The only reason that you luck out with all these busy bee (or other insect) photos today is that I needed to counterbalance an account of an anything-but-busy writing routine that I – surprise! – found quite familiar.
This from Brian Bilston, the unofficial poet laureate of the Twitterverse, in an interview with Suffolk (UK) Libraries:
A typical day consists of the following:
7.30 - 9.30 Embrace the art of equivocation
9.30 - 11.00 Read a book on procrastination
11.00 - 11.30 Look up 'avoidance' in the dictionary
11.30 - 12.30 Dawdle, dither, delay continually
12.30 Break for lunch
1.30 - 2.30 Ponder the intrinsic nature of work
2.30 - 3.30 Re-prioritise some tasks to shirk
3.30 - 4.30 Hem and haw, chew my jaw, lurch and wallow
4.30 - 5.00 Write new To Do list for tomorrow
All the insects were found in dahlias. These are showy flowers in general, and have been favorites for painters for centuries, most often bundled in huge, colorful bouquets. Although there are innumerable new varieties, the basic types and colors can still be found 100s of years later, as the photographs attest.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir Dahlias 1918
Some like it daintier (I can relate, but am torn – these flowers lend themselves to bunching.)
Piet Mondrian Dahlia – circa 1920-1925Eugene Delacroix Still Life with Dahlias, Zinnias, Hollyhocks and Plums, 1835 Paul Gauguin Dahlias in a Copper Vase 1885Emil Nolde Rote und gelbe Dahlien, Undated watercolorHenri Rousseau Dahlia and Daisies in a Vase 1904SALVADOR DALI The Dahlia , 1979
And the most recent one from local master Henk Pander:
Henk Pander Still life with Dahlias 2022
And one of my all time favorites:
Theo van Rysselberghe Dahlias (to Mme Madeleine E.R Bonnet) 1912
Here are some of the ones that caught my eye independent of remembered paintings, again on the daintier side.
All the dahlia photographs shown here were taken during a visit to the Swan Island Dahlia farm near Canby, OR, some weeks ago. The fields are open until the end of September – it is really worth a trip if you don’t go on a weekend, about 30 minutes from Portland.
“Memories of Hiroshima are what drives me to take action to restore peace. In order to achieve peace, the international community must make it clear that aggression as such brings consequences.”
– Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in a speech at the Guildhall in London, U.K., on May 5, 2022.
SCIENCE. ART. GARDEN(S). A perfect trifecta, all told. Superseded by thoughts of peace. Recent visits to Portland Japanese Garden, one of our city’s treasures, stretched both mind and senses along those lines.
I had not been to the garden in a while. First it was closed for a serious $33.5 million remodel, with new buildings added, and the approach path restructured. Then the pandemic ensued. I was excited, therefore, when my visiting kids suggested the outing – delighted by novelty and grateful for the familiar.
You now pay at the bottom of the hill, then climb up a beautifully landscaped path, eventually entering through the old gate which still greets you with familiar detail.
Bamboo grids support aquatic planting and platforms amplify the sound of dripping water or rainfall while installed as visual screens on the ground, covering mechanical features and drains.
Bell at the old entrance gate
Portland Japanese Garden was an idea conceived in the late 1950s in the context of the US’s attempt to improve relations with Japan after the horrors of WW II. It was founded in 1963, declared the Year of Peace. The project was based on the assumption that the experience of a peaceful environment could be transferred to healing on a larger scale, leaving the hostilities between the nations behind us, promoting reconciliation. I had to look it up, of course, since I don’t speak Japanese, but there are multiple words in Japanese linked to these aspects. 和平 (wahei) means peace, 和解 (wakai) means reconciliation or rapprochement, and 和む (nagono) means to be softened or calming down. All three concepts can be found in the garden: peace as a mission, rapprochement in acts of cultural exchange (more below) and calming, if you immerse yourself in the nature on offer.
Sign at the entrance, maple plantings and water feature.
It is only fitting that the Japan Institute, an extension of Portland Japanese Garden founded last year and devoted to connecting people internationally and exchanging ideas about peace through cultural diplomacy, has created a Peace Program Series.
The first symposium,“Peacemaking at the Intersection of Culture, Art, and Nature,” will be staged in Tokyo, Japan on the United Nation’s International Day of Peace, September 21, 2022. Before that, replicas of the garden’s own peace lantern will be given as Peace Lantern as symbolic gifts to Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Tokyo.
The “Peace Lantern” (neko ashi yukimi), on the East bank of the Upper Strolling Pond.
***
IT TOOK ALMOST seven years from site dedication to opening in 1967, revealing a riveting acreage of 5-in-1 gardens, each reflecting different historical development styles in Japanese horticulture, designed by Paul Takuma Tono (1891 – 1987.) Educated both in Japan and the US, Tono was the head of the landscape architecture department at Tokyo Agricultural University, led a design firm that produced renowned public and private landscapes, and designed a Japanese garden for the Memphis, TN, Botanic Garden as well as the one here in Portland.
Tono’s vision of the flat garden (hira-niwa). The gravel was imported from Japan, deemed too white in its original marble and color- adjusted with more off-white gravel. That kind of attention to detail, getting it “right,” is a hallmark of this garden.
Across the decades, the space began to be open year round, and several structures were added; most recently three LEED-certified buildings compose a Cultural Village, skillfully nestled in the surrounding nature, realized by Japanese architectKengo Kuma for whom this was the first American project. (You can find a recent book about his approach to this particular design and his vision in general here.) Three steel-and-glass pavilions linked by a large courtyard provide space for arts, horticulture, education, a library and a giftshop (quadrupled in size to the old one) and a café. Real growth for a cultural institution, grounds for celebration. Not everyone was happy, though.
Some members of the adjacent Arlington Heights Neighborhood Association worried that the commercial additions to the garden were double the approved size from the city’s land use decision, and would result in increased noise and congestion, a loss of open space. They claimed that the garden didn’t honor promises to mitigate lighting to maintain a dark sky in the park and limit spillover to the neighborhood, or use bird-safe construction practices. (Ref.) This was during the construction phase some years back – I could find no further information, so hopefully all is resolved.
Water not absorbed by the green roofs drips into graveled dry-wells. Class- and meeting rooms are airy with glass sliding doors that allow the outside in and sheltered by wooden slats.
The buildings flank a new wall, Zagunis Castle wall, the first of its kind outside of Japan. Built by a 15th-generation (!) master stonemason, Suminori Awata, who usually repairs old ones at home and was delighted in the opportunity to build a new one, it is supposed to invoke medieval Japan.
Zagunis Castle Wall
The garden attracts between 3000 and 4000 visitors on its most crowded days, much dependent on season, but also receives other communal support. Lots of organizations, for examples, have donated trees like this red pine.
Individuals volunteered to build bridges – I was told that a 98 year-old Robert C. Burbank recently visited to look at the Moon Bridge he helped fashion from an old redwood effluent container no longer in use at the factory where he worked many years ago.
The garden, in turn, gives back – there is, I learned after wondering about the high cost of admission, making visits seemingly out of reach for economically disadvantaged folks, a membership category named in honor of this Moon Bridge. For $20, Oregon and Southwest Washington families receiving public income-related assistance can become annual members of the garden. It also participates in the Multnomah Library Discovery Pass program, donating free tickets that library patrons in need can reserve.
The basic structure of the garden is unchanged, with its many inviting and/or hidden vistas,
its Koi ponds,
tea house garden (cha-niwa,)
its maple trees that attract practically every single Portland photographer in the fall,
and its strolling (kaiyū-shiki-teien) or sand and stone gardens (karesansui).
Buddha and the Tiger cubs. Karesansui or dry landscape garden, focusses on the beauty of blank space, often found as parts of Zen monasteries.
Eight full-time gardeners and many volunteers tend to the place, with daily (!) raking of moss one of the many repetitive chores. I appreciated that they interrupted their work for me, answering my questions and letting me take photographs. Thank you, caretaker Masaki! Of course, I always return to photographing the same subjects, my beloved conifers and the occasional maples. He, on the other hand, returns to taking care of the Bonsai.
A 500 year-old Rocky Mountain Juniper at the Bonsai Display at the Bonsai Terrace.
***
THE VISUAL BEAUTY of the garden is renowned and the obvious magnet for scores of visitors each year. There is another feature, though, that we should think about as well. A growing movement in contemporary landscape architecture suggests to integrate soundscapes and thinking about sound in gardens, a sensory experience that has scientifically acknowledged positive effects on our health. There has been a recent flurry of research focussing on the impact of sound, with some concentrating on untouched natural environments to prevent more sound pollution, and others looking at designed natural spaces. The upshot of much of the medical literature: too much noise is bad for your health, but exposure to nature and garden visits can lead to reduced heart rate and improve our circulatory systems as well as our mood, and they certainly engage our senses. Perhaps not news to traditional gardeners. Sound has been integral to Japanese landscape design for centuries, after all. For the rest of us, new to the idea and curious, I am summarizing an in-depth exploration of 88 Japanese gardens, found here, and apply examples found in our very own garden.
Water features add wanted natural sound and also provide auditory masking for unwanted sounds.
Sound is a variable that can be looked at from different perspectives. You can embrace wanted sounds, you can avoid unwanted sounds, and sometimes you can invite unwanted sounds (as a contrast effect.) Wanted sounds can be introduced in gardens by the sounds of water, vegetation, the materials you walk on, certain biotopes and resonance and reflection. Unwanted sounds can be reduced by noise screens (walls, buildings or hedges etc.) by topography (don’t build next to the highway…) and absorbing (moss as a ground cover) or deflecting materials (tree stands next to garden walls that stop the city noise carried over by wind) to mention a few. None of these are exhaustive lists.
Absorbant moss carpets
Wooden screens at the tea house, protecting against extraneous noise, but also producing natural noise when the fall winds hit at the right angle.
Wanted sounds can be enhanced if you place the garden close to other natural landscapes that provide nature sounds – as is the case in town where Forest Park is a natural backdrop with its wooded hills, bird- and squirrel sounds wafting over. Water features like loud streams or water falls are both providing wanted natural sounds but are also good for auditory masking of traffic or other unwanted noises.
By all reports, Tono stood with his back to the waterfall during installation and directed the placement of rocks and boulders according to the sound that was achieved by different interrelations.
The subtle noise of water trickling engages our senses, it can vary in rhythm and tone, speed and amplitude.
Vegetation can provide pleasant noise: the rustling of leaves, the creaking of branches, the swooshing when the wind moves bamboo, the noise rain makes on broad-leaved plants.
Gravel paths make sounds (as would have the traditional stone paths when frequented by people who historically wore geta, wooden shoes, that clomped along.) Large pebbles provide sound surfaces for dripping water.
Biotopes, conscious planting of species that attract birds and their song, for example, also bring about sound, as do shallow ponds for frogs. The fish, of course, splash, occasionally and unexpectedly, with those huge carp making quite the noise.
Add to that the joyous noises of kids squealing with delight when the Koi jump, and the politely mumbled but insistent exhortations by staff/volunteers to refrain from bending too closely over the water to get that perfect shot….
Hard surfaces like concrete walls or large sculptures can amplify desirable sounds.
In sum, next time you visit, extend your awareness to the auditory components delivered by Portland Japanese Garden. They might reliably, if subtly, increase your pleasure. Announced with a gong seen at the Pavilion Gallery some times back! Maybe too loud….
***
“Intimacy: noun“
1: the state of being intimate : FAMILIARITY
2: something of a personal or private nature – Merriam-Webster Dictionary
SOMETIMES IT PAYS OFF TO BE BRAVE AND CHEERFUL. I cold-called the folks at the garden to see if I could meet their very first artist-in-residence invited by the Japan Institute, who arrived last week. The Institute is in the process of remodeling a new campus that will eventually hold artist studios and housing as well as lecture halls and administrative offices, an extended cultural space. For now, artists are privately accommodated, recruited through leadership connections and networks keen on showcasing international art related and/or relevant to Japan.
The response to my query could not have been friendlier. Sarah Kate Nomura, the Assistant Director of Exhibitions, filled me in on the mission and future plans of the Japan Institute. Will Lerner, the media relations specialist, fount of knowledge about the garden and all-round interesting conversationalist, made the arrangements and gave me a terrific tour, adding new bits of knowledge when here I thought I knew the place pretty well. And finally I met the artist, who was gracious in giving me time during her whirlwind arrival for a month-long stay now, and repeat visits planned for December and March, when her exhibit will open in the Pavilion Gallery.
Rui Sasaki, conceptual glass artist.
