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Brian Winkenweder

Breathing the High-Altitude Ether of Discovery

“Art-making embodies our private struggles with the meaning of life, the relationship between humanity and nature. In a time when our ability to comprehend reality is becoming more and more blurred by our inability to abstract meaning, the visionary abstractionist of natural phenomena represents a way of making art that is inherent and primordial…Through use of organic shapes and a chaotic vocabulary, it is possible to awaken the viewer’s own private demons.”Frank Kowing (2011)

It all began with a cold call to Linfield University. The family of Native American artist Frank Kowing, one of the first graduates of Linfield’s budding art department in 1966, wondered if they could get help with a treasure trove of work left in a storage unit. Framed, encaustic oil paintings, endless loose canvasses of acrylic abstracts, sculptures made of sticks and found objects, drawings and notebooks were all looking for a home.

Partial Linfield Gallery View

Brian Winkenweder, chair of the art department, was hesitant given the fact that the university is not set up to store collections, but upon seeing it all, was hooked. The quality of the work, the link to the institution and the region all deserved an exhibition, with hopes to connect collectors and art lovers to the work for further distribution.

Partial Linfield Gallery View

Thea Gahr, artist and curator of the Linfield Gallery, had her hands – and her head – full. Selection is always difficult with a plethora of materials, particularly when works range across domains, span decades, and differ wildly in style.

Thea Gahr inspecting one of the many canvases that could not be hung

In her favor, though, were the facts that she excels in taking risks, as I have now seen across several of her curations, had sufficient run-up time to think things through, and commands a space that captures a light seemingly made for or reflected in Kowing’s paintings of Pacific Northwest mountain scapes.

Frank Kowing Mt Hood 2010
Frank Kowing North Cascades 2010

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Frank Kowing: Breathing the High-Altitude Ether of Discovery

Exhibition dates: Feb. 9 – Mar. 18, 2022

Opening reception: Wednesday, Feb. 16, 5:30 – 7 p.m.

Experience the paintings, sculptures, and sketchbooks of Frank Kowing Jr. b. April 1,1944 – September 24, 2016.

900 SE Baker Street
McMinnville, Oregon 97128
503-883-2200

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I don’t follow any system. All the laws you can lay down are only so many props to be cast aside when the hour of creation arrives. – Raoul Dufy.

I had entered the empty gallery in the morning, wary of inside visits but determined to get to know what the Linfield folks were raving about and had almost an hour to myself, camera in hand, before meeting with the curator.

Some of the work was truly beautiful, much of it disquieting and all of it forcing you to read beyond seeing, the artist himself disambiguating the visual impressions by including text on practically each and every painted abstract or representation. Or, was the intention to make the work rather more ambiguous? Hard to tell.

Frank Kowing Thought Thing 2009 with excerpts

I did notice an intense push-pull exerted on me. The perception of wholes, of representative forms, of the rhythm and flow of the abstract visual input were constantly battling with the compulsion to decipher what the artist had written for you to read, or included in terms of photographs. The focus narrowed on his written communications, as if he intended to protect the beauty – or the meaning – of his painted visions and landscapes from too close an inspection, any possible intrusion. I couldn’t help thinking that the old adage by the 18th century French philosopher Marmontel, “the arts require witnesses,” had to be extended here to the request that the artist’s life, his struggles, demanded witnessing.

Un-numbered acrylic. “Closed into myself as if in mental state, saying please, how soon will this end.”

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Frank Kowing, a member and Elder of the Confederate Tribes of Grand Ronde, was born in McMinville in 1944. (I am grateful to the Kowing family to have made excerpts of an upcoming biography available to me, which allowed me a glimpse of the artist’s life.) He served in the Navy during the Vietnam War, traveling extensively across Asia during his R&R breaks, travel an early passion that would hold true for the rest of his life. Europe was next after his tour ended, where he settled in Amsterdam. He attended the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, an art school that heavily focussed on graphics and design, but probably also provided exposure to the burgeoning neo-expressionist movement that took Europe and then the U.S. by storm during the 70s and 80s, the Austrian Georg Baselitz and Americans Philip Guston and Jeffrey Koons among them.

