Adam Bacher: Earth, Water, and Sky
May 24 – July 27, 2008
Adam Bacher is a Portland photographer who captures the remote alpine regions and backcountry wilderness of the western United States, including the Oregon and Washington Cascades, the Sierra Nevada of California, the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming, and the rugged terrain of Glacier National Park in Montana.
Michael Dailey: Color, Light, Time, and Place
June 7 – August 31, 2008
Michael Dailey is a Seattle painter and professor emeritus from the University of Washington. An abstract painter of tremendous skill and prowess whose work focuses on the deconstruction of the landscape to its basic elements of horizon, color, light, and atmosphere, the exhibition features 44 paintings and works on paper drawn from public and private collections throughout the region that span a 45-year period.
The Collector’s Eye: Contemporary Art from the Leo Michelson Collection
August 2 – October 5, 2008
Leo Michelson is a Portland resident and avid collector of contemporary art. Beginning in the late 1990s, Michelson donated a large portion of his collection to the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, including works by Rick Bartow, Judy Cooke, Baba Wague Diakite, James Lavadour, D.E. May, and James Thompson, among others. The exhibition presents a range of artists and themes found in the Michelson collection.
Ruth Patterson Hart: Works on Paper
September 20 – November 2, 2008
As a young women in the late 1920s and 1930s, Ruth Patterson Hart studied at the Arts Student League in New York, spent a year studying etching in Florence, Italy, received her BFA degree from Mills College where she studied with Roi Partridge and with European modernists Hans Hoffman, Alexander Archipenko, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and earned her MFA degree from Colorado College. Back in Portland, she worked as a graphic designer and taught art classes at the Portland Art Museum School until she married attorney Allan Hart in 1941. The exhibition features approximately 40 works on paper on loan from Ruth Patterson Hart’s children: drawings, watercolors, and prints. Many of the works have not been seen since the 1930s, stored away in closets and under beds and yet bearing eloquent witness to a remarkable talent underestimated until recently.
The Art of Ceremony: Regalia of Native Oregon
September 28, 2008 – January 18, 2009
The Art of Ceremony features historic and contemporary regalia from native Oregon, offering visitors a rare glimpse at the beauty, history, and meaning of regalia in tribal life and thought. Included in the exhibition are objects made of buckskin and beadwork from the Plateau region of eastern Oregon, objects with condor feathers from the Columbia River Gorge, and objects with feather and abalone shell decoration from the Oregon Coast.
The Second Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts Biennial
October 11 – December 21, 2008
The Second Crow’s Shadow Institute Biennial features contemporary prints created by Native American artists at the Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts on the Umatilla Reservation in northeastern Oregon. Founded by Native American painter and printmaker James Lavadour (Walla Walla) in 1992, the Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts seeks to create educational and professional opportunities for Native American artists to utilize their art as a vehicle for economic development.
D. E. May: The Artist as Archivist
November 8 – December 21, 2008
D.E. May is a contemporary Salem artist who works in a variety of media. A critically important Pacific Northwest artist, his work is nationally appreciated and is included in private collections across the country and in such public collections as the Portland Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, and the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York. The range of the work of D.E May is broad: refined abstractions, intimate sketchbooks, templates, architectural models, to name a few genres. His work, in general, defies classification. May’s art tells a story of obsession—obsession with materials and time. While the materials he uses allude to different past eras his artistic process reinvigorates them so that they cease to be relics and become contemporary objects, relevant to today.
Mary Randlett: Artist Portraits
January 10 – March 8, 2009
Mary Randlett is a Washington photographer who has photographed and documented some of the most prominent artists, writers, poets and thinkers in Washington and Oregon. Since the late 1940s, she has been a frontline witness to the cultural evolution of the region. The exhibition features a range of Randlett’s best portraits of Oregon artists, including Carl Morris, Hilda Morris, Louie Bunce, and Frank Okada, among others.
Harry Widman: Image, Myth, and Modernism
January 31 – March 29, 2009
Harry Widman is a Portland painter and professor emeritus from the Pacific Northwest College of Art. The exhibition surveys Widman’s career over a 60-year period in works that explore the possibility of a “meaningful shape” in abstract painting, the role that myth can play in contemporary expression, and the interplay between the physical strength of the athlete and the intellectual delicacy of the poet or philosopher in expressionist modern art.
From Hestia’s Sacred Fire to Christ’s Eternal Light: Ancient and Medieval Lamps from the Bogue Collection
March 14 – May 17, 2009
Oil lamps were essential objects of daily life in ancient and medieval times, and every household would have owned several. Like other ceramics, the simplest oil lamps were plain and purely functional, while others contained ornamental and/or figural relief scenes, often taken from mythological or religious contexts. The exhibition features between 30-50 oil lamps from the Bogue collection at Portland State University.
Senior Art Majors
April 11 – May 17, 2009
Each spring, the Hallie Ford Museum of Art features the work of senior art majors at Willamette. The exhibition includes work in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing, ceramics, photography, and mixed media. In addition, the exhibition features senior theses in art history.
James B. Thompson: The Vanishing Landscape
April 11 – May 17, 2009
James B. Thompson: The Vanishing Landscape focuses on an important body of work that the artist has been developing for some time that explores the transformation of the rural western United States. Thompson holds an MFA degree from Washington University in St. Louis and has been on the art faculty at Willamette University since 1986.