Rui Sasaki is an internationally exhibited, conceptual glass artist who strikes an unusual balance of sensitivity and edginess. Born in Japan, she has lived in multiple places on the archipelago as well as long stretches abroad. The thread that connects much of her work relates to her desire to experience herself within place, craving understanding of and familiarity with her environment, a desire shared by many of us who have changed countries and cultures, in some cases frequently.
What distinguishes her from the rest of us migratory folks, is her ability to create intelligent beauty from the intimacy she develops with her surrounds, extending her descriptive powers to everything from the flora of a particular place to its weather, from observations of present detail of a familiar building, to encapsulation of historic specifics of a particular region.
Sasaki received her BA in industrial, interior and craft design at Musashino Art University in Tokyo, before attending Rhode Island School of Design, where she received her MFA in glass in 2010. I was first alerted to her conceptual gift when I saw images of her craft
Detail of “Liquid Sunshine/I am a Pluviophile” (2019), glass, phosphorescent material, broad-spectrum UV lights, motion detector, 3,353 x 4,267 x 3,658 millimeters as installation. Photo by Yasushi Ichikawa, 33rd Rakow Commission, courtesy of The Corning Museum of Glass.
and heard the interview about the work that scored her the prestigious Corning Museum of Glass Rakow Commission in 2018. The work is gorgeous. The weather theme was subsequently expanded upon with a series on Wearing rain, where the artist re-imagines traditional Japanese rainwear fashioned from rice straw in glass and silver wire, one of my favorites.
Wearing Rain Glass, silver wire (2016) Photo Credit Pal Hoff
Capturing images of a particular site, or representing it in some ways is not new to glass work, of course. One of Sasaki’s favorite artists, Roni Horn (new to me and now I can’t get her out of my head,) for example, collected samples of water from numerous Icelandic glaciers and stored them in transparent glass columns. The Library of Water (2007) is an installation of 24 such containers, refracting and reflecting the light onto a floor covered with a field of words in Icelandic and English which relate to the environmental conditions. Some of the water stored is the last evidence of glaciers that have since melted, a document to the mutability of environments, our unstable place within them, and the need for a sensitive approach to preservation. Here is an interview from Horn’s current show in Paris, laying out some of the principles behind her art anchored in identity and change.
Roni Horn The Library of Water (2007)
One of my own admired glass artists, Beth Lipman, has several projects related to place as well. Her series Alone and the Wilderness (2014) places gazing balls and other blown containers into the landscape, video-graphing the ongoing reflections of nature with changes in light, temperature and weather conditions, exemplified in the video of Windfall, a continuously looped time lapse displayed at the Corning Museum of Glass.
Beth Lipman Windfall (2014)
Rui Sasaki will use her residency at Portland Japanese Garden to extend an ongoing search for connection to the environment she moves in. What started in Japan during a stay at the Houen Temple in Kanazawa will be continued with specifics from the current site. The artist collects local plants and fires them together with the glass, providing a repository for the ashes that maintain a semblance to their prior form, holding past and present in one. I could not help wondering about the significance of ashes for an artist whose country has quite literally risen from the ashes of nuclear incineration. The trans-generational trauma for offspring of survivors of Hiroshima is scientifically well documented, as for many later generations of communities who experienced collective loss, the Holocaust, the families of war veterans, be it Vietnam, Afghanistan, Irak or former Yugoslavia. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s unshakable anti-nuclear weapons position can be directly linked to his nation’s trauma. Perhaps Sasaki’s subtle beauty can be indirectly associated with the notion that we must not forget. Both urged me to contemplate peace.
She plans to create four walls composed of these glass components in an installation measuring around 8 feet long and more than 9 feet high, with two openings allowing visitors to move among all sides of the display. The combination of Japanese and newly site-acquired plants will link the two cultures. Sasaki also hopes to represent what she’s gleaned in planned conversations with gardeners and staff of the garden, adding historical bits that forge connection to people as well as botanical environment, opening our eyes to different perspectives on the garden. The work will be fired at Bulleseye Studio and displayed in March at the garden’s Pavilion Gallery.
***
THE QUESTION OF (NOT) BELONGING can loom large for people who experience culture (and reverse culture!) shock when moving between countries. It is psychologically adaptive to focus on the next best thing – familiarity with and closeness to a place and its people – since rational as well as affective exploration can distract from the pain of uprootedness, probably made worse by the isolation throughout the pandemic.
Some months ago I reviewed an old, but seminal science fiction novel by Sakyo Komatsu, Japan Sinks, which took 9 years to write. The scenario imagines a scientist’s discovery of the likelihood that all of Japan, the entire archipelago, is going to go under due to earthquakes, ocean floor faults, and what not. One of the narrative lines concerns how the government is handling the crisis, from negligence to obstruction to panic. Another focusses on the distribution of millions of people around the world, with nationalist impulses against immigration vying with empathy for a drowning people. My thoughts:
“The philosophical question it raises, though, is one that we will have to think through in climate change migrations to come: what does it do to your identity, as member of a nation, or a tribe or a culture or a language group, when the place that defines you ceases to exist? Literally is no longer there to return to? Is it destructive to lose that connection to place which is a base for underlying sense of self, or is it empowering because you can shed the debt you incurred as a member of the nation (say of an imperialistic or fascistic past) and start from scratch? “
Sasaki’s work speaks to a version of this question, the subjective disconnection to origin as experienced by the migrant. She demonstrates resilience to loss by forging an intimate connection to whatever can still be embraced, finding succor in the perceived beauty of an environment, preserving it in glass for all of us to see. But ashes represent the very notion of loss as well. Art as a wake-up call as much as consolation.
Portland will be enriched by her presence.
Details found on the access path.
Here is a 2021 concert of Japanese music presented in the garden.
TO PUT IT BLUNTLY: I came for the art. Stayed for the history. And left with a mind filled with thoughts about access to education. It all started out, however, with standing at the doorstep of the wrong museum.
Leave it to me and my heat-addled brain to drive to Newport, OR to visit OSU’s current Art About Agriculture exhibit displayed at a Lincoln County Historical Society‘s venue, look up the address for something called “museum” and end up at the Society’s Burrows House. Which was closed. I rang the doorbell and a startled, but exceedingly friendly book keeper tried to figure out who I was and what I wanted. Ah, I was supposed to be at the Pacific Maritime Heritage Center (PMHC) overlooking the bay and the iconic Yaquina Bay bridge!
Good thing that my ridiculously stereotypical German punctuality had left some leeway to make it in time to the appointed meetings across town with the various parties involved in my query to learn more about what’s going on in Newport, OR. Somewhat flustered, nonetheless. Soon absorbed by so much I had to take in.
Let us first look at The Sustainable Feast (August 5- September 30, 2022) a collection of artworks about food production and consumption. It was in the process of being hung by Owen Premore, Directing Curator of OSU’s College of Agricultural Sciences, when I arrived. Curating so many diverse works across two locations (the Visual Art Center at Nye Beach is the second one) is an art in itself – the sequencing as demanding as the mounting. Premore had his work cut out for him, while also training museum staff how to hang and distribute. Consider the statistics:
Number of art submissions to the open call: 290 artworks by 91 artists. Counties represented: 12 Oregon counties, 5 Washington counties, and Kaua’I County in Hawai’i. Artworks selected for inclusion in the tour by a blind jury: 59 artworks by 47 artists. Artworks at PMHC: 49 artworks by 47 artists. Artworks at VAC: 12 artworks by 12 artists
Quite a feat.
I will then turn to what I learned about the Maritime Center and its new Executive Director, Susan M.G. Tissot, appointed at the beginning of May, who gave me the grand tour of the building, related its history and provided much food for thought. Finally I will fill you in with what’s new at Newport’s Visual Arts Center, which is also exhibiting some of the Sustainable Feast‘s displays in the Upstairs Gallery (August 5 to 28, 2022) and has new leadership as well. Yes, it was a full day. Glorious, too.
***
FOR ALMOST 40 YEARS, OSU’s College of Agricultural Science has called on local artists to submit work that helps bring people closer to agricultural resources and research, increasing our understanding and valuing of agriculture, diversity of approaches and innovation in our food system. At its core it is an educational mission, one made possible by significant resources put into the Art in Ag production, including helping the annual show tour across the state for maximal access for visitors. Included is the acquisition of jury-selected art works for the University’s Permanent Collection, which at this time holds fiber arts, mixed media assemblages, paintings, sculptures, watercolors, and works on paper including drawings, photographs, and prints. Permanent collection displays can be found across the state, including at the OSU campus in Corvallis, the Oregon Housing and Community Services in Salem, and the Oregon Food Bank and Wheat Marketing Center in Portland.
The current exhibition shows a wide array of media, and ranges from mediocre to stellar exhibits, a fact I found particularly appealing: this is not an elitist display, but a cross section of artists of all levels interacting with nature, their eco systems, the way food is processed and problems or successes associated with issues related to agriculture. Rather than being in awe, the visitor is drawn in, recognizing our own place and time, exposed to art that is quietly accessible.
I am featuring below selected works that give an impression of the range of media and topics. Go visit the exhibition to get the full sense of artistic talent!
Toni Avery Grey Skies,Golden Fields Acrylic
As a photographer I was of course drawn to particularly strong work by Loren Nelson, David Schaerer, and someone new to me, Craig J. Barber. Whether you depict the simple beauty of a vegetable,
Loren Nelson Bent Pepper, 1999 Black&White Photograph, Archival Pigment Print
or the interaction with the land,
Dave Schaerer Commercial Clam Diggers 2 2012 Digital photographic print
often made harsh by working conditions under a system that has not been kind to or even exploitative and harmful to those it hires, the photographs engage the viewer to think through the issues. This is particularly relevant in a year where farm workers in Oregon, most of them Latinos, have finally been granted overtime pay, something they had been excluded from since the federal 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act. Since June and July, Oregon also has new OSHA state rules that protect workers when temperatures soar beyond 80 degree or the air becomes clogged with wildfire smoke.
Craig J. Barber Trimming Rhubarb Photography: archival pigment inks on fine art rag paper
The heat protections require employers to allow workers to take paid breaks to get relief from the heat, provide access to shade areas outdoors and an adequate supply of drinking water, have a heat illness prevention plan and to gradually introduce workers to high temperatures. Some 87.000 farm workers, independent of immigration status, construction workers, forestry professionals, highway workers, and utility personnel will be protected. (Ref.)
Craig J. Barber Hooking Up an Irrigation Hose Photography: archival pigment inks on fine art rag paper
My eye was caught by a mixed media exhibit by a local Newport artist that teemed with detail, helping us understand the biodiversity required for healthy soil.
Carol Shenk Healthy Soil Biodiversity Mixed media – Details below
My interest was piqued by a mixed media installation that informed, in rebus-like fashion, about animal husbandry and intergenerational transfer of knowledge on a Central Oregon sheep farm in Crook County.
Andries Fourie Powell Butte Romneys Mixed media
There was fiber art,
Sheryl LeBlanc Eat Uni and Help the Kelp Fiber arts
unusual bead work,
A. Kimberlin Blackburn A Farmer’s Life with Luna at the Waterfall 2022 Glass beads, acrylic, thread and up-cycled ceramics
gorgeous sculpture of fungi,
Hsin-Yi Huang The Magnificent Fungi 2022 Porcelain fired to Cone 8 in oxidation atmosphere
and a cabbage.
Crista Ames Unfurl Ceramic: stoneware
There was whimsical work combining installation and photography (all the vegetables were photographed at markets by the artist.)
James Erickson Singer Farms Mixed media sculpture
Video installation could be found next to traditional paintings.
Katy Cauker Orchard Late Summer – Carpenter Hill 2022 Acrylic on Canvas
Julia Bradshaw Cafeteria 2022 – Video, Chafing Dish, TV Monitor – you saw empty dishes moving along an assembly line inside the chafing dish, clever.
Mabel Astarloa Haley Decay 2 2022 Oil
***
THE EXHIBITION AT THE MARITIME CENTER is located in the Mezzanine, a space recently refinished, plied with soft carpeting to shelter from uneven floor planks, equipped with beautiful exhibition panels, and with a professional lighting system that tells you right off the bat that Susan Tissot is not a woman of half measures. If something needs done, it will get done right.
30 years of experience in the museum world, including 19 years as Executive Director at different institutions across the western states and Hawai’i, have produced an accumulated knowledge base and varied skill set (think fundraising, grant writing, and above all museum development) that are surely needed in the current situation: cultural institutions all over the place have been battled by economic factors, the closures and difficult working conditions due to the pandemic, with non-profits some of the hardest hit.