When funds ran out – a constant struggle throughout a lifetime devoted to making art and forced to making money, in exhausting day jobs as a contractor – Kowing returned to the States, living and working at multiple East Coast locations. He received an MFA from Penn State in the early 70s, joined various art collectives in New York, Pensylvania, D.C. and later Maryland, starting to sell work but never enough to be economically secure, like so many artists. After brief stints in California and a respite year in his beloved Oregon, he joined the Peace Corps in 1985 and spent 2 years teaching children living with developmental disabilities in Tunesia, followed by 6 years as a curator at Meridian House International, a multiservice not-for-profit conference center and museum in D.C.

The frequent shifts in location and occupations where partly the result of structural factors, economic hardship, the opportunities to be part of collectives, a conflicted relationship with established art galleries, the personal anchors of love and friendship found or abandoned.

I also think they were part of an internal restlessness, one driven by an overarching theme in the artist’s life: intense and frequent losses.

He was estranged from his parents, as well as from a son from an early relationship. He lost two beloved wives to death from diseases. He lost his health to a series of grave accidents and subsequent surgeries, the ravages of undiagnosed Lyme disease and increased pain management by self-medicating with alcohol. The zest for life, the passion for nature – mountain climbing in particular, again and again all over the world – the longing for the freedom of high altitudes of any kind, was in increasing tension with the paralysis induced by physical pain and emotional depression.

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I am writing about this because the work itself draws one into a conversation with the artist’s expressed feelings. When he notates states-of-mind and emotions he communicates with the potential viewer. It is tempting to label him as a confessional painter, just like Sylvia Plath was stereotyped as a confessional writer, given the naked honesty and vulnerable pain and self-reflection associated with her poetry. That would be a mistake, though, in both cases, since the work embodies strategies of communications that are very well aware of the perceiver, and not just centered on self-disclosure, with Kowing implicating the viewer directly in his artist statements.

Frank Kowing – Tree of Life – 2011 with excerpted side-view showing the three dimensional materiality of the work.

Art is a language, an instrument of knowledge, an instrument of communication.” –  Jean Dubuffet

Among the standard models of intentional communication in my own field, psychology, are the so called Gricean assumptions. Grice proposed that we all want to convey meaning, something best achieved if we stick to truthfulness (maxim of Quality) which would be reflected in an artist’s sincerity to communicate or their skill and the selection of an appropriate style and medium in artistic communication. We should also choose the right level of complexity, (maxim of Quantity,) in painting that would be the appropriate levels of visual complexity. Our communication should be non-random (maxim of Relevance,) expressed in the painting’s subject that might included links to our culture, or to personally relevant issues, or historic symbols. Finally, there is the issue of how obscure an expression is, or structurally sound in terms of a painting’s composition (maxim of Manner.) Forget the science speak. Simply put: if you want to get a message across, to be understood, choose your topic wisely and in context, express it without distraction or excess details, and do so in a manner that does not obscure the meaning. Could have said that in the first place, I know.

Frank Kowing self portrait Journal series (Tyger Tyg, Burning Bright) 2011 with excerpts

Kowing basically breaks all of these rules and has us nonetheless completely fascinated with deciphering the meaning he might or might not convey. That is what true art can do!

Here are just some random examples that speak to that point. I had mentioned before that the layout of the representational paintings, the mountain scenes in particular, draw the viewers on the one hand to the beauty of nature, the pristine peaks, yet bind them to the base of the mountains, chained to deciphering the text, loosing the forest for the trees, so to speak. The mountains come in full view only if you stand far away, but the texts draw you close so you can read.

What is the subject and why is it overlaid by riddles?

