Portland Art Museum & PAM CUT
Dyani White Hawk’s suite Takes Care of Them was inspired by the Lakota practice of four veterans being asked to stand and face each of the four cardinal directions during the wabléniča ceremony, a ritual welcoming adoptees and formerly fostered individuals back into the tribal community. In many Native cultures, veterans are revered as modern-day… Read more
It has been more than one year since Write Around Portland and the Portland Art Museum began collaborating on weekly, art-inspired writing prompts to sustain our souls and our sense of connection during the pandemic. Write Around Portland staff and writing workshop facilitators have created over 60 writing prompts inspired by works in the Portland… Read more
Artist, teacher, and color theorist Josef Albers spent decades refining his concepts of color relationships and form. Formulation: Articulation, published after his retirement from the art department at Yale University, is a compendium of Albers’s research. Albers considered this book to be a work of art in its own right—not purely didactic. In his words,… Read more
![[Image Description: Family (Mother and Child). Romare Bearden.. 1980. Color screenprint on cream wove paper. 18in H x 14 in W. A Black mother sits on a brown chair with her right arm around her child who is wearing a blue dress and white shoes. The mother has short curly black hair with brown highlights and a yellow square coming out the back, white triangular earrings, a reddish brown nose and lips, a dark blue long sleeve dress with light blue outlines with a white shirt underneath, a reddish orange apron, and light brown shoes. Her eyes and nose are outlined with blue lines and her hands are large and appear more dimensional than the other parts of her body. Her left hand rests on her knee and her right hand is held with thumb and third finger touching while resting on the child’s elbow. The child has short dark curly hair with a white triangle coming out the back and white eyes. She stands with her left side resting on her mother’s apron looking towards the right side of the print. Her arm bent at the elbow, palm open and facing up. A bright blue wall is behind the chair with a painting with green hills, trees, white sky, and blue clouds with a light gray frame. There is a dark blue shape under the painting that resembles an arched entryway. The chair is sitting on a floor consisting of light gray, dark gray, and blue rectangles - some vertical and some horizontal. The angles are such that it creates somewhat of an optical illusion.]](https://nwfc.pam.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Romare-Bearden-1200.jpg)
As we celebrate Mother’s Day this Sunday, we invite you to think of a person who has been a strong maternal presence in your life. It could be your mother, grandmother, auntie, close friend, teacher or other care provider, another parent, guardian, or person close to you. Someone who embodies the care and love and… Read more
As warmer weather approaches, we are all dreaming of lazy summer days. This recent acquisition by Derrick Adams captures the pleasures and poignancy of timeless summer afternoons. Using 68 puzzle-cut woodblocks, seven runs of screenprint, and fabric collage, Adams depicts a young boy resting on a gigantic inflatable swan in an expanse of blue water.… Read more
Something about the diagrammatic silhouettes and obscured labels in Larry Rivers’s An Outline of History hit differently when I came across it in PAM’s Online Collections today. The shapes and composition are so familiar that I instantly recognized the moment in American history. Yet I still imagined a multitude of alternative narratives filling the negative… Read more
This screenprint by Dyani White Hawk was inspired by a Plains style women’s dentalium dress. You can almost feel the ribbons, the wool, the shells, the metallic details, the hemline. Learn more about the creation of this piece and the series Takes Care of Them. Then take some time to write a bit, using something… Read more
“On Monday, curator Grace Kook-Anderson shared Jacob Lawrence’s inspiring image of voters, a screenprint he prepared for the Kent Bicentennial portfolio. As she notes, the commissioned artists were asked to respond to the question, ‘What does independence mean to you?’. Reviewing the portfolio in ‘The New York Times’ in 1976, one critic cited Barnet’s image… Read more
“Jacob Lawrence depicts the African-American experience of citizens in an election from the 1920s. With a complex, angular composition of figures and strikingly primary colors, the scene we see is a moment of humble but powerful action in the act of making a vote. Elders wait patiently in line, a woman comforts her infant child,… Read more
“ Coastal Range was made during Robillard’s residency at Sitka Center in 2013. There the artist worked with scientists studying the Cascade Head Experimental Forest, a Forest Service land that was set aside in 1934 for the study of the forest and its ecosystem. In ‘Coastal Range,’ Robillard evokes Eastern and Western pictorial traditions while… Read more