What stood out to me in our interaction, though, was Tissot’s infectious enthusiasm for education and her curiosity in conversation. Here was a woman who could have simply made a sales pitch to get her institution on the map – plenty of positive features to highlight, intriguing history of the building to report, neat stuff to show. All of which she did, mind you – I now know the history of a house built by wealthy entrepreneurs, converted into nightclubs and restaurants, and eventual transformation of this beautiful space with its breathtaking views into the current historical center.
The Doerfler Family Theater, for example, is in the building’s basement. There you can directly choose which of 12 short documentaries you would like to see. It also serves as an auditorium for a variety of performances and belongs on a long list of things that hold much potential for this venue. The varied engagement of community members is formidable. To mention just a few, the Board President and retired Director of the Port of Toledo, Bud Schoemake, spent the last 18 years working tirelessly on the building and also oversaw project management of the mezzanine remodel.
Jo An McAdams, the Board Secretary has also been very involved; she is a USCG wife whose husband was a Master Chief. Jo An got the USCG in Newport to help the PMHC do some heavy lifting getting the new exhibit panels here and up on the mezzanine from the shop in Toledo. Joe Novello, a retired US Coast Guard, educator and author who runs the Toledo Community BoatHouse worked with Schoemake on the exhibit panels. Art exhibits are lined up for the near future that will speak to a variety of interests and regional strengths.
The work of three Northwest artists, Cascade Head artist Duncan Berry’s Gyotaku printing on wood panels, McMinnville artist Andy Kerr’s wildlife painting on wood panels and Lincoln City artist Nora Sherwood’s bird illustrations on paper are pretty striking.
The visual art is paired with objects from the museum’s collection, taxidermy specimens including exquisite maritime birds, and a hands-on opportunity that includes wildlife pelts for kids of all ages, courtesy of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. Tissot very much wants to provide occasions for the general public, children included, that allow people not just to experience wonder or surprise, but that makes them ask questions, the very first step to become more engaged, be it in science or art.
Not the easiest thing to do, when your institution runs on a staff of 5, and is physically slightly removed from the tourist strip that is Bay Boulevard in Newports’ Historic district, if only by a few steps up a staircase, or a driveway that leads to plenty of free parking behind the building. That distance is enough to have people blindly walk by, not aware of what one misses. I, too, plead guilty of not even knowing about the PMHC, despite annual pilgrimages to Newport with the kids, who would have just loved, loved, loved this museum. (Here, by the way, is an online resource for maritime institutions nationally that you can visit, virtually in may cases. Use it as a teaser and then explore the real thing in Newport!)
Andy Kerr Owl Painting on Wood
Here is an interview where Tissot explains the plan for public programs. Still to come are a free Exhibit Art Talk on August 21, 1-3 pm about how nature is used as inspiration for art with artists Duncan Berry and Nora Sherwood. They also discuss the reasons why they focus on the subject. And on Sunday August 28, 1pm, Skyler Gerrity, Assistant District Wildlife Biologist, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, will be at the PMHC to give a presentation on How to live peacefully with our local black bears.
***
I RECENTLY LISTENED TO AN INTERVIEW with Heidi Zuckerman a young American leader in contemporary art, formerly a curator at the Jewish Museum in New York City and the Berkeley Art Museum. As CEO and Director of OCMA/The Orange County Museum of Art in California, she is building a new, ground-up project with Pritzker Architecture Prize winner Thom Mayne, as well as producing podcasts featuring conversations about art. She talked about her three criteria for a successful institution that serves the public (other than free access which is only a possibility if you have a wealthy and generous donor base. One should be so lucky.) She listed:
1) looking back to look forward – have history as a guide.
2) be mindful of place – anchor yourself locally and within the specifics of your time (awareness of what Covid has done to us and institutions was one example she used.)
3) caring and sharing – be aware of the needs of the community you want to reach, and approach them, invite them, engage them where they are, rather than expecting them to find their way to you.
I was thinking that Tissot’s approach to her work – and partially what PMHC has done since its inception – really fits with these criteria, biding well for the institution. History is preserved, explored, taught; it is anchored in place, focussing on local needs, interests and struggles. (One of her biggest achievements, in her own words, for example, was support for an oral history program (Center for Oral History, Social Science Research Institute, University of Hawai’i at Manoa) that taught younger generations of Hawai’ians about the devastation and horrors of previous tsunamis destroying the islands.) And she is a conversational partner, caring and sharing indeed, not just a representative of an institution, but voicing interest in her interviewer and taking time to discuss shared concerns about how art can be of help in education. She was clearly curious about who she interacted with, something that happens rarely in my reporting experience.
Let’s help keep the PMHC afloat!
***
THE NEWPORT Visual Arts Center, my last stop for that day, has seen its share of challenges as well. After admiring the Sustainable Feast artworks displayed in the Upper Gallery (selective images are posted below,) I was sitting down with Sara Siggelkow, OCCA Arts Education Manager, well known for her important role in Newport’s paper book arts festival, and OCCA Executive Director Jason Holland, who arrived in 2020 after 18 years of experience in various roles at Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, California.
The Covid pandemic had a huge impact on the institution given that educational classes and camps could not take place, and performances at the Performing Arts Center had to be canceled. At this point the institution operates with 50% of the original staff, a large decrease for an organization and a major upheaval for those who lost their jobs, some permanently, in a small community where the arts are likely not hiring for some time to come. Lay-offs are always difficult, but particularly jarring when alternative options are slim.
Holland emphasized how much flexibility is needed and day-to-day decision making required to adapt to new and ever changing circumstances. He was excited to be joined in this venture by a new Director of the Visual Arts Center. Ceramic artist Chasse Davidson who operated Toledo Clayworks from 2015 thru 2020, served as Toledo Arts Guild President 2014-2015, and has participated in the Newport Visual Art Center’s Steering Committee since 2020, will join the staff.
Robin Host Crab Season 2022 Acrylic and Paper Collage on Panel
Bill Marshall Quamash 2022 Watercolor
Lisa Brinkman Sophia’s Garden 2022 Eco-prints of sumac, eucalyptus, and maple, cold wax and oils on raw silk canvas
I was fully familiar with the important role the VAC plays for Oregonian artists as a place to exhibit art. I knew much less about its role in education, beyond my general knowledge of summer camps and year-round classes. Both Holland and Siggelkow reported on their venture with the Oregon CoastArt Bus, a vehicle that literally brings art to the people, instead of people to the arts center. Or, to be more precise, brings the chance of making art and thus involvement in art to those who might be stuck in their communities due to lack of transportation, funding, or simply information.
Oregon Coast Council for the Arts is pleased to announce the creation of a new mobile arts-learning platform—The Oregon Coast Art Bus, which will bring creative learning projects to students throughout Lincoln County this summer and beyond. The project has been funded by the K-12 Summer Learning Fund of the Oregon Community Foundation and is designed to address the “opportunity gap” associated with educational challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Oregon Coast Art Bus’s summer initiative will focus on under-served youth populations. The Bus event will be free and families are encouraged attend.
The bus comes equipped with an arsenal of tools to introduce a theme, parks at the local library, or a box store parking lot, or a sports field, and everyone can come and participate. For the last round it was printing of nature’s bounty. Planned for the next round are geometric shapes. Struck me as a splendid idea, and I wonder how many counties in Oregon could copy that approach to help children find access to and grow an interest in art. Here is a detailed article on the project published in Oregon Arts Watch last year.
Looking forward, concerned with place and sharing and caring here as well. Art is in good hands at the Oregon coast. A sustainable feast with our continued support.
Artwork by a child participating in the activities offered by the Art Bus crew.
And finally a note to my regular readers: I will take the rest of the month off, an earned break!, see you in September.
It is always bittersweet when a project ends that involved a long-time investment and connected you to many different artists, art works and unusual experiences. I have been following most of the 13 fiber artists of Maryhill Museum’s 2022 Exquisite Gorge II project for almost a year, traveling to their studios and residencies from Ashland to Kennewick, and many places in-between. (Here are all of the profiles that I ended up writing, all in one place.)
Tammy Jo Wilson, Owen Premore, Amanda Triplett with student collaborator.
Bonnie Meltzer, Lynn Deal.
Chloë Hight, Xavier Griffith, Carolyn Hazel Drake and Husband.
Magda Nica, Ophir El-Boher.
Kristy Kún, Francisco and Laura Bautista.
I’ve gotten to know them, admire them, envy them – and most of all I got to think about diverse approaches to create artistic representations of sections of the Columbia River and the Gorge. They were at the heart of the project that connected 11 installations of enormous creative range along the Maryhill Museum Driveway this weekend, a festive celebration by and of community, the many involved area partners to the artists who contributed selflessly and substantially, and the many visitors who came to admire the work.
I also realized how much work is involved behind the scenes, the sweat and labor we never get to experience when we just go and visit an exhibition. There are practical challenges, strokes of bad luck when people are forced to drop out, or promised help fails to materialize. We also do not get to see all the time invested in travel to and from the community partners, the extra cost required by tricky materials, or the realization that some design ideas are brilliant but not able to withstand the weather elements, notoriously fickle in the Gorge.
My fears that the final event after such a long, interesting and difficult run might be anti-climactic were unfounded. It all came together with visible joy and enthusiasm – I will let the photographs (mostly) speak for themselves.
Louise A. Palermo, Curator of Education, was a driving force, in more ways than one. Her connection to and support of the artists and her involvement with the community partners, let alone organizing the technical specs and details of the final event, were moving the project forwards. There was literal driving as well – long stretches to facilitate my visits with the artists, hauling the frames for the installations to and fro, and eventually driving the forklift that brought the finished art works out onto the museum drive.
Multiple volunteers helped in ever so many ways, sustaining the yarn bombing, the poppy project, manning the various booths that helped introduce visitors to different ways of manipulating fibers. At the day of the event, many helpers managed to set the frames in place and secure them on rails that had also been built by friends of the museum.
Cindy Marasco, who saved me from starvation with an ice chest full of goodies, guarded my gear and was all around wonderful to talk to when we hung out in the shade when I had to rest, and her husband Ryan Mooney, who built the tracks.
Chris Pothier and Dylan McManus.
Visitors enjoyed the activities on hand, including a sheep shearing demonstration by M&P Ranches,
Merrit and Pierre Monnat of M&P Ranches
and a story walk created by the Fort Vancouver Regional library and the Klickitat County Book Mobile.
Here are some of the other activities on offer:
Judy learned felting!
Most of all, however, visitors congregated around the finished installations, admired the incredible range of what was shown, and listened to the individual artists giving short talks explaining their process.
They eagerly photographed the QR Code that linked to detailed information for each piece, clearly engaged.
Many visited the museum itself, at one point in time registering over 350 visitors simultaneously, approaching limitations.
Wilson and Premore Frontispiece, seven crocheted mountains on top of the sturgeon, aquatic plants printed, and quilted fabric from Premore’s grandmothers who lived in the region.
Here are some details from the installations – to experience the full beauty you have to visit yourself – they will be in display for over a month starting now. Or you can take a virtual tour here with a short video produced with the help of canine Daisy…
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A parade of hats was a feast for the eyes, elegant protection from an increasingly hot sun – remind me to get one of those for future occasions!
with people seeking shade for picnics or the delicious food sold by a Mexican caterer,
and dogs happy when they eventually found some shade as well.
In other words, a great success, for the museum, for the artists, for the many in the community who contributed in so many ways.
It all goes back to the river. The land that has seen hope and heartbreak, new opportunities at the cost of displacement of those long here before colonial settlers arrived. It struggles with fires and floods, with economic inequality, competition for access to ever diminishing resources of water and fish, with questions of what a future might hold and who will be privileged to enjoy that future without having to leave home or traditional vocations. The art installations reminded us of much of that.
Equally so, Saturday’s celebration showed the resilient spirit that unites many of the people of the region: a pride in and connectedness to the river, well aware what an incredible resource it is and how it deserves protection. May art be a guardian of that mission.
Details of work by Meltzer (front) and Kún (back felting.)
Three cheers for an institution – the museum – to help us remember all this through the Exquisite Gorge Projects.
Cant’ wait to see what Exquisite Gorge III will hold.