It is puzzling, but the work soon conjures some strong emotion in the viewer – in my case memories of years spent in a suffocating, cloistered boarding school in the South West of Germany, looking through my classroom windows into the hazy blue of the Odenwald mountains and the Koenigsstuhl, a longing for being out there, away from it all, so intense it almost hurt. It might be different memories for others, but we probably all share that sense of wanting something, someone or somewhere and not having easy access, if any at all.

Frank Kowing Cascades 2004

The level of complexity of Kowing’s work goes overboard, particularly in the abstract expressionist acrylics that are dotted with snippets of text like his beloved Mt. Hood meadows with wildflowers. The words in the oil paintings are also in ambiguous relation to the complex spatial planes depicted in the painting; the photographs and typed pieces of paper are neither clearly foreground nor background, they remind the viewer that the painting is literally a flat surface, immediately contradicted by the three dimensional parts of the paintings created by layers of paint and wax – tactile mementos of ripped open scars or glorious mountain ridges, take your pick.

Frank Kowing Tree of Life 2011 excerpt

He has taken the inclusion of signs and text from the legacy of his forbears, collagists like George Braques, to new heights, leaving the viewer at times to struggle.

Un-numbered acrylic

Frank Kowing Acrylic # 84 Date not available

And chaos rules, obscurity is writ large. At least in my head, trying to figure out if Kowing meant the accumulation of fortune cookie predictions or other banal proscriptions scattered across his acrylics seriously, or as a tease, ridiculing our desperate need for unambiguous meaning by serving cultural platitudes cold.

A wonderfully humorous trickster, then, in addition to the deeply serious communicator.

That sense of trickster is reinforced when looking at the possibly invented communication with Edward Kienholz in one of the largest works in the exhibition. Kienholz, famous for his elaborate found-object assemblages which convey a harsh scrutiny of American society, was known to pull major pranks himself, in pursuit of chaos many times over.

Frank Kowing The Sea of Kienholz – excerpts – date unknown

I prefer the emotion that corrects the rule. – Juan Gris

I think Kowing would have liked the photograph below that dimly reflects me in the gallery glass door in front of the exhibition announcement. A faint witness to his art, his wit, his struggles. Moved by learning about this work, his life. And wondering what it is with art that allows communication between an artist and an audience even if they are separated by time, sometimes centuries, by cultural back-ground – Native American Oregonian meet German immigrant – by color or class, with some having the unearned privilege of inclusion in mainstream society, while others don’t.

The true artist knows how to convey basic emotions, cross-culturally shared, I suppose, the woes of longing/not belonging, the irreparable hurts of a past than cannot be healed, or the joy of being a small part of a majestic natural environment, that lets us feel free for small slivers of time.

Kowing knew how to tell stories, fully aware that they were likely shared in some, even many details at levels that transcend our roles in life.

The very last painting Kowing painted has an alpine sky-blue rectangle in the center, an empty space devoid of text, mementos, sorrow.

I try to tell myself that when he walked on in 2016, he stepped through that window into the azure light, breathing the high-altitude ether of not discovery, but release.

If you are interested in seeing work of other contemporary Native American artists, here are just a few options from around the state:

Raise a Voice – Art as Social Praxis

Sooooo – long piece today which was written as a review for OregonArtsWatch over the weekend. You can read it on their site or the usual way below. The latter will, of course, give you the bonus of music, as per usual (the favorite musician of the artist who I interviewed.) This was the first time I venture out in over a year to actually review an exhibition, and I felt grateful that it turned out to be a splendid occasion. See for yourself.

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 …the ordinary becomes beautiful as a trace of the true. And thordinary becomes a trace of the true if it is torn from its obviousness in order to become a hieroglyph, a mythological or phantasmagoric figure.” 

– Jaques RancièreThe Politics of Aesthetics – The Distribution of the Sensible.

