days of the 8th Annual Montavilla Jazz Festival live-streamed from Portland Metro Arts on both August 21 and 22.
The Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Curator of Northwest Art