“…a collaborative fiber arts project featuring 13 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence. The project, again initiated by Maryhill Museum of Art and following the original one by printmakers in 2019, takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project II, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”
Section One: Oregon Society of Artists–Artist: Lynn Deal Section Two: Lewis and Clark College–Artist: Amanda Triplett Section Three: Columbia Center for the Arts, The History Museum of Hood River County and Arts in Education of the Gorge–Artist: Chloë Hight Section Four: White Salmon Arts Council and Fort Vancouver Regional Library–Artist: Xavier Griffith Section Five: The Dalles Arts Center and The Dalles-Wasco County Library–Artists: Francisco and Laura Bautista Section Six: The Fort Vancouver Regional Library at Goldendale Community Library–Artist: Carolyn Hazel Drake Section Seven: The American-Romanian Cultural Society and Maryhill Museum of Art–Artist: Magda Nica Section Eight: Desert Fiber Arts–Artist: Ophir El-Boher Section Nine: The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation–Artist: Bonnie Meltzer Section Ten: ArtWalla–Artist: Kristy Kún Frontispiece: Tammy Jo Wilson (project artistic director) and Owen Premore
“If it is true that all thought begins with remembrance, it is also true that no remembrance remains secure unless it is condensed and distilled into a framework of conceptual notions within which it can further exercise itself.”- Hannah Arendt, On Revolution
IMAGINE BEING A YOUNG CHILD ripped out of your familiar surround, transplanted into a world completely foreign to you, including a new language. Imagine being raised Jewish and now settled in a Christian school. Imagine being entrusted with an adult secret, urged not to tell that you will be leaving, unable to fill in the gaps about the reasons, a dark cloud over your mind too young to understand the facts, but old enough to pick up the feelings: pure fear. Your guess: Germany late 1930s? Guess again: America, during the McCarthy era in the 1950s.
She told me
I had a chance to talk to artist Ruth Ross, for a preview of her upcoming exhibition, Red Scare, at Gallery 114 in August, and look at her beguiling work – fabric collages, cyanotype photography and embroidery – which deals with that childhood trauma at the same time that it provides a memory cue for all of us to think back to the days of communist witch-hunts, and perhaps forward to possible witch-hunts of our own now and in years to come.
Ross was born to a young Jewish couple, Ethel and Eli Ross, both members of the Communist Party of the United States, deeply engaged in the fight against racism and the struggle for social justice and improvement of the lives of workers. Their social circle, and indeed close friends, included many such idealists, some compelled to fight fascism in Spain, sacrificing their lives to combat that scourge. Their circles overlapped with those of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, accused and convicted of espionage for providing the Soviet Union classified information on the Manhattan Project, executed by electric chair in 1953, leaving two young boys orphaned. Insisting on their innocence to the very last, it was later confirmed that Julius had indeed handed over some secrets, though less crucial ones than was claimed, and an innocent Ethel was convicted on false testimony of her brother-in-law who tried to protect his own family.
June 19th, 1953 – Date of Execution
The artist’s parents were shellshocked and decided to leave the country to where their meager funds would take them and their 2 children, ending up in Puerto Rico. What do we know about the times that would warrant such a life-changing decision? Was it based on justified fear or mired in hysteria? What could compel a couple deeply entrenched in their Brooklyn, NY neighborhood, their work, their organizations, their family, comrades and friendships, to choose displacement?
Arise, you prisoners of starvation! Arise, you wretched of the earth! For justice thunders condemnation. A better world’s in birth.
Ethel and Eli Ross
The 1950s American psyche was accosted with the Red Scare, with powerful political forces inciting widespread fear of a potential rise of communism, anarchism or other leftist ideologies. Fear of hostile outsiders was, of course, nothing new to Americans. Starting in colonial times until the early 19th century it focussed on Catholics, who were seen as inferior and unassimilable, stoked further by mass immigration of Irish Catholics in the 1830s and 1840s. The arrival of Italians, Slavs, and Jews from Southern and Eastern Europe prompted a new nativist upsurge – by the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan had gained hundreds of thousands of members, with their membership exceeding 4 million people. Fear mongering worked: new federal immigration laws severely dented the numbers of people allowed to immigrate. Fears of foreign ideology – fascism, anarchism, Marxism, undermining American ideas of exceptionalism and manifest destiny, eventually culminated in decrying the specter of communism during the times of the Cold War.(Ref.)
People who are afraid often seek a protector. If protecting allows you to yield power, then it is in your interest to feed fear, particularly in those who are not (yet) aligned with the Zeitgeist or the desired ideology. If instillation of fear squashes dissent and weakens both individuals and organizations that threaten your power or the profits you derive from the system that you support, then you become pretty good at figuring out what scares people.
In the 1920s, during the first Red Scare following the Bolshevik revolution and during a strengthening of the labor movement, it was often mob rule and mob violence that affected union members or other progressives, with one particularly horrid example close to us geographically, in Centralia, WA. A detailed description and analysis – not for the faint of heart – can be found in Cal Winslow’s When Being a Red Meant Risking your Life. During the second Red Scare in the 1950s, Senator McCarthy’s and friends’ approach to generating and sustaining anticommunist actions welcomed more allies in their fight against those who threatened old regimes or existing local hierarchies, be they class, religion, race, or gender. If you wanted to bust unions that organized labor across racial lines, fight pluralism, undermine civil rights organizations offering critiques of capitalism, racism, and gender oppression, or silence writers, artists, and journalists who advocated internationalism and peace, or oppress gay people who were seen as a threat to American masculinity, you needed loyalists in place to help with the task: in the administration, in law enforcement, in the court system, with neighborhood snitches and the occasional violent mob.
Letter to Eli from Abe Schwartz I and II – I hope the comrades are proving to be good Bolsheviks.
So what did Ruth Ross’ parents face, as members of a despised and feared political party? Or if labeled as Rosenberg acquaintances? They knew about the fate of some of the latter – Joel Barr, a college friend of Rosenberg, disappeared in Paris. Another college friend, MortonSobell, went to Mexico (and was later extradited), where another, Alfred Sarant, had already gone into hiding. William Perl was convicted of perjury .
Clockwise from Left: Arraignment. Rosenberg Boys at Sing-Sing. We are young, too young for death.
The more likely scenario, though, was what tens of thousands of leftist or progressive people faced in those years:
You were called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), with but a few unsavory options. As Benjamin Balthaser wrote in a March 2022 essay for Jacobin, reviewing the book In Contempt: Defending Free Speech, Defeating HUAC:
“If you testified, you would be called upon to publicly denounce communism and then “name names” of other Communists and former Communists, then subjecting them to the same investigation. If you refused to testify, then you could be cited under the Smith Act, which effectively banned membership in the Communist Party. If you were not a citizen, you could be further indicted for failing to register as a Communist. … if appearing at the hearing and refusing to answer questions on the grounds of the First Amendment right to free speech and free association, then you could be indicted and sent to prison for contempt and noncompliance with a congressional committee.”
“The other punishments of the Red Scare were less legalistic but no less devastating. As the Supreme Court ruled, Communists and former Communists could be legally denied jobs, fired from jobs they had, denied federal student aid and research funding, and denied a place to live. There were no rights a Communist had that the state or a private citizen was bound to respect.”
“And in many cases, vigilante violence solved what the state could not: torchings of Communist and left-wing summer camps, labor halls, personal homes, and public beatings, most famously at Peekskill, New York, were common.” (Ref.)
No wonder, then, that many, like the Ross’, decided to start over, with so many activists silenced and organizations weakened.
At home, labor unions could often not be counted on as allies in either antiwar or student struggles. The energetic Jewish left, as well as African-American civil rights fighters had lost access to progressive institutions and could not longer trust many in their communities, with both the American Jewish Committee and the NAACP backing the Red Scare and even the execution of the Rosenbergs. (They tried to score political victories in a Cold War milieu by rejecting and denouncing “communist” allies who’d helped make those victories possible.)
No surprise, either, that the situational causes were too complex to explain to a child. A child that could only try and comfort her mother with the plea to stop crying on the day of the execution of an innocent acquaintance.
Mom cried on Execution Day.
***
MEMORY IS A STRANGE BEAST. Composed of actual facts, revised notions after a change-in-circumstances, integration of facts supplied by others or derived from non-memory sources like dreams and suggestions, conceptually geared towards helping us function in our worlds, it cannot always be trusted. Unless we are on the witness stand, though, veracity of fact does not exactly matter.
What matters is the construction of a narrative that helps us understand our world, our reactions, our path and our sorrows. In a funny way that is the opposite of the Arendt quote I prefaced these thoughts with. Her assertion”... that no remembrance remains secure unless it is condensed and distilled into a framework of conceptual notions…“referred to the assessment of the historical role played by the American and the French revolution in securing a memory true to fact. I had chosen the quote because I believe we must accurately remember the role that red baiting or any kind of baiting (I’ll get there in a moment) plays in a democracy or any system that aspires to uphold democratic values – a topic brought to the fore by Ruth Ross’ work that made me think about politics and justice (incidentally topics that loom large in a relatively recent biography of Ethel Rosenberg, Ethel Rosenberg – An American Tragedy, by Anne Sebba, a book that inspired Ross to dedicate herself to this project.)
Ruth Ross
Yet what Ross’ art does, in particular her depictions of her personal odyssey and that of her parents, is to create a narrative that considers the world from a perspective all her own, the emotional lessons learned and worked through from painful experiences, a personal, not necessarily factual truth. In some way, the entire project reminded me in this regard of Louise Bourgeois‘ often quoted phrase that “sewing is an act of emotional repair.” (I have never been able to find the actual reference, alas.) With all of her embroidered and collaged imagery, Ross walks a path brilliantly laid out in a different aspect of Arendt’s work, her use of non-standard mechanisms to help us see old assumptions with new eyes. (These mechanisms are summarized in a riveting book by Marie Luise Knott, Unlearning with Hannah Arendt, who describes them as laughter, translation, forgiveness and dramatization.)
The artist includes, for example, some black, black humor when she embroiders, on quotidian kitchen towels and old tablecloths, the image of an electric chair right among the symbolism of various identifiable parties, as if it belongs into a national gallery of power symbols. However shameful, I had to laugh, distancing myself enough from the upsetting thoughts so that I did not have to turn away from them completely to preserve emotional equilibrium, thus allowing the Rosenbergs to be remembered.
Quilt for a red diaper Baby – detail below
Forgiveness lingers over the inclusion of letters from a fallen friend to the artist’s father. She is able to acknowledge her father’s role, his losses, his motivating fears, despite the fact that he was a difficult man and turned his back on some of his more youthful political passions, much less his family. Ross attributes her own emotional recovery to time spent at an upstate NY summer camp, theLincoln Farm Work Camp, where hands-on physical work, art and politics united a group of youngsters from predominantly leftie and Jewish families, who found a place and a community there. She spent numerous years with her mother who had, for an interim time, left Puerto Rico to work in San Francisco and nurtured her daughter’s ambitions. Ross eventually graduated Parson’s School of Design in New York City with a degree in Graphic Design and worked for almost two decades as an Art Director at Random House, all the while pursuing her art.
On top: Eli Ross is a Commie. Bottom: Details from Letter to Eli from Abe Schwartz, who died in the Spanish Civil War.
The notion of translation as a tool to provide new ways of seeing old things captured my interest in multiple ways. The artist translates some of the ideas of disrupted lives, harmed existences, a demise by electrocution into visual symbols. The fabrics are frayed, some holes seem to be burnt, but above all there are loose threads hanging wherever you look, broken, ripped or snipped, if you will. I could not avoid thinking of the thread of life, so brutally cut. Yet there was also another word floating to the surface, the German compound noun Fadenriss, literally translated as ripped thread, a rupture. It is the little sister of amnesia, the inability to remember for a short while until you pick up the thread again. It is more than losing your thread of thought, in colloquial English, and less than a total black-out that comes with the biological system’s alarm reaction to overbearing trauma.
Ross’ installations acknowledge the lack of remembering, the desire to forget and the need to return to remembrance, all encapsulated in Fadenriss/ torn threat. They cover both, the personal and the public realm, which makes it very strong work indeed.
Left: Ethel Ross and her Firstborn. Right and Below: Ethel Rosenberg in her Kitchen. Ethel Ross.
Remembering our past is surely important in the face of a resurgence of political movements that use baiting to establish a new enemy, justifying the protection by a strong man and the establishing of legal and administrative structures that undermine pluralism. Calls for loyalty and “cleansing” (feel free to explore the Schedule F plans devised by the previous administration for a future term, with the suggestion to purge tens of thousands of “disloyal” people from government positions) have become louder. A return to traditional, rigid gender roles is openly demanded, including calls for control over female bodies. Any non-traditional gender- or sexual orientation is not only vilified as dangerous, but legally challenged, and certainly not given equal rights. You have trans bans on athletes and in the military already. Schools and curricula are affected with more than a dozen bills introduced across the country to ban teaching of certain topics, specific books or specific sources, among them the Zinn Education Project. Ross’ project reminds us that public memory is short and that will not serve us well. But maybe that is my interpretation of her work, aligned with my own interest in a Jewish approach to fascist stirrings.
