Author: Michael Smith

Categories
Discover Learn

Daily Art Moment: Lee Chunghie

Lee Chunghie, Bojagi, 30x28 5/8 inches, silk and screen print. A square textile composed of varied rectangular shapes in blues, pinks, mauve, burgundy, greens, and gold. Stitching creates dark, thin lines between the transparent fabric scraps giving the work the look of a patchwork quilt. Some blocks of fabric are set side by side, some parallel to each other. A few of the blocks, like the blue and burgundy, have partial patterns visible, such as stripes and circular designs. Almost all of the fabric has a rippled effect to the weave. Some transparent fabric blocks continue beyond the square along with thin ribbons that trail off the edges of the work. Threads and ribbon ends are visible throughout.

“Fiber artist Lee Chunghie transforms the traditional Korean textile form known as bojagi into wearable art and wall installations. Bojagi became popular in the Joseon dynasty (1392–1910) as a frugal way to repurpose fabric scraps, quilting them together to create new and often beautiful cloths that could be used for wrapping objects. Lee’s practice recognizes…  Read more

Categories
Discover Learn

Daily Art Moment: Claes Oldenburg

A vertical rectangular image of an ice cream bar composed of puffy alphabet letters on a wooden stick. The letters bulge and recede in colors of buff, cocoa, and light browns. The background is off-white. The upper-left corner of the bar shows the letter A in white and blue, suggesting the inside of the coated bar dripping downward. A single teardrop shaped drip is seen just below the lower left of the bar. The bar and stick are rendered to suggest a color pencil sketch with visible shading and hatch marks throughout.

“We all deserve a treat during the dog days of August, and who better to serve it up than artworld prankster, Claes Oldenburg? Oldenburg humorously transforms familiar things through shifts in scale and media. In this work, the fleshy letters that form a melting ice cream bar recall his soft canvas sculptures from the previous…  Read more

Categories
Discover Learn

Daily Art Moment: Marie Watt

A long rectangular work composed of numerous other horizontally oriented rectangles. Each rectangle contains a word embroidered in red thread on various shades of cream to pale tan cloth in assorted stitches and styles. Some of the largest words are Ancestor, Myth, Love, Voice, Fighter, Custodian, Gratitude. Smaller words include Seeker, Care, Watcher, Legacy, Healer, Advocate, Interpreter, Wild, and Catalyst. Interspersed among the words are rectangles made of striped blankets in red, green, yellow, and black.

In her practice, Marie Watt maintains these inquiries that guide her work: “There are two questions that are an ongoing part of my work. One is asking people to reflect on a special blanket or piece of cloth and consider sharing the story with another. I am also interested in the question, ‘What would the…  Read more

Categories
Discover Learn

Write Around PAM: Rick Bartow

A vertical, rectangular, abstract painting of a bird, possibly an eagle, that takes up most of the frame. The head is painted with heavy brushstrokes in white, gold, pale pink and blue around human-like eyes. A large, black beak stretches horizontally into a grimace with reddish pigment at the corners. Under the beak is a large triangular area of blue brushwork. The body is rendered in a flat manner with paint layered, streaked, dripped and smudged creating horizontal and vertical lines in the paint. Towards the bottom, the body forks into two wing-like areas. Tan, brown, pink, gray and white make up the wing on the left, the right is primarily browns. A dark leg juts from the body of the bird to the right. The bird is shown in a mustard yellow background with visible brushwork. Areas like the upper left and right corners reveal underpainting in browns, greens and gray. The artist’s signature is at top right in blue.

Writing continues to be a powerful way to engage with, and be inspired by, visual art. This week, we invite you to spend some time with Quiet One by Rick Bartow and see what stories it evokes for you. Before or after you write, take some time to learn about Bartow’s life and art.⠀ We…  Read more

Categories
Discover Learn

Daily Art Moment: Tōdaiji Scriptorium

A photograph of a rectangular scroll composed of horizontal bands. Brown bands, top and bottom, appear to be of woven cloth, the top band composing about a third of the overall work. The bottom band is half the top’s width. At center is the indigo band with 56 rows of silver inked calligraphy sandwiched between the mottled metallic foil bands. At the very top are two loops for hanging and at bottom a dowel can be seen at the scroll’s edge.