Theodore A. Harris, Artist

Ownership. It’s a difficult concept to define, given that it can be applied to relations between a person and an object like a painting or a piece of land, or relations to legal entities like a business, a domain or a copyright. Ownership is usually protected by law, although the details of this protection vary according to cultures, economic systems, and other customs. In each case, the details specify who has which rights to what they own, and also who is allowed the use or enjoyment of others’ possessions only with the owners’ consent.

There are often ethical questions around ownership that we have trouble resolving, despite all the laws. Should we appoint scientific ownership to cells taken from an individual without consent? (Think Henrietta Lacks.) The privilege in that case was assigned to the scientific community and the pharmacology industry (which, of course, benefitted heavily from this ownership).

Should we grant ownership of discovered skeletal remains to the anthropology community or to Native American tribes demanding that the remains be returned under the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act ? In the case of Kennewick Man, it took a 9-year legal battle, advances in DNA testing, and a 2016 legislative change that finally allowed the ancient bones to come home to a coalition of Columbia Basin tribes for reburial according to their traditions.

Who is the owner of objects that were illegally obtained? Jewish families whose art was stolen or expropriated under the reign of National Socialism have been granted restitution by the courts. African American plaintiffs in a case arguing that daguerreotypes of their enslaved ancestors belong to them and not Harvard University, have been denied by the courts. The argument that the photographs were taken under conditions of slavery and with the explicit intent to demonstrate the “truth” of White superiority by depicting the slaves in full frontal nudity, and thus constitute crimes against humanity, held no sway with the judges.

Theodore A. Harris. Postcard from Conquest (Collage and Conflict series), 2008, triptych, 85″ x 42′ in each panel, collage printed on paper , mixed media collage on panel.

There is a different kind of ownership, no less beset by ethical concerns. This kind lies in the role of the gate keeper who owns the power to control access to a given domain, and, equally important, the power to frame the criteria that define the domain and the rules of participation.

The ethics of gate keeping – in the realm of art as well as politics – are addressed by Linfield University’s new exhibition: 

Theodore A. Harris: Art as Social Praxis – Dedicated to Art Historian David Craven

October 11- November 20, 2021

Opening Reception/Artist Talk: Thursday, Oct 14 – 6 pm – Linfield Gallery, Linfield University, McMinnville, OR 

Theodore A. Harris, Artist

Harris, collage artist, writer and founding director of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Black Aesthetics, is based in Philadelphia. He is a warm, approachable man, whose thoughtful explanations are often punctuated by bursts of enthusiasm, quite infectious. As a writer, Harris is co-author of books with Amiri Baraka: Our Flesh of Flames (Anvil Arts Press) and Malcolm X as Ideology (LeBow Books); with Fred Moten: i ran from it and was still in it (Cusp Books); as well as TRIPTYCH: Text by Amiri Baraka and Jack Hirschman (Caza de Poesía). His visual art can be found in public and private collections, including the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Center for Africana Studies, the W.E.B. DuBois College House, and Penn Libraries, University of Pennsylvania; Saint Louis University Museum of Art; and Lincoln University. Since 1985 he has taught at the renowned Anti-Graffiti Network/Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, which he co-founded.

The artist has created work that is historically pertinent and initiates political thought – two benchmarks that are essential for art to be significant, in the eyes of eminent art historian David Craven (1951 – 2012) to whom the exhibition is dedicated, and whose analytic insights have clearly informed the art before us. (A helpful introduction to Craven’s life and work by Brian Winkenweder, professor of Art History and chair of the art department at Linfield, who organized the exhibition and invited the artist, can be found here.) Winkenweder has a track record of placing his students in first-rate MFA programs, not least by using exposure to the various complex exhibits in the beautiful Linfield gallery as a “learning laboratory.” The university fully supports his endeavors, not something you hear often across art departments in this country, testimony to an institution that understands the value of an art education and the critical thinking that it instills.

Brian Winkenwerder, Professor of Art History, Linfield University

Harris’ work on display is, as it turns out, prescient in some ways, eerily transposable from one era to another. 