Julius’ Tallit (Prayer Shawl) Front and Verso
Which brings me to the last technique on our list, dramatization.
“Arendt came to see human existence as a stage. The job of a writer, she came to understand, didn’t involve making an argument aimed to force the reader, through logic, to change his or her mind and come to accept what the writer had written. She wanted to spark a discussion in which readers were invited — indeed, expected — to take part…. The goal was to present a variety of ideas, perspectives and insights for the reader to sift through, evaluate, compare and contrast and, in his or her mind, synthesize into a new and personal understanding.” (Ref.)
Ross’ fabric works – her cyanotype photographs beneath semi-transparent veils, her curious dedication to feminine attributes from lace, to shoes, to flowers covering the image of a doomed life, her depiction of domestic closeness with hints of nightmare lurking in the back, death all pervasive from a Manhattan prison chamber to the dying fields of the Spanish Civil War – all ask us viewers to decipher the narrative meaning.
It demands that we provide our own answers about the nature and the consequences of an intentionally designed scare, be it about communism or whatever else is handy as a useful specter.
My take? Ripped threads will be all that remains if the civil fabric is once again frayed and broken apart.
Ruth Ross August 4 – 27 1st Thursday, August 4, 6 to 9.
with guest artist Diane Kendall showing Harpies Furies Mercies.
Poetry Reading: Friday, August 19, 6:30 PM Hear award-winning writer Leanne Grabel read poems inspired by Ross’s work.
Gallery 114 1100 NW Glisan Street, Portland, OR 97209
You cannot define electricity. The same can be said of art. It is a kind of inner current in a human being, or something which needs no definition. – Marcel Duchamp
HYDROPOWER. WIND POWER. SOLAR POWER. WILLPOWER. – All of these topics loomed large when talking to Bonnie Meltzer, the last artist I visited in the context of Maryhill Museum’s 2022 Exquisite Gorge II project. She chose to focus on power generation and transmission, a creative move that captures a defining element of the Columbia Gorge landscape and the river as a whole, both visually and economically. It is also a timely topic in an era when calls for renewable energy have become more urgent in light of the impending climate catastrophe. And a potential reference to the obstruction from the fossil fuel industry that is not willing to yield profits regardless of scientific data pointing to the damage wrought on the planet. In the line-up of 11 works by different fiber artists, Meltzer’s sculpture features Section 9, located close to Pendleton with The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation as her community partner.
Bonnie Meltzer with EG II sculpture and community members who helped with beading – 3 photographs courtesy of the artist
The installation consists of crocheted, fabricated and collaged representations of wind turbines and pylons towering over the river, lined by tumbleweed. The towers command visual attention, directing our focus to power lines feeding our incessant demand for electricity.
It is surely no coincidence that electric power and art have often been metaphorically entwined. Most of us cannot claim to fully understand art and electricity’s unpredictable ways, their danger, their ability to illuminate and, yes, to electrify. Clearly they are about transformation, but the details remain a mystery to most. OK, they mystify me. Wired currents, inner currents – I am with Duchamps here, at a loss for a definition, though I am sure a decent engineering or physics education could fix that at least for half of the pair.
Bonnie Meltzer
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN electrical power and art is in some strange ways also embodied in the various art museums, galleries and Kunsthallen that used to be power plants and are now housing art, often art directly related to electricity either as subject matter or to the use of electric devices in the areas of light art, some even producing electricity as well. The most famous ones are probably the TATE MODERN,
which was the former Bankside Power Station in London, England and the Nanshi Power Plant that was subsequently renovated to house the “Pavilion of the Future,” which opened to the public in 2010 for the Shanghai World Expo.
Germany has at least two such museums, ZOLLVEREIN KOHLENWÄSCHE(Former Zollverein Coal Mine) in Essen,
andE-Werk Luckenwalde, outside of Berlin, which actually still generates power and claims self-sufficiency,
The newest of the bunch of converted power plants, which I would love to see if travel is ever again a possibility for me, is the Kunsthalle Prahawhich opened in Prague this year with – who’d guessed it –a show about electricity, Kinetismus: 100 Years of Electricity in Art, tracing the history of electricity in art over the past century, to rave reviews.
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MELTZER AND HER FASCINATION with electric power fits right in then. She surely has the creative spark of defining some of the symbols associated with power in interesting ways, having them pulse enough in crocheted constructions of metallic wire, plastic strands, reflective beads and luminous odds and ends that the resulting landscape becomes electrifying.
The issues of environmental impact, pollution and heritage protection are also not new to her, she’s been long ahead of the curve. There is a substantive thread across her entire body of work that shows her concern, but also her humorous ways of tackling issues in non-combative, and, importantly, non-didactic ways.
She has assessed various aspects of pollution in her Fossil Fuel series which dealt with coal terminals and transport,
COAL TRAIN: Who Pays crocheted wire and magnetic tape, found objects, paint, collage.
Coal — Not In Any Backyard crocheted wire and fishingline, found objects, paint, collage
the dangers of particular matter and coal dust to both environment and human lungs, a beautiful, delicate installation,
Particulate Matter crocheted fishingline, beads, shells stretched on metal frame
and the issues of greenwashing – “the process of conveying a false impression or providing misleading information about how a company’s products are more environmentally sound. Greenwashing is considered an unsubstantiated claim to deceive consumers into believing that a company’s products are environmentally friendly.” (Ref.)
Clean Coal window screen, net, beads, clothespins
Use of atypical materials, creative juxtaposition and unusual textures abound. For me the most interesting aspect of the work, though, is the use of a traditional feminine craft, crocheting, and objects like beads, associated with women’s jewelry or finery, to communicate political ideas and offer social critique. Take this cape, for example, that the artist modeled with gusto and graceful movement, that looks at the many layers of interactions in riparian zones, at the water’s edge. Pollute one, endanger them all. It was originally crocheted for a performance at Cascadia Composers, Our Waters: Big River to the Pacific.
the combination of her interests and her craft reminded me of the work of the artists and architectural team Jin Choi and Thomas Shine. They have worked with pylons, wind turbines and transformers in their actual dimensions, seeing beauty where others see ugliness in the newly defined landscape. They connect the wind turbines to us by use of the human figures, giants that stand in those nordic landscapes as a reminder that humanity is served by renewable power.
The architects also turned to crocheting for huge environmental installations, so of course I was reminded of Meltzer who has also escaped the realm of pot holders and doilies traditionally associated with that ancient craft, exploring political storytelling with chains crocheted from fishing line or wire, looped, doubled, arranged in the most intriguing ways.
All photocredits: Choi/Shine Architects. This project, Arizona!, was erected in 2019 in Scottsdale, AZ.
Just imagine Meltzer would have the support to work on that scale!
BONNIE MELTZER WAS CLOSE to her beloved grandmother and appreciates the skills she inherited from this gifted fiber worker. Born into an orthodox Jewish family in New Jersey, she practically grew up with a crochet hook in one hand and a crayon in the other, (I quote.) For a girl born in the 1940s into such a traditional community, with parents who did not even have a chance to finish school, it must have been an act of incredible willpower to disentangle oneself and find a personal path that potentially defied norms and expectations. Or so is my guess based on reports of women of similar backgrounds who I met when living in New York City. Meltzer and I did talk about her love for her grandmother, encapsulated in the sculpture shown below, but I was too immersed in listening and simultaneously taking in the visual riches around me to ask a lot of follow up questions.
Sculptural Collage that includes images of her grandmother and another mentor. wire crochet, digital photographs.
Meltzer received a fellowship to the University of Washington, Seattle, WA and earned her MFA in 1971. Her work has been widely shown, throughout the Northwest and beyond, for example at the Hallie Ford Museum and Columbia Center for the Arts. Works are in collections at the University of Washington, Baylor University, National Science Foundation and the City of Portland. Most recently she had a well received installation at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education (OJMCHE,) Mending the Social Fabric (link to Beth Sorensen’s review at OregonArtsWatch here.)
Mending the Social Fabric
The project, with themes related to immigration, voting, Covid-19, social justice and safety nets, had
“… at its core a parachute with a 314-foot circumference that is encircled by 75 handkerchiefs embroidered with text that amplifies the mending motif. Mounted behind the parachute are textiles from across the globe. The parachute, a symbol of safety, has rips and tears and over the course of the exhibition interactive community building happens as visitors sit and mend the damage.”
The devotion to working with the community is repeated in the current fiber art project, sewing circles of old evolving into collectives giving voice to their environmental concerns.
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MEANWHILE BACK IN THE STUDIO, there is still much to be explored.
Crocheted sculptural work on the studio wall
Golden hands, indeed, given the countless stitching sessions and the work with materials that are pliable, but certainly not as easy as traditional thread. Green thumbs, by the way, as well. Her organic vegetable garden surrounding her cottage is quite productive.
Not the only traits associated with this artist, though. Her desire to build and maintain community is reflected in the many occasions where she works with others, both teaching and accepting help, like for the EG II project on hand. Meltzer jumped in when a previously assigned artist had to drop out of the process for unforeseeable reasons. Rather than having a year or more preparation time, she had a total of 6 weeks to conceive of a design and do the work to have it materialize. Some 20 people of all ages helped, recruited via Facebook and word of mouth, but the bulk of the task rested of course on her, making for sometimes 12-16 hour work days, for a woman who is approaching her 80ies. Talk about willpower! And Sitzfleisch, to use another German/Yiddish term, the capability to stay on task with grit, patience and determination. Seated on your tush.
Her sense of beauty and whimsey is reflected inside and outside house and studio, with small and large discoveries to be made around each corner.
Notable, however, is a curiosity about the world, and openness to look closely and dare to comment without hesitation. The world is often represented by means of various altered globes throughout the artist’s studio and with themes that react to each political moment, from elections to war.
The world might be about to crack –
but the artist is still on top of it all!
You will meet Bonnie Meltzer and all of the other participants in this adventure on August 6th, at Maryhill Museum. There will be plenty of activities, you can watch the sculptures being installed on top of the bluff, help shear sheep, engage in fiber crafts of various kinds. You can talk to the artists and visit the museum that has a lot of other things to offer.
35 Maryhill Museum of Art Drive, Goldendale, WA 98620 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. DAILY
See flyer below for specifics for the festival.
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THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECTII
“…a collaborative fiber arts project featuring 13 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence. The project, again initiated by Maryhill Museum of Art and following the original one by printmakers in 2019, takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project II, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”
Artists and Community Partners:
Section One: Oregon Society of Artists–Artist: Lynn Deal Section Two: Lewis and Clark University–Artist: Amanda Triplett Section Three: Columbia Center for the Arts, The History Museum of Hood River County and Arts in Education of the Gorge–Artist: Chloë Hight Section Four: White Salmon Arts Council and Fort Vancouver Regional Library–Artist: Xavier Griffith Section Five: The Dalles Arts Center and The Dalles-Wasco County Library–Artists: Francisco and Laura Bautista Section Six: The Fort Vancouver Regional Library at Goldendale Community Library–Artist: Carolyn Hazel Drake Section Seven: The American-Romanian Cultural Society and Maryhill Museum of Art–Artist: Magda Nica Section Eight: Desert Fiber Arts & REACH Museum–Artist: Ophir El-Boher Section Nine: The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation–Artist: Bonnie Meltzer Section Ten: ArtWalla–Artist: Kristy Kún Frontispiece: Tammy Jo Wilson and Owe
The email came out of the blue, from someone I did not know. They liked the way I describe my encounters with the world. Would I be interested in documenting how they see theirs?
Of course I would! How can you not take the opportunity to go to the coast and spend a day with an intrepid band of painters who are out there every summer for a 2- week PaintOut, rain or shine? Meeting at various locations, including Seal Rock, Ona Beach, Rocky Creek State Park, Yachatz North Shore and the old Yaquina Head Lighthouse? Painting, critiquing, freshly exploring a familiar landscape every year or being stunned (or stumped) by it for the first time? Receiving instructions from a veteran art professor, Erik Sandgren, as enthusiastic about teaching as about the act of painting itself?
Off I went to Depoe Bay, not knowing what to expect, but curious how such a collective approach to making art would work. Spoiler alert: It works great. And I had the best day. The weather gods were kind, nature conspired to show off as only nature can, bald eagles on their way to lunch, pelicans on patrol and ambling oyster catchers included.
