Tag Archives: Maryhill Museum

Bob Hicks, Dance, Film, General, Martha Ullman West, Visual Art

Updates: Maryhill and ‘Black Swan’

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By Bob Hicks

The Plaza by GBD Architects. Watercolor rendering by C.S. Holmes.Maryhill Museum of Art officially breaks ground at 3:30 p.m. next Friday, Feb. 18, on its $10 million expansion project, which will give the Columbia Gorge landmark some much-needed elbow room. Between an expansive plaza and expanded indoor spaces, the project will add 25,500 square feet.  The museum will be open during construction: Maryhill’s 2011 season opens March 15. Read the update here on Art Daily. And read our original reporting here and here.

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Meanwhile, Scatterers who remember chief correspondent Martha Ullman West’s take on the Oscar-nominated movie Black Swan — “In several places I got the giggles,” she wrote here about the ballet-bloodbath melodrama — might also be interested in Alastair MacAulay’s take here on the same movie, in which the New York Times dance critic considers Black Swan in Bette Davis terms. “Let’s also admit there have always been striking parallels between the ballet classics of the 19th century and the Hollywood women’s movies of the mid-20th century,” he writes. Let’s.

Bob Hicks, Environment, General, Visual Art

Maryhill stretches its legs for the future

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The extension blends landscape and building architecture to keep a low profile. C.S. Holmes for GBD Architects

By Bob Hicks

Today Mr. Scatter donned his reporter cap with the story Maryhill Conceives a Broader Canvas in The Oregonian. In case you missed the print version (which has lots of cool pictures, including one of Queen Marie of Romania dedicating the Maryhill Museum of Art in 1926, and another of original mansion owner Sam Hill sitting in the library with a bunch of medals slung around his neck), you can follow the link.

Paul Guinan, "Marvel on the Klondike," from "Boilerplate: History's Marvel," copyright 2009 by Paul Guinan.The gist is this: Maryhill, that unlikely yet undeniably charming citadel far out above the Columbia Gorge, has announced a $10 million expansion to its 1918 building, which is a beloved landmark in Gorge country and was built as a home for good-roads champion Hill, who never actually lived in it. The place has been bursting at the seams, and the expansion plans, by Portland’s GBD Architects, offer it necessary breathing space while keeping a low enough profile to give the beaux-arts style original mansion pride of place. Plans are to have the extension completed by March 2012.

Mr. Scatter’s trip out the Gorge (Maryhill is about 110 miles east of Portland, on the Washington side of the river) also gave him the chance to see Maryhill’s temporary exhibition Comics at the Crossroads: Art of the Graphic Novel, which he wrote about here for the Big O. It’s drawn mostly from Portland’s vibrant comics/graphic publication scene, and includes the very cool illustration of Paul Guinan’s Boilerman and a dancing bear shown above.

The museum has already raised $8 million of the $10 million it needs for its expansion, but not everything’s rosy.

Continue reading Maryhill stretches its legs for the future →

Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

Bringing it all back home: Steven Grafe at Maryhill

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Queen Marie of Romania dedicating the still unfinished Maryhill Museum of Art in a 1926 ceremony.

Queen Marie of Romania dedicating the still unfinished Maryhill Museum in 1926.

Eventually the world seems to show up on the doorstep of the Maryhill Museum of Art.

Which is a funny place for the world to show up, in this isolated concrete mansion overlooking the Columbia River Gorge in the semi-desert landscape of Klickitat County, Washington.

But look at the evidence. Marie, the bohemian queen of Romania, and Loie Fuller, the American dancer who was the toast of European arts circles around the turn of the twentieth century, were vital figures in the founding of the museum.

One of the museum’s signature collections is the ornate scenes of Theatre de la Mode, the post-World War II tableaux of design that helped get the French high-fashion industry back in gear and that features fantasies by, among others, the incomparable Jean Cocteau. Another important collection is the museum’s icon paintings, many from eastern Europe and Russia. It’s a long story, and worth hearing, but not right now.

Maryhill with spring lupine. Photo: Nyland WilkinsPartly because of weather and isolation, Maryhill is a seasonal museum, and it takes its annual break Nov. 15 before starting up again in spring, on the ides of March. That gives you a couple of weeks to make the drive out the Gorge: It’s a little more than 100 miles east of Portland, about the same distance as Eugene, but a much more interesting drive.