Take the collage murals now affixed to the walls opposite the Linfield Gallery. One depicts a young, masked boy – looking at us perhaps cautiously, perhaps accusingly – next to an inverted image of the Capitol building. Created in 1995, the context then was the Rwandan Genocide, the boy witness to the massacres against displaced persons, masked to combat the stench from the scores of killed Tutsis, the ethnic minority that fled Hutu persecution. The U.S. did nothing to intervene in the systematic slaughter of hundreds of thousand of people, missing an opportunity to mitigate a crime at best, actively pursuing its own geo-political interests at worst. 

When looking at this collage in 2021, the mask can come to denote another kind of symbolism – the fate of a world exposed to a pandemic and “responses” that again range from missed opportunities or misplaced optimism at best, to the pursuit of political and economic goals while sacrificing lives at worst. The inverted capitol building brings to mind the attacks of January 6th, an attempt to turn the democratic process upside down and put structural agreements enshrined in the constitution on their head.

Theodore A Harris Vetoed Dreams (1995)

The second mural invites the viewer to a mix of visual depictions of armed conflict and text, including a written justification of the Iraq invasion by Condoleeza Rice. The triptych from 2008 is titled “Don’t Shoot the Caregivers.” At the time it invoked the controversy over the true reason for the war, whether the U.S. had to protect the world from weapons of mass destruction or whether an un-satiable appetite for fossil resources motivated the invasion. Independent of reason, the fact remained that the victims of war were those indigenous to the land, its caretakers. Fast forward to 2021 where native populations spear-head the protest against resource extraction and dangerous transport through tribal lands on our own continent. The fight against the construction of various pipelines exposes the caretakers to violence, at times deadly, now on our own soil. Alternatively, 2021 also provides scenarios where the polarization around the vaccination debate has led to violent attacks on caregivers who are trying to heal and protect those afflicted with Covid-19.

Theodore A. Harris. Don’t shoot the Caregivers” (2008)

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The concern about ownership is forced on us by those who ask: 

Is it art? “Oh no,” would the gate keepers of yore respond while clutching, if not pearls, then their tie pins. Belonging to a guild of self-referencing art critics and art historians, learned, territorial critics like Clement Greenberg or Hilton Kramer seek to legislate who counts as an artist and also to frame what constitutes art, in particular establishing formal rules and focusing on the purity of medium and style (no language allowed!) 

Is it art? “The essential kind given its content,” would perhaps be Craven’s answer, “the notion of aesthetic quality has to be expanded!”

This contrast of opinions between progressive art historians and those considered establishment is brilliantly skewered in Harris’ body of work ThesentürConscientious Objector to Formalism, with many examples displayed as large prints in the current exhibition. 

Riffing on Martin Luther’s then revolutionary theses pinned to the church door in Wittenberg, the title points us to the urgency of reform, of change needed when it comes to whose voice is allowed at the table. The various exhibits contain snippets of quotations of and references to the luminaries in the art world, some more accessible than others to the uninitiated. They are anchored by a repeated image of a group of men familiar from Rembrandt van Rijn’s painting “The Syndics” (1666.) These were the men from Amsterdam’s Drapers Guild, appointed to exercise quality control of dyed cloth, assigning prices and marketability during a time of intensifying import/export business and slave trade with the expansion of the East Indian Trade Company, a de facto colonial ruler since 1602. The excerpted image was found by Harris on a Dutch Masters Cigar box. Gate keepers in their own right.

Theodore A. Harris. Exhibits from Thesentür :Conscientious Objector to Formalism series, 2020, 
     46” x 29” in, digital image printed on paper. 
Theodore A. Harris. After David Craven 4 (Thesentür Conscientious Objector to Formalism series), 2020, 
46” x 29” in, digital image printed on paper.