“The Avatamsaka (or Flower Garland) sutra is one of the best-known texts of Mahayana Buddhism in East Asia, describing a radiant, mystical universe of infinite realms. This fragment was created in the 740s as part of a set of sixty scrolls of the Avatamsaka sutra for Tōdaiji, the Great Eastern Temple of Nara. Elegantly calligraphed…  Read more

Categories
Community Discover Learn

Virtual Residency: Malia Jensen

Installation view; Hand, with Plum, Nehalem Estuary, 2019

The Portland Art Museum and NW Film Center is pleased to introduce an artist-in-residence series launching with an online presentation of Malia Jensen’s Nearer Nature: Worth Your Salt. As part of reimagining our work with artists in the COVID-19 era, we are exploring new ways of presenting works by contemporary visual, cinema, and new media…  Read more

Categories
Community Discover Learn

Podcast: Auto Immune Response—Will Wilson’s Photographic Past, Present, and Future

Will Wilson is a trans-customary Diné artist whose work explores Native ideas of the future blended with the past. Though Wilson is mostly known as a photographer, his work also encompasses installation, mixed media, and digital media. Anyone following the Portland Art Museum for the past few years might also recognize Wilson from an exhibition…  Read more

Categories
Discover Learn

Write Around PAM: Sonya Clark

Shoes evoke movement. Travel. Connection. Style. And, for these penny loafers, the weight of history and Lincoln’s legacy. We invite you to spend some time writing today, stepping into your own creativity and imagination with inspiration from this piece by Sonya Clark. Before or after you write, take some time to learn about Clark’s life…  Read more

Categories
Discover Learn

Daily Art Moment: Rick Bartow

A photo of a rough, oval-shaped mask of a human face with closed eyes, open mouth, and flared nostrils. Closed eyelids are defined by simple scored lines with the eye on the right positioned at the far edge of the mask. The mouth is open creating a gash with the right side drooping lower than the left. Smudged reddish pigment is visible around the mouth especially on the upper lip. The texture of the mask is rough with ragged edges, scattered scoring and markings and varies in color from beige to brown to dark gray. The Roman numerals II and V are seen beside the mouth and on the right cheek. Overall, the mask seems to have a flattened appearance.

“In these recent weeks, I have been thinking about the idea of shedding: such as, the peeling away and casting off of what is no longer useful or functional, but also shedding as in shedding light to illuminate and make clear. Rick Bartow’s After the Fall III is a wonderfully unguarded study in the artist’s…  Read more

Categories
Discover Learn

Daily Art Moment: Navajo artist

A photo of a silver bird shaped pin with wings open to each side. Its head and beak are shown in profile, facing left. The body of the bird is adorned with round turquoise stones set in an inverted triangle pattern. In the center is a small stamp of a thunderbird with its wings pointed down, head and beak facing right. Two small, stylized crosses are positioned on either side of the turquoise triangle. Just below this triangle is a small, stamped, inverted triangle with detailed decoration. There are single turquoise stones at the tip of each wing. The tail is depicted by three feathers with rounded tips and accented with three more turquoise stones in a row. Two vertical incised lines delineate the bird's tail feathers. Small, stamped, inverted triangles edge the wings and tail. Two rows of four larger inverted triangles appear on the wings parallel to edging stamps. The stamped detail is a darker shade of silver color than the rest of the metal. The turquoise stones vary in color from pale blue to blue-green and have different veining and patterns including deep blue, white, brown, and green.

“Silver and turquoise jewelry plays a special role in Navajo families. They are passed on from one generation to the next and worn for all types of special occasions. Apart from personal connections to our family members who wore the jewelry before us, they connect us to our heritage as masters of silverwork and are…  Read more