The Ford Family Foundation’s Visual Arts Programs honors the Foundation’s late co-founder Hallie Ford and her lifelong interest in the arts by helping Oregon’s most promising established visual artists actively pursue their work. One element of this program is Critical Conversations, a collaboration between the Foundation and the University of Oregon, in partnership with Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland State University, and Reed College.
Critical Conversations provides a space for artists and cultural producers that is rooted in exchange and inquiry. Organizing partners facilitate a year-round calendar of studio visits for Oregon artists by prominent visiting curators and arts writers, who also offer public lectures and other forms of engagement to our community. Recognizing the nexus between artists and those who reflect upon and present their work, Critical Conversations also sponsors a series of convening that specifically engage Oregon’s curators and arts writers around currents in society and the field.
Most critical to the publication you are now reading, we commission essays, reviews, interviews, and ekphrastic poems from Oregon writers, who select their own topics relative to art in our state. Their contributions are published online by the Visual Arts Ecology Project, in cooperation with the Oregon Arts Commission. For the past three years, these commissions have been overseen by Stephanie Snyder, John and Anne Hauberg Curator and Director of the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College, and Sue Taylor, Professor Emerita of Art History and former Associate Dean in the College of the Arts at Portland State University. Now for the first time, we have gathered a selection of this writing, alongside evidence of our other activity, into print. This inaugural publication is dedicated to notions of “figuring,” that is, the processing of a moment to inform a position from which to act, the presentation of a form, or expression of a body. A representative assortment of commissions appears in this volume and reflects the creative richness, breadth of inquiry, and social vigilance of the state’s visual arts ecology.
As a parallel to Oregon’s fraught history and rogue social compasses, visiting curator for spring 2021, Peter Eleey, meditates in this volume on how visualizations of various kinds—diagrams, memes, exhibitions, memorials—figure evidence and absence in times, like our own, of crisis. His essay complements his many one-on-one discussions with Oregon artists under the aegis of the Critical Conversations program. Two convenings are also documented in the pages that follow: Bean Gilsdorf reports on her reading group’s analyses of notions of artistic success in a market-driven economy, while Sharita Towne inserts an unbound, limited-edition folio inspired by her group’s conversations about how Oregon institutions can better support BIPOC creatives and audiences.
By holding space for both indeterminacy and latent form, Figuring conjures histories and possible futures, lived experiences, and propositions for ways that ethereal matter might exist concretely or be allowed to endure as defined by its own logic. An essay by Prudence Roberts on the serendipitous creation of an iconic Oregon image opens the volume. In Ocean X (1978), the late photographer Terry Toedtemeier captured a mysterious figure momentarily inscribed on the beach, a figure formed by two solitary waves crossing in the shallows. It is a beautiful emblem for this collection. Abigail Susik’s moving tribute to the late Salem artist D.E. May testifies to the ineffable impact artworks may have on a critic, as on any thoughtful viewer, creating an impersonal kind of intimacy. Her loving encomium to the friend she barely knew reveals the visual arts ecology as above all an interpersonal, social space.
Figurative drawing features in these pages as well in Samantha Wall’s sensitive graphite portraits of women of color. We also see inside the practices of Wall and Stephen Slappe as they discuss the creative process. Patrick Collier celebrates the imaginative creature-drawings of autodidact Kurt Fisk, while Richard Speer describes how Felicity Fenton, who parodies social media influencers in her internet art, foregrounds the sensuous physical body in her often intimate live performances. And the body, albeit not represented per se, remains implicit in the sculpture and performance by Jess Perlitz, in the soft sculptures and paintings of Kristan Kennedy, or in sculptural assemblages by Natalie Ball, which often include elements of Native American regalia and clothing. Ball’s interview by gallerist Jeanine Jablonski ranges over related issues of identity, Indigeneity, and motherhood. A different kind of garment, the handsewn Buddhist rakusu, becomes the focus of Jovencio de la Paz’s essay on the sacred role of craft in daily life in an Oregon monastery where the labor of stitching constitutes a form of spiritual practice.
Other institutions and traditions come under consideration in Figuring from critical perspectives, as Libby Werbel rethinks the museum as an inclusive, non-hierarchical space, and Sarah Sentilles recounts how artist Juli Green celebrates the liberation of wrongfully imprisoned individuals with her “First Meals” paintings. An excerpt from Demian DinéYazhi’s travelogue conflates time, space, and mixed realities in an intimate reckoning with violence, grief, radioactivity, anger, identity, insecurity, and love as a body moves across the U.S. landscape. And in another personal memoir, written expressly for this collection, bart fitzgerald conveys the sensuous experience and solidarity of social gatherings—an “evening caper” and an organized brunch—during the Black Lives Matter movement in Portland.
A healthy visual arts ecology is only possible because of a certain level of porosity, criticality, and symbiosis. The production of Figuring has brought together writers, artists, editors, curations, and educators as colleagues and collaborators invested in Oregon’s art community. We thank The Ford Family Foundation for recognizing the critical roles that arts writing plays in elevating artistic viewership, patronage, and practice in our state, and for helping us disseminate this writing to local, national, and international audiences.
Critical Conversations Editorial Board
Meagan Atiyeh
Brian Gillis
Mack McFarland
Stephanie Snyder
Sue Taylor