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Voice. The question of who is allowed to speak has been debated since Aristoteles. The decision of who has a voice reflects power hierarchies, then and now, with the Greek philosopher among the first to marginalize certain populations who he deemed not to have logos, the power of speech needed to participate in the political arena. Whether we look at medieval guilds claiming their territories, to the contemporary exclusionary mechanisms reserving access to education to certain classes, or to which nations are allowed to join global alliances, a seat at the table was something that was never guaranteed. The most glaring example in our own country is the institution of slavery, followed (as an obviously related issue) by the question of who has the right and the access to vote. In these and other domains, marginalized populations, including, of course, people of color and women, have had to fight to make their voices heard.

Which voices are admitted will also influence the framing of issues, and this can have major consequences. Is affirmative action a necessity that compensates for past injustice or is it yet another entitlement in a society that (some claim) has reached (or, in the view of the Supreme Court, needs to reach) a state of color blindness? Are vaccine mandates depriving us of guaranteed freedoms, or are they protective measures needed to ensure freedom? Is housing a human right, or is it to be treated as a financial asset only? These are not just theoretical questions – consider, for example, that different framing of crime leads to different political outcomes. If you ask people how to combat crime that “invades the city like a virus,” they are twice as likely to vote in favor of social reform (rather than adding police forces),compared to people who are asked how to combat “crime that preys like a beast on the city.” (Ref.)

Theodore A. Harris. End This War…after Shirley Chisholm (Collage and Conflict series). 2008, triptych. 9” x 11″ in each panel, mixed media collage on board.

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Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) once said that art is no longer able to perform a vital function in our culture. I strongly disagree. Art like Harris’ work lends its power to social movements that add new and different voices to the chorus, voices that help address social inequality. Those previously unheard not only want to have a voice, but they want to use that voice to challenge the framing that favors existing power relations, and encourage transformation instead. No longer content to be silenced, this art provides a template for those gathering the courage to speak up.

The exhibition lifts up excluded voices. It is beautifully curated by Thea Gahr who has been teaching art at Linfield for almost a decade and is a notable print maker in her own right.

Thea Gahr, Linfield Gallery Curator
Teaching students in the print studio

Importantly, it provides a welcome signal at a fitting time and place. Tenured Linfield professor Daniel Pollack-Pelzner who had spoken out against university leaders about allegations of sexual misconduct as well as antisemitism and the mishandling of racist graffiti on campus, was abruptly terminated not half a year ago. The move created outrage in the national and international community of educators and scholars, aghast over the silencing of a Jewish voice, and those of the students he encouraged to come forward, by a Baptist-affiliated organization. A since-filed lawsuit by Pollack-Pelzner interprets the firing as retaliation against a whistleblower – a discriminatory business practice with no due process. (Subsequent events seem to vindicate the whistleblower: One of the people accused has now resigned from the Board and has since been indicted on multiple counts of sexual abuse. Another Trustee and long-term donor to the university immediately resigned from the Board in protest of the firing, another Board member stepped down several weeks ago.) Whose voices are heard? 

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The ordinary becomes beautiful as a trace of the trueAnd thordinary becomes a trace of the true if it is torn from its obviousness in order to become a hieroglyph, a mythological or phantasmagoric figure.”  Harris’ work reminded me of Rancière’s insight, since it develops familiar images and quotations into a truth that can only be discerned by ripping them out of their context. By turning things upside down, the artist encourages us to look and listen in different, new ways, appropriate to moments of crisis. It is enormously empowering in its suggestion that the gate keepers can’t keep out all of us. The potential for transformation is there, repair an option if we use our voice.

Plan a field trip to McMinnville. Talk to the artist who is in residence until 10/14 and the folks who make it all happen. Much to contemplate. 

Theodore A. Harris: Art as Social Praxis – Dedicated to Art Historian David Craven

October 11- November 20, 2021

Opening Reception/Artist Talk: Thursday, Oct 14 – 6 pm – Linfield Gallery, Linfield University, McMinnville, OR