More importantly, I met a number of artists who were not only engaged with what they were doing, but who had nothing but positive stories to tell: how practicing their craft outside was a godsend during the pandemic, because they could interact, talk, escape isolation and nurture friendships. Many of the people who participate in the annual PaintOut workshop, traveling there from all over the place, continue to practice some form of it with likeminded painters back where they live on a regular weekly schedule, ever more improving the facility and skill with the medium.
From left to right: Deb McMillan, Erik Sandgren, Quinn Sweetman
Speaking of which, there were water colorists and oil/acrylic painters on site, spread across various locations, making me feel, while wandering through the park, like on a treasure hunt – you never knew what sight awaited you while rounding the next corner, or taking a fork in the path. All were enrolled in the three-day paid tutorial that Sandgren offers, tackling specific tasks and problems that arise with landscape painting, with lectures followed by painting session and then a late-in-the-day critique round that helps tie theory and practice together.
Starting with day 4, the meetings are open and free to all, with each day having a specific site announced and anyone who is serious about painting, no matter the level of their expertise, can join the fun. There will still be a conversation about work in the afternoons, but more of a free-for-all, from what I understood.
Some of the attendees have been coming for decades – the workshop started in the late 70s, initiated by Nelson Sandgren, Erik Sandgren’s father, long before the “en plein air” movement saw its recent renaissance in this country. Several of them told me that this annual trip is one of the highlights of their year – and I have to apologize that I did not catch every name, or associate it with the right face – I was so busy learning, admiring, photographing and trying not to lose my notebook in the wind that I was remiss about taking detailed notes for everyone.
Look at the shadow of the hand!
Landscape painting evolved from being a backdrop to religious, mythological or historical themes to a genre important in and of itself only in the late 19th century. Instead of inventing a landscape or creating something from memory, people started to go outside, and document their own perceptions of the way the land looked, a sensory reality that was soon imbued with their own emotional reaction, dependent on how skillfully one managed to get those feelings across. En plein air, a French phrase meaning “in the open air,” anchored the painter – and the painting – in a particular place and a particular time, advanced an understanding and often an appreciation of nature. Or the place you lived. Or both. Some plein air painters, like Théodore Rousseau, for example, even became environmental activist, fighting for the ecological preservation of their habitats.
Painting outside is easier, of course, if you live in a place that has reasonably good weather, in contrast to the nordic countries where landscape painters were known to have to tie their easels down and schlepp large umbrellas against the rains. And talking about schlepping: It was chemistry and technology that enabled people to move beyond the realms of their studios. Bostonian John Goffe Rand’s 1841 invention of the paint tube transformed the practice. Rather than grinding and mixing your own pigments with binding agents, you could use directly from the tube, maybe thin it, but there it was. Add to that a portable easel: the French box easel was easily carried, set up on telescopic legs and had palette and paint box attached. Finally, the development of synthetic pigment allowed a whole new palette to emerge, vibrant shades now easily available, and soon incorporated into what we now know as Impressionism. (Ref.)
Modern gear has obviously advanced. But the engagement with nature has remained the same – a desire to describe, but also awe that takes you away from the easel if special admiration is required. As it was when the whale surfaced, even for the smallest amounts of time. I find it always curious how exited I become – and obviously it was shared excitement – when I get just these tiny glimpses of something dark or grey, there and gone in the blink of an eye. Our brain obviously provides the rest of the story – the thought of the humongous body attached to that small curve, the knowledge how special these animals are and how deserving of our protection of waters that see ever more pollution, dangerous increase in temperature and shrinking feed base.
The more immediate, however, also captured my attention – the landscape’s colors, water and cliffs, both, challenging for the photographer’s eye just as much as the painter’s,
the varied flora,
Clockwise: Monkey flower, wild carrot, daisies, have no clue but could be woodruff, salmonberry, false lily of the valley.
the trees so clearly hammered by harsh winds and salt in the air.
And of course, there are always unexpected odds and ends.
Lost hair scrunchie, anyone?
***
Erik Sandgren is a great story teller, something that I have always associated with gifted teachers. He got his B.A. at Yale in 1975, and earned his MFA at Cornell University in 1977. From 1989 until 5 years ago he taught, single-handedly, art at Grays Harbor College in Aberdeen, WA, with a special interest in a Foundation course that allowed him to convey the basics to students, for many of whom this was the first serious encounter with art. He is widely traveled, and entertained me with an anecdote about an encounter with a museum bureaucrat in Germany, who first insisted on the rules of access (Forbidden! Later!) only to break them five minutes hence by opening the doors for Sandgren, on a short break between trains, banging on the doors, to the holy archives of the Hamburger Kunsthalle. I could not help but adore the big smile with which Sandgren confronted this German, yours truly, with the stereotypes about Germans and the approval that they could be defied, apparently. Even more so since the desired archival visit concerned Horst Janssen, enfant terrible and somewhat famous artist during my young adulthood in Hamburg, known in particular for his uncensored erotic watercolors there, but as a fabulous printmaker internationally.
Self portrait Horst Janssen; Plates from Phÿllis, 1977/78 – a book that contains varied scenes with his innumerable lovers (after three marriages and divorces.) Janssen writes in the introduction:
“The mechanism of love requires ambition, serious effort, patience and wit. The observing eye is then required for the implementation of this mechanism, which divides the whole into its parts, subdivides it, on the one hand increasing it by adding a lustful gaze to the pleasure of the understanding hand, on the other hand for the control of pleasure.”
Seems to me we could apply that to art just as well.
Here is a photomontage of a photo I took of the Hamburger Kunsthalle, for a series, Postcards from Nineveh (2019) calling for the protection of our oceans, mixing 17th century Dutch paintings and drawings of whaling expeditions with photographs of contemporary landscapes, mostly from the US, and some from my native Germany, to show that 400 years later the need for environmental stewardship is still pressing.
I am lingering on this little anecdote because it seems to encapsulate what I glimpsed in this first visit: someone with a deep interest in art, willing to pursue it, a clear understanding of human psychology – including the rule-obsessed German one, and just a lot of curiosity.
Erik Sandgren
Much of it makes its way into his own paintings, particularly the public art murals that embody social issues as well. Ideas about psychology, however, can also be found in his teaching. As always, he prepares for the annual PaintOut by taking notes across the entire year when he runs into problems to be solved while painting, or encounters topics that might be of interest, or tries to find ways to help students overcome obstacles.
This time around he decided to try something new: ask participants in the workshop to sketch what was in front of them while simultaneously listening to his lecturing. By his reports, the resulting sketches were freer, more refined than what had been produced earlier. Why would divided attention achieve those results? Why might multitasking in this way help? Or does it, wonders the cognitive psychologist?
The most straightforward assessment predicts a mixed result. On the negative side, many of us have had coaches, or piano teachers who would admonish us to “pay attention to what you’re doing!” Presumably that advice rested on the idea that, in the absence of focussed attention, we would rely on well established habits that could be implemented without much thought. The result? A mechanical, soul-less performance.
Sandgren sketch used to show the progression of a watercolor
But that concern gets balanced by considerations that point in the opposite direction. Often anxiety and self-consciousness can disrupt and inhibit performance. Distraction can diminish those concerns leaving us less inhibited. Likewise, sometimes we approach a problem with strongly held, but ill-advised presuppositions. Distraction can help us to loosen our hold on those presuppositions, opening the path toward novel and more successful approaches.
I do not know of any clear science that would help us understand how these opposing forces play off against each other. Surely it depends on the details of the circumstances. But even so, the idea that divided attention might help is entirely plausible.
Patty McNutt using a color sampler paper to sketch a coastal pine; progression across the morning.
We should note, though, that there has been some silliness written on the topic. Years ago, various authors advises that you need to “liberate your right brain” in order to be creative, and this meant somehow shutting down your left brain, presumably the locus for analytic thought. I won’t bore you with the details but the conception certainly overstates and distorts the specialized capacities of the two brain hemispheres. More importantly, this perspective completely misrepresents the interaction between the brain halves. The halves of your brain are not cerebral competitors, instead they interact in complex and productive ways. It is unclear, what could possibly be meant by the prospect of shutting down one half or the other. Both brain halves contribute to creative processes.
Jeanne Chamberlain Whalecove
In any case, the best thing, as far as I could see, about that entire workshop was the fact that product – a finished painting – did not score above process, the way of making art in this indescribably beautiful landscape, among soulmates, with a gifted guiding hand. Or brain, as the case may be.
Watercolor by Robin Berry who moved to the coast from Oregon City 5 years ago.
I drove away filled with envy, reminding myself that I can still photograph, and always have the choice of picking up painting in my next life…. in the meantime, what a spectacular view!
“The arts and humanities have the potential to remind us of past environmental change and positive visions for our environment. What we need, I argue, are narratives of hope…..We need stories that empower us to become thinkers, actors, and activists capable of imagining alternatives in a world dominated by technical and economic constraints. We need ideas that will find their way through the mesh of an ever-tighter net of path dependencies. And we need people who will dare to cut apart some of the meshwork.”
– Christof Mauch. Slow Hope: Re-Thinking Ecologies of Crisis and Fear (2019)
I WAS BIASED, ALRIGHT. My interests in art, botany, and communal work were all captured in the installation before me. How could I not be particularly taken? I presume, though, that a more objective observer would be equally excited by Chloë Hight’s contribution to Maryhill Museum‘s Exquisite Gorge II exhibition which will feature a collection of fabric art sculptures, opening on August 6th, 2022 in the museum’s park. The elegance and geometry of her design, combined with her basketry weaving skill, would draw anyone in, is my bet.
Art has the power to remind us about the state of our environment, past, present and potentially future. It can tell us important stories if presenting the right ideas, tales of warning, but also of hope. Hight is a storyteller who is keenly sensitive to issues of place and our history within it, but also of potentialities. Warning and hope.
Her tale begins with the frame that surrounds the sculptural elements she created. The frame is black, and not just any old black. It is black from having been burned with a torch using Yakisugi/Shou Sugi Ban, a traditional Japanese method of preserving wood by applying fire. She then rubbed it with charcoal, ground into powder and blended with pine tar and beeswax. The artist collected the charcoal on the site of the 2017 Eagle Creek fire, part of her section of the Columbia river that begins near the Harphan Creek tributary and ends near the Tumalt Creek tributary, with many draining tributaries including Eagle Creek from its headwaters at Wahtum Lake.
These three photographs courtesy of the artist.
The wildfire, started by a careless teen playing with fireworks, burned more than 48,000 acres in the Gorge and Mt. Hood National Forest. Hikers needed to be rescued; people lost homes and were evacuated. About 121 miles of national forest trails and the businesses of the area were affected during the three months’ duration of the fire and then some. Trails were subsequently endangered by landslides and closed. It is only recent that you can hike there again.
The vulnerability of the eco-system at the juncture between urban areas and the wilderness is evoked with this frame, reminding us of the impact deforestation and climate change had on the magnitude of the fire. But so is resilience: blackened wood still stands, and areas are now open so that charcoal, an important material for man and nature, can be collected and used. Both perspectives, catastrophe and renewal, are integrated into the narrative.
INSIDE THE FRAME flows the river, banked by gently curved steel rods fabricated in collaboration with MacRae Wylde, a local sculptor. The rods provide a metal loom with the metallic material representing the man-made industrial infrastructure along the Columbia River, rigid and constricting. The curvature of the form, on the other hand, echoes the fluidity and resilience of water, a river that seeks its way regardless, created from wood and plant material weavings that represent many botanical species of the Pacific Northwest. Again a juxtaposition of elements that integrates both sides of an environmental story.
The weaving techniques are varied, some shapes hinting at scales and/or fins of fish, so elemental to the river and the people who have lived here for millennia. Some parts contain designs reminiscent of traditional basketry. All are made from plants that play essential roles both in the ecosystem of the region, and the culture of its inhabitants. Diverse techniques, including stake and strand weaving, twining and plaiting introduce texture and patterns. Variations in color, effects created by choosing appropriate plant materials – Himalayan blackberry (Rubus armeniacus), willow (Salix), European beach grass (Ammophila arenaria), iris (Iridaceae), day lily (Hemerocallis), and cattail (Typha) – from roots, bark and leaves, mirror the shading and dappled effect of light streaming into the local forests or shimmering on eddies or wavy water. Darkness and brightness, opposing forces here as well, provide the artist’s rendering of a region with ample tension and beauty – and us with ample opportunity to recognize shades of a landscape we so revere.
