Titles

Breath of Heaven, Breath of Earth: Ancient Near Eastern Art from American Collections encompasses the geographic regions of Mesopotamia, Syria and the Levant, and Anatolia and Iran, and explores several broad themes found in the art of the ancient Near East: gods and goddesses, men and women, and both real and supernatural animals. These art objects reveal a wealth of information about the people and cultures that produced...

Critical Messages examines the key environmental issues that face our region and the many ways contemporary Northwest artists are responding to those issues in their artwork. Environmental art is a new kind of mirror, a reflection of our past and a crystal ball holdig visions of the future. In their approach to environmental concerns, some contemporary artists face critical issues head on: growth management as seen in urban/rural...

Crow's Shadow Institute of the Arts at 25 explores the first twenty-five years of a remarkable nonprofit printmaking and traditional arts studio based on the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in eastern Oregon, the only such center located on a reservation community in the United States. Art historian Prudence Roberts, drawing from conversations with CSIA founder, the artist James Lavadour, narrates the institute's history...

Frank Boyden is a highly regarded Oregon ceramic artist and printmaker who has created a stunning body of work based on the flora and fauna of Oregon. Boyden has explored a wide variety of themes in his prints, including animals, the landscape, and most recently, the human figure. An essay by Prudence Roberts places Boyden's work within the context of regional and American art. Ian Boyden discusses his father as a printmaker and book collaborator.

A ceramic artist and printmaker, Boyden has explored a wide variety of themes in his prints over the past twenty years, including animals, the landscape, and most recently, the human figure. In this suite of 96 drypoints, Boyden set out to depict horrendous and abhorrent images of humanity: "characters from creation's ineptitudes, vagaries, vengeances, and sad jokes." In the process of creating the series of three-inch-by-two-inch plates, the artist came to the realization...

George Johanson – painter, printmaker, and teacher – was born in Seattle, studied art in Portland, Oregon, and lived in New York in the early 1950s before returning to Portland. Whether in New York jazz clubs and slaughterhouses, in Mexican villages, at the Rose Festival held each year in Portland, at rehearsals of the Oregon Symphony, or in life drawing sessions with artist friends, making images on paper has been a basic element for Johanson throughout his life. The haunting power of Johanson’s art...

Harry Widman: Image, Myth, and Modernism chronicles the life and times of the highly regarded Portland painter and teacher, who taught for 36 years at the Pacific Northwest College of Art (formerly the Portland Art Museum School) and served as interim dean during a critical period in the college’s history. Responding to the work of artists as diverse as Wassily Kandinsky and Robert Motherwell, Widman forged a mature style that combined an abstract vocabulary and sensibility with social and political...

Henk Pander has lived in Portland, Oregon, for 45 years but describes himself as a "reluctant immigrant" from his native Holland. He has maintained a cultural double vision. He records and interprets American technology, materialism, topography, and disaster in paintings and drawings that radically revise aspects of traditional Dutch painting in order to make hard-hitting American art. At the same time, he frequently paints specifically European scenes and subjects. His painted narratives range from...

This book on the contemporary painter and printmaker James B. Thompson is a meditation on the possibility of discovering, in an American landscape wracked by the devastation of global warming, flood, drought, and environmental disaster, an uncanny beauty, even a source of affirmation and hope. Thompson's entirely abstract canvases and prints offer themselves up as metaphors for landscape, as terrains full of incident designed to reveal not only a sense of what we have lost but the creative...

James B. Thompson: Fragments in Time explores the development of Thompson's work over the past two decades, from his Certain Situations series of the mid-1990s to his more recent Forgotten Biography of Tools series from 2015. Bob Hicks best describes Thompson's work: "[it] grapples with the perplexing issues of cultural and geological change. [Thompson] ranges freely through ancient and forgotten forms to confront the mysteries and fractures of the universe, investigating not just the abandoned and the...

Louis Bunce: Dialogue with Modernism explores and assesses the art and life of the iconic Pacific Northwest modernist painter and printmaker who engaged with American and European modern art from Surrealism to Post-Modernism. Based in Portland, Oregon, Louis Bunce maintained strong ties with artists of the New York School, counting Jackson Pollock as colleague and friend. In his fifty-year career, Bunce (1907-1983) created a wide-ranging body of work that both reflects and illuminates twentieth-century...

Manuel Izquierdo (1925-2009) was a major talent and charismatic personality in Oregon's modern art movement in the second half of the twentieth century. This book traces his compelling story of poverty-stricken origins in Madrid, his introduction to woodworking by his cabinet-maker grandfather, his childhood escape from Spain following the Spanish Civil War and emigration from France during World War II, and his life as a sculptor and printmaker in Portland from the 1940s to the twenty-first...

Marie Watt is an American artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and Portland, Oregon. Born in 1967 to the son of Wyoming ranchers and a daughter of the Turtle Clan of the Seneca Nation (Haudenosaunee), she identifies herself as "half cowboy and half Indian." Formally, her work draws from Indigenous design principles, oral tradition, personal experience, and western art history. Her approach to art-making is shaped by the proto-feminism of Haudenosaunee matrilineal custom, political work by Native artists...

Mel Katz is a highly regarded Portland sculptor and teacher whose work is firmly rooted in the principles of geometric abstraction. He moved to Portland, Oregon, in 1964 to teach at Portland State University, where he taught for the next thirty-two years. He helped found the Portland Center for the Visual Arts in 1971, one of the first alternative artist spaces in the country. Originally trained as a painter, Mel has produced a remarkable body of work over the past fifty years that reflects his unique journey...

The Oregon artist Nelson Sandgren (1917-2006) worked in three distinct media - oil painting, watercolor, and lithography - distinguishing himself in each of these modes throughout his sixty-five-year career. Nelson Sandgren: An Artist's Life is the first in-depth study of this mid-century Oregon modernist who was born in Canada, grew up in Chicago, and moved with his family to Oregon during the Depression. As a watercolorist who loved to paint on site, often on the Oregon coast, Sandgren worked in the...

Richard C. Elliott (1945-2008) was a nationally recognized mixed media artist who lived and worked in Ellensburg, Washington. Born in Portland, Oregon, Elliott received his BA degree from Central Washington University in Ellensburg in art and economics. During the 1970s, he made meticulous drawings of his friends and other subjects, weaving light and form together to capture a particular moment in time. By the early 1980s, however, he no longer felt that he could express what he wanted to about light and...

Timeless Renaissance features 74 recently rediscovered drawings from the 16th through the early 18th centuries. The book offers a fascinating glimpse of Count Allessandro Maggiori (1764-1834) as an art collector and reveals the cultural and historical importance of the collection he assembled in his villa near Monte San Giusto. All of the works were clearly influenced by Raphael's 16th-century Renaissance ideals of beauty, which were further...

Since the 1980s, Oregon-based art collectors George and Colleen Hoyt have amassed one of the finest private collections of Northwest Coast art in the United States. Transformations traces the history of contemporary Northwest Coast Native art since the 1950s. Included are works by some of the region's foremost Native artists of the past half century, including Robert Davidson, Doug Cranmer, Beau Dick, and Susan Point. The collection...