One of her formative experiences, she told me, was an internship with Vancouver B.C. based artist Sharon Kallis who focuses on environmental art and community engagement and is the founding Executive Director of EartHand Gleaners Society. Hight was fascinated by and adopted parts of Kallis’ approach to site-specific installations: using material found in the immediate environment, from tended or invasive plants as well as discarded materials in fields and gardens. Making due with what already exists is, of course, a profoundly sustainable approach.
Weaving in the water of the river – Photograph courtesy of the artist
There is an additional advantage, though. Much of the material that is ripped out of our gardens and fields are prolific plants that are not indigenous to the region, but brought to us and considered invasive. Think beachgrass, English Ivy, or Himalayan Blackberry. Rather than demonizing these species, Hight approaches them as something that can serve a purpose. She embraces the abundance of these superspreaders for making functional items, once you know how to treat the plant parts best suited. An irritant, if not a danger, now shaped into something useful, integrated into the ever changing biological melting pot.
Materials collected and displayed for the project
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I HAD PREFACED my observations with the words of Christof Mauch, a fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, an international, interdisciplinary center for research and education in the environmental humanities located in Munich, Germany, because I believe they fit very well with what Hight is engaged in. The center focusses on research in and education about plant humanities, a term that is relatively new, when the approaches it covers are historically pretty established. Think of all the humanities disciplines that have engaged with plants: Anthropology has explored health and biomedicine in different cultures. Environmental archeology has looked at factors that influenced the fate of civilizations. Art history has studied the many glorious plant illustrators who helped science moved along. Plant collections have helped establish taxonomy systems and seeded our modern Botanical Gardens. From philosophers to poets, landscape designers to neurobiologists, questions about plants and their relationship to people have occupied us – now more than ever, I think, given the worries over biodiversity, environmental sustainability and conservation. Biocultural institutions help find answers.
Artists like Hight are telling stories about the places we live in by teaching us about the plants they contain, how to identify them and how to use them. Her small sampler of the most common plants she uses for weaving, cording and basketry is sweet and functional.
It triggered a flood of childhood memories in me. We had large prints of several botanical illustrators hanging in our house, Maria Sibylla Merian (1647 – 1717) among them,
Anne Pratt Flowering Plants Plate 234 Reed Mace, Bur Reed
My mother, who held a PhD in Agricultural sciences and was a master gardener, used them to teach us early about plant parts as much as plant identification, but their beauty alone instilled a lifelong connection. I see Chloë Hight as a great fit for this lineage of women educators, artists and botanists, with an added sense of practicality for schlepping around but a small booklet to have it ready for show and tell!
***
BIOCULTURAL COLLECTIONS – representing the interchange between plants and people – are, of course, not restricted to artistic renderings of our flora. They contain objects made from plants, tools used to process them, medicines derived from plants, and anything else, like archival materials and historical documents, that help us understand both the botany of a particular place and its culture – the art, history and societal traditions of the people who used these plants. There are many of them: The Biocultural Collections Network has over 215 member institutions including botanical gardens, herbaria, natural history, anthropology, and cultural history museums, which span the globe. (Ref.)
One of their major goals is to educate people about plants so they understand the role they play in our world then and now, how important conservation is, and what needs to be done to preserve access to sufficient quantities of food. Which brings us back to our artist.
***
HIGHT IS ENGAGED in teaching at a variety of levels and across domains. She has an interest in preserving and relating ancestral techniques related to fiber arts. She is keen on helping student identify plants and understand their uses. For the EG II project she worked with 7th graders in teacher Adam Smith’s class at Hood River Middle School, using the cordage they produced with her instructions as part of the Exquisite Gorge II sculpture. During the activities she also linked to the 7th grade curricular studies of riparian plants and ecosystems. In previous years she had helped middle schoolers at HRMS to understand the causes and implications of the Eagle Creek Fire. Here is a small film the students produced, including a focus on the fate of the plants. Impressive!
Executive Director of the History Museum of Hood River, Anna Goodwin, on left, with the artist.
When I visited, she was teaching cording to people who had signed up for a workshop with The History Museum of Hood River, one of her two community partners for the project (the other was Arts in Education in the Gorge.) The museum is worth checking out next time you come through Hood River. Small, but informative about local history. They were in the process of putting up objects from their archives relevant to Hight’s piece.
Once the workshop started, Hight explained that cordage was one of the first human fiber technologies that has been practiced across cultures around the globe. It can be an essential skill for everyday survival – think bows, bow-and-drill-friction fires, fishing lines, securing of shelter, and eventually all the ropes needed for sailing ships across the oceans. (A detailed overview of the history of cordage in the Americas can be found here.)
She talked about the process of gathering the materials, splitting, prepping and drying them, and later,when it comes time to use, making them pliable again by immersing them in water.
Clearly the participants had fun, working hard but also together – community in action, under the blossoming, sweet smelling Linden tree in the backyard of the museum.
Actually basswood (Tilia Americana,) a native genus within the Linden family. One of the many things I learned that day, grateful that I got to meet all these interesting, knowledgable, creative people associated with the EG II project. It will be a joy to see the sculptures connected, soon now.
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THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECTII
“…a collaborative fiber arts project featuring 13 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence. The project, again initiated by Maryhill Museum of Art and following the original one by printmakers in 2019, takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project II, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”
Artists and Community Partners:
Section One: Oregon Society of Artists–Artist: Lynn Deal Section Two: Lewis and Clark University–Artist: Amanda Triplett Section Three: Columbia Center for the Arts, The History Museum of Hood River County and Arts in Education of the Gorge–Artist: Chloë Hight Section Four: White Salmon Arts Council and Fort Vancouver Regional Library–Artist: Xavier Griffith Section Five: The Dalles Arts Center and The Dalles-Wasco County Library–Artists: Francisco and Laura Bautista Section Six: The Fort Vancouver Regional Library at Goldendale Community Library–Artist: Carolyn Hazel Drake Section Seven: The American-Romanian Cultural Society and Maryhill Museum of Art–Artist: Magda Nica Section Eight: Desert Fiber Arts & REACH Museum–Artist: Ophir El-Boher Section Nine: The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation–Artist: Bonnie Meltzer Section Ten: ArtWalla–Artist: Kristy Kún Frontispiece: Tammy Jo Wilson and Owen Premore
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
MAYBE IT WAS the state of wistfulness prompted by the fact that my 6-month project of interviewing the artists of the Exquisite Gorge II project is soon coming to an end. Maybe it had to do with entering yet another world new to me, a world filled with appliqué stitching joined with ceramics. What claimed my focus, intellectually and emotionally, was the idea of transitions. Good thing, too, since it is one of the reference points of Carolyn Hazel Drake‘s artistic vision. In dual ways, no less: the meaning of transition is conceptually expressed in her work, but exceptional attention is also given to the transitional points that connect the many small pieces in her larger installation.
Maryhill Museum’s Exquisite Gorge II project links multiple sections of the Columbia river, represented by as many artists, to each other, forming a giant sculpture made out of individual artworks. Drake’s section 6 covers the stretch of the river that ranges from the Deschutes River to the John Day River, including The Dalles Dam, one of four dams built along this stretch of the Columbia between the 1930s and 1970s that displaced Native American communities and wiped out traditional fishing grounds. Celilo Falls, called Wyam, “echo of falling water” or “sound of water upon the rocks,” in several native languages, had existed for 15.000 years, the river providing salmon, the staple diets for the Tribes, the land a place to live, gather and worship. The historical, political and environmental implications of the erection of the dam and the destruction it wrecked, were enormous.
“HOW DO YOU TELL A STORY that is not necessarily your own? How do you capture a landscape that did not always belong to you? How do you document reality without appropriating someone else’s history? These questions pose themselves to any artist, anthropologist, historian who is aware of the limitations of their own perspectives.” I had written these words in relation to Section 6 when interviewing the assigned non-Native artist for the first Exquisite Gorge Project 3 years ago. They apply now as much as then. Carolyn Hazel Drake gloriously rises to the challenge just as Roger Preet did in 2019.
The story that she tells reflects the transitory nature of the river, constricted by dams, the flow that is constrained or enhanced by external forces, the bi-directional migration of the birds that come and go, always in transition. The beauty of the landscape’s colors is captured in a muted scheme that matches the solemnity of remembering the losses of the Tribes, incurred by forced relocation. It is about the river, its fate as well as its strength, the despair imposed on those who call(ed) it home and the resilience that nature confers.
MUCH RESEARCH, both on site and in the literature, preceded the design. Exploration of palette, gathering of materials, choice of fabric to go into a “river” of linked/divided pieces covered with abstract representations of the flight of geese, and lined by ceramic “stones” representing the river banks.
The geese come and go, helping the eye to move along the river, just as they would when observing them in nature.
The stones sway softly, as will the river as a whole when suspended and moved by the wind in the outdoor installation at Maryhill Museum. The somber tones are offset by an occasional striking burst of color. Drake uses Japanese Daiwabo fabrics, yarn-dyed before woven, with nuanced variations. Some are neutral, some muted and some are toned-down, reminiscent of traditional Japanese colors like gray willow (yanagi-nezumi), color of old bamboo (oitake-iro), or time altered celadon (sabi-seiji), leaves in autumn (kuchiba)and the color of water (mizu-iro / suishoku/).
When examining the thought and craft going into the detail work, all I could think of was: Patience, precision and particularity. The dividers of the panels, for example, are sewn into wool fabric that is used to line the woolen blankets produced by Pendelton. Pendelton Woolen Mills has had a longstanding relationship with PNW Tribes since its incorporation in 1909; their first blanket designer, Joe Rawnsley, appropriated tribal preferences for elements in their blankets. The tribal blankets were constructed then as now in the jacquard method, creating woven patterns in a textured woolen fabric. Today they make custom blankets, (not for public sale) “given to honor events on life’s journey: birth, marriage, coming of age, graduation and even death, as well as special celebrations and gifts.” One annual special blanket is created in order to fundraise for the American Indian College Fund. Blankets are produced in Pendelton, but the finishing work is done in Washougal, WA, right at the banks of the Columbia river.
The hand-stitching of the appliquéd work is beyond regular, requiring the patience of a saint.
The knotting of the bands of “stone” is tight and precise with cotton-string dipped into bee’s wax.
The frame was special-ordered by the artist, with wood matched in color to the fabric installation, blending in with shades of muted green.
New frame on left – the provided one next to it.
I cannot begin to imagine what it took to apply the thousands of small dots, with slight color gradations, with a micro-tipped ink bottle after the porcelain beads were made and glazed. As always when I find myself in serene spaces – and Drake’s studio is bathed in serenity, light, orderliness, simplicity and all – my imagination was allowed to run free, absorbing what was in front of me, rather than being distracted.
The many tiny dots danced in front of my eye, grains of sand from the Columbia shores, salmon roe, tears from the trail(s) of tears, even the shorter local trails after Celilo Falls was destroyed, the flocks of geese that disappear into the distance on their migratory journeys. You choose. Then again, why choose at all. Varied reminders of a landscape and its history might be exactly what we need. Each finding a place in the family of things.
Canada Geese I photographed in January
***
lim·i·nal
1. relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process.
2. occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold. – Oxford Language Dictionary
CAROLYN HAZEL DRAKE is a third generation Oregon who acquired her affinity to fabric early on in her mother’s quilting store. She received her BA in English Literature, with a minor in Architecture, and her MA in Education from Portland State University, the first in her family to graduate from College. She taught language arts and art history in Portland’s Public School System for more than ten year and was also a PPS Visual & Performing Arts Teacher on Special Assignment (TOSA); come fall, she will be teaching art at Arizona State University. Also in the fall, she will be artist in residence for two month at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. In case you’d wondered how one pulls off a double load, rest assured: she has experience with that! If you look at the number of previous residencies and her role as a member of the Portland Art Museum’s Teacher Advisory Council all successfully integrated with her professional obligations, there is no doubt she will thrive.
The dog and I are, of course, exhausted just thinking about it.
In addition to working with fabric, Drake is nowadays exploring ceramics, particularly smoke firing techniques, and much of her recent work has combined the two in novel ways. One of the things that fascinates her about porcelain or clay is the porous nature of these materials, a mode that allows transition. She is fascinated by liminal spaces, and not just the ones in the geographical world.
Liminal comes from the Latin word ‘limen’, referring to ‘threshold’ or ‘doorway’. Liminal is that which occupies the transitional space at a boundary or threshold, a river being a perfect example of a gateway to new or different locations. Hallways, bridges and crossroads are other geographical locations that link a point of departure with a destination. Liminality is not restricted to a geographic place, though. There can be liminal time, the border between day and night during twilight, for example, or between the old and the new year. Liminal space can also be a cognitive or experiential dimension during times of transitions, when we experience major change, or go through periods of uncertainty. In many religious ceremonies that employ rites of passage, a liminal point is reached in the middle of the ceremony defining a before and after.
I HAD BEEN THINKING about liminal space in a completely different context before I even visited with the artist. There is a fascinating, if strange, development of Artificial Intelligence programs like DALL-E that allow the creation of images from text, having been trained as a neural network with everything art history has to offer – and then some.
“…it has a diverse set of capabilities, including creating anthropomorphized versions of animals and objects, combining unrelated concepts in plausible ways, rendering text, and applying transformations to existing images.”
Let’s say you request a painting of Black men drinking coffee in the snow, in the manner of John Singer Sargent. You utter the words and you get this. Made by a machine. (Well, I got it from reports by Brandon Taylor, a perceptive and witty author whose book Real Life was an impressive debut and who has been playing around with the AI program, posting diverse results.)
Or you ask for a Sargent version of James I and the Duke of Buckingham as a couple.
Or here is a machine generated portrait of the Duke of Navarro by Edward Hopper.
I’m bringing this up because the borderline between AI creations and art made by the rest of us will become more and more porous, it’s early days yet. I am not interested in a discussion of what is “real” art, or if we can ever tell a fake from a human original in years to come, or any such topic. (Nor am I interested in losing more sleep over potential dangers of perfected AI programs – if you dare you can read a basic AI 101 horror tutorial here…)
I am interested in how transitions will unfold between what we embrace and what we reject, and if there are aspects of human creativity that simply cannot be mimicked no matter how many neural nets draw on data from infinite exposure to all of our knowledge sources. Or can they?
Take Drake’s interest in liminal constructs. She plans to use her Sitka residency to create urns and altar cloths, combining, if possible, ceramic and fabric art for both. Urns stand for the remnants of someone who has walked on, transitioning into an unknown place (if you are spiritual,) or into dust (old secular me.) They remind us of humans’ transitory nature, or, by the care that someone takes to create beauty across their surface, that we will keep a memory alive, waiting for the pain of loss to recede.
Altar cloths are used during worship, also devoted to something we cannot fully know, but in whom we invest hope for allowing a transition into a better place. They cover the chalice that carries the Holy elements and the altar itself – should a drop of wine believed to be Jesus’ blood be spilled it will be caught by that cloth, not touching the altar itself. (Ref.)
What I cannot begin to imagine how something so thoroughly, deeply human can be incorporated into AI art. But maybe it can – maybe the sense of unease that is so often associated with liminal places, caves, chasm, empty airports at night, you name it, will find justification when AI turns out to be a match.
In the meantime, we have the quiet beauty and search for meaning that is deeply incorporated into Drake’s art. As real and as resilient as the river landscape that she has sought to depict. No further transitions needed. It is a place to rest.
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THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECTII
“…a collaborative fiber arts project featuring 13 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence. The project, again initiated by Maryhill Museum of Art and following the original one by printmakers in 2019, takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project II, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”
Artists and Community Partners:
Section One: Oregon Society of Artists–Artist: Lynn Deal Section Two: Lewis and Clark University–Artist: Amanda Triplett Section Three: Columbia Center for the Arts, The History Museum of Hood River County and Arts in Education of the Gorge–Artist: Chloë Hight Section Four: White Salmon Arts Council and Fort Vancouver Regional Library–Artist: Xavier Griffith Section Five: The Dalles Arts Center and The Dalles-Wasco County Library–Artists: Francisco and Laura Bautista Section Six: The Fort Vancouver Regional Library at Goldendale Community Library–Artist: Carolyn Hazel Drake Section Seven: The American-Romanian Cultural Society and Maryhill Museum of Art–Artist: Magda Nica Section Eight: Desert Fiber Arts & REACH Museum–Artist: Ophir El-Boher Section Nine: The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation–Artist: Bonnie Meltzer Section Ten: ArtWalla–Artist: Kristy Kún Frontispiece: Tammy Jo Wilson and Owen Premore
A shoutout! An accolade! Kudos! Applause! Today’s photographs are dedicated to all who have worked behind the scenes to participate in, prepare for and support Maryhill Museum’s Exquisite Gorge II project in ways large and small.
Maryhill Museum
Beyond the involved community partners there are staff, there are people who host artists in residence, there are folks who compute and design the technical specs of the structures under the windy conditions of the bluff, there are drivers willing to transport the frames. Three Cheers!
Their numbers pale, though, in comparison to the number of people who, across the nation, have become involved in contributing to another part of this fiber art celebration: the yarn bombing of the museum site and creating remembrance poppies for Stonehenge, a World War I memorial that is part of Maryhill Museum.
Crafted squares echoing Romanian folk patterns decorate the outside of the museum, repository of many donations from Queen Marie of Romania, delivered during her visit for the inauguration of the museum in 1926. Queen Marie’s gift of Romanian textiles provided the basis for a collection of Romanian folk dress that now includes 400 items. The creation below was still to be hung at the museum entrance when I visited.
I think Queen Marie (2nd from left) would approve!
Yarn bombing on trees and structures in the surrounding park also pick up the Romanian folk theme, as well as that of poppies to which I will come shortly.
Louise Palermo, Curator of Education, putting finishing touches on the yarn bombing.
Traditional Romanian dolls celebrating spring, called màrtisors.
***
Imagine being a committed pacifist, a Quaker, desiring to build a utopian Quaker community in the middle of nowhere, setting a faux French mansion on the top of a windy bluff towering above the river, and not a Quaker shows up. Imagine tearing down an inn you built in a small hamlet that burned, in order to establish a full-sized Stonehenge replica as a memorial to the futility of war. All based on the wrong idea that you somehow took home from a 1915 visit to England, that Britons used Stonehenge as a spot for bloody sacrifice to the Gods of war.
Imagine the realization that local stone is not up to the task and so you improvise with slabs of reinforced concrete, made to look lumpy by lining the wooden forms with crumpled tins. That’s Sam Hill for you, the visionary and founder of Maryhill Museum, a man who promoted modern roads across the Pacific Northwest and who made a fortune with utilities and railroads. Unstoppable in pursuing his dreams, a strange brew of steely pragmatism and utopian ideas. Providing us with a remarkable legacy.
Stonehenge was the very first War Memorial to World War I in the United States, finalized in 1929, with an altar plaque dedicated already in 1918. Hard for me to find echoes of pacifism in the original plaque:
To the memory of the soldiers and sailors of Klickitat County who gave their lives in defense of their country. This monument is erected in hope that others inspired by the example of their valor and their heroism may share in that love of liberty and burn with that fire of patriotism which death alone can quench.
Back to our unsung heroes, though: the nameless volunteers. They have knit and crocheted countless poppies, remembrance symbols for the fallen, poppies which are now attached, sown on by hand(!) by yet another group of supporters onto netting covering the stones around Stonehenge. Needed to defy the harsh winds on top of the promontory.
Vonda Chandler, a long standing volunteer at Maryhill was a major support and inspiration for this project, at least one name I was able to glean. Another was Gavin McIlvenna, the Society of the Honor Guard for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier-founding President, who sent an email to the President of the Daughters of the American Revolution, receiving coast-to-coast responses, and some even from Belize.
The museum posted on Facebook as did Maryhill’s Curator of Education, Queen of the Poppies, Lou Palermo, activating a wide-flung net of contacts in the museum and crafts world. Bravo!
Lou Palermo, Curator of Education, Maryhill Museum
This is the current state of affairs, with more packages and boxes arriving daily, a treasure trove of fiber art, poppies filling each parcel. All in need of unpacking and mounting….
The symbol of the poppy has its origins in a poem written by one of the soldiers in the Great War, Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, a brigade surgeon.
The war-ravaged landscape of Western Europe sprouted these flowers, really a plant classified as a weed, red like the blood that had been so senseless spilled. And the emotional impact of the words, soon published in both Europe and the U.S., had people on both sides of the Atlantic decide to wear fabricated poppies as a sign that the fallen would not be forgotten.
In Europe, Anna Guérin organized French women, children and veterans to make and sell artificial poppies as a way to fund the restoration of war-torn France. Here is a detailed, moving description of her single-minded efforts with archival photographs of many of the original creations. Millions of people in the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Belgium, Australia and New Zealand don the red flowers every November 11 (known as Remembrance Day or Armistice Day) to commemorate the anniversary of the 1918 armistice.
On this side of the Atlantic we had calls for remembrance as well, although people wear the poppies on Memorial Day, the last Monday in May. Moina Michael, a professor at the University of Georgia at the time the war broke out, vowed to wear red poppies and to produce and sell them for proceeds supporting returning war veterans. Michael’s autobiographic writings and a time line of the adoption of the symbol across the world can be found here.
***
I was looking around at the landscape so beloved by Sam Hill, Mt. Hood visible from Hill’s last resting place slightly below Stonehenge. Thinking about the fact that wars, and the horrors and loss they inflicted, are not a thing of the past. They have continued across the world, often in places foreign to us and thus more easily ignored but for the soldiers and their families who fought them. Got physically or psychologically maimed in them. Died in them.
We now see a war again, on Eastern European fields that sprout poppies, in Ukraine. Even that war, just a few months old, has already slipped from our attentional radar, as much as we are preoccupied with political upheaval and judicial assaults closer to home.
As the outpouring of fiber art poppies for the museum project confirms, that is not the case for the many volunteers for whom these symbols likely have personal significance. They honor the dead. They miss the dead. They cannot escape the trauma instilled by war that trickles down across generations. Louis Menand’s words come to mind, describing what significant memorial art does:
“It doesn’t say that death is noble, which is what supporters of the war might like it to say, and it doesn’t say that death is absurd, which is what critics of the war might like it to say. It only says that death is real, and that in a war, no matter what else it is about, people die.”
***
On the walkway leading up to Maryhill Museum’s front doors you can spot a sculpture by James Lee Hansen. The bronze is part of his Missive series, which depicts tektites, small meteors, on the front, with some abstract embryonic form on the back. The series incorporated ideas from a book, Immanuel Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision(1950), which advanced the theory (scientifically debunked since) that cataclysmic events in our solar system changed Earth’s orbit and axis and caused numerous catastrophes that were recounted worldwide in mythology and religion. The sculptor himself wrote the stanza above, talking about a missile. (He has a book New Totems and Old Gods a well as another one, Missive Poems, related to this series.)
James Lee Hansen Missive (1976)
I don’t know about missiles bringing life. Perhaps they might, if arriving from outer space. Seems to me they bring death, and death only, when launched by our own planet’s warmongers. The many, many contributors to the poppy project for this year’s Exquisite Gorge II project remind us of this.
Let their remembrance be a force for peace.
Let the rememberers be recognized.
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THE EXQUISITE GORGE PROJECTII
“…a collaborative fiber arts project featuring 13 artists working with communities along a 220-mile stretch of the Columbia River from the Willamette River confluence to the Snake River confluence. The project, again initiated by Maryhill Museum of Art and following the original one by printmakers in 2019, takes inspiration from the Surrealist art practice known as exquisite corpse. In the most well-known exquisite corpse drawing game, participants took turns creating sections of a body on a piece of paper folded to hide each successive contribution. When unfolded, the whole body is revealed. In the case of The Exquisite Gorge Project II, the Columbia River will become the ‘body’ that unifies the collaboration between artists and communities, revealing a flowing 66-foot work that tells 10 conceptual stories of the Columbia River and its people.”
Artists and Community Partners:
Section One: Oregon Society of Artists–Artist: Lynn Deal Section Two: Lewis and Clark University–Artist: Amanda Triplett Section Three: Columbia Center for the Arts, The History Museum of Hood River County and Arts in Education of the Gorge–Artist: Chloë Hight Section Four: White Salmon Arts Council and Fort Vancouver Regional Library–Artist: Xavier Griffith Section Five: The Dalles Arts Center and The Dalles-Wasco County Library–Artists: Francisco and Laura Bautista Section Six: The Fort Vancouver Regional Library at Goldendale Community Library–Artist: Carolyn Hazel Drake Section Seven: The American-Romanian Cultural Society and Maryhill Museum of Art–Artist: Magda Nica Section Eight: Desert Fiber Arts & REACH Museum–Artist: Ophir El-Boher Section Nine: The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation–Artist: Bonnie Meltzer Section Ten: ArtWalla–Artist: Kristy Kún Frontispiece: Tammy Jo Wilson and Owen Premore