When Lee Musgrave arrived as curator of art from Los Angeles 14 years ago he brought a vision for contemporary art to amplify and complement the museum’s historic collections, which ranged from outright curios to engaging oddities such as a collection of global chess sets to some very good Rodins. Works by the likes of Red Grooms, Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons started popping up on the museum walls, plus pieces by a whole lot of contemporary Pacific Northwest artists.

Musgrave retired this summer, and his replacement, Steven L. Grafe, is just getting his feet dry. I’d say “wet,” except it doesn’t rain much at the Maryhill end of the Gorge, and Grafe already knows a lot of the territory.

Grafe arrives at Maryhill after almost six years at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, where he was curator of American Indian art. It was a good stop for a specialist in Native American art and culture. But Maryhill is very close to home.

Steven Grafe, Maryhill's new curator

Grafe earned his masters and doctoral degrees in art history from the University of New Mexico, where his doctoral dissertation was on pre-1880 beadwork from the southern Columbia River Plateau — an area of deep interest, not coincidentally, in the Maryhill collection. And he put in a couple of years as chief curator of the Southwest Museum of the American Indian in Los Angeles, in addition to curatorial stops at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado and Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina.

He grew up in Salem, got his bachelor’s degree in studio art at Oregon State University, and has deep Northwest roots. His father’s family is from the Santiam area east of Salem, his mother’s family is from around Zigzag near Mt. Hood, and his wife went to Madison High School in Portland.

“She’s wanted to live at the east end of the Gorge since she was in high school,” Grafe said a couple of weeks ago when he was in town for a museum marketing meeting.

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Bob Hicks, Environment, General, Visual Art

Columbia River School: The art landscape in the Gorge

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Jasper Francis Cropsey, Misty Afternoon, 1873. Collection Dr. Michel Hersen & Mrs. Victoria Hersen

“In my opinion a museum cannot and should not be showing only art by dead people.”

Lee Musgrave was sitting in his little ground-floor office at the Maryhill Museum of Art, away from the sweeping view just outside of the Columbia River Gorge and the eastern face of Mt. Hood. He’d just told me that after 14 years as the museum’s only curator he was getting ready to retire — he leaves at the end of July — and he was in a relaxed, expansive mood.

Maryhill Museum with spring lupines. Photo: NYLAND WILKINSOf course, I’d just driven the 110 miles east from Portland to see a bunch of paintings by dead people: the museum’s show Hudson River School Sojourn, which is on view through July 8.

But then, I was also curious to see the newest incarnation on the museum grounds of Musgrave’s annual outdoor-sculpture invitational, Maryhill’s lively contemporary response to its historic collection of Rodin sculptures in the indoor galleries. And if this quirky, oddly intoxicating little museum hadn’t begun to pay much more serious attention to the contemporary world in the past couple of decades, I might have just left it dozing away in the desert and never gone visiting at all.

These days, I consider it a personal requirement to drive to Maryhill at least once a year, and I freely confess that although I find the museum an intriguing place — I can’t think of any institution anywhere else, even in the wild-and-woolly West that it so quintessentially represents, that’s quite like it — a lot of the allure is simply that it offers a great excuse to make one of the most drop-dead gorgeous drives in the United States. The improbable fortress that is Maryhill, perched high on a cliff in that stretch east of The Dalles where forest has given way to desert, is the end-of-the-road payoff to a journey that’s already been its own reward.

“In my time here,” said Musgrave, who on the day of my visit was in a genial summing-up mood, “I’ve done 59 contemporary shows and exhibited the work of 258 Northwest artists.”

Those figures might come as a surprise to people who tend to think of Maryhill in response to its historical collections, an assembly of oddments that make it seem a little like a far-west cubby-hole annex to the Smithsonian Institution, “America’s Attic.” There are the chess sets, the Russian icons, the Rodin plasters, the old weapons, a good Native American collection, the road plans of visionary engineer and rural utopian Sam Hill, memorabilia of the turn-of-the-century dance sensation Loie Fuller, the Queen of Romania’s furniture, the peacocks strutting around the grounds (they scare away snakes), the nearby concrete replica of Stonehenge, the French high-fashion dioramas of Theatre de la Mode.

Francisco Salgado, Falilia, painted steel, 2009 Outdoor Sculpture InvitationalBut as crucial as those things are to Maryhill’s identity (a prominent art historian told me the other day that the museum should concentrate on its “creation myth”), they’re not the whole story. Musgrave, a practicing contemporary painter who’s been showing his own work since the late 1960s in California, the Northwest, and even Australia and Japan, has nurtured relationships with contemporary-art collectors such as Portland’s Jordan Schnitzer. He’s worked directly with a lot of artists, and he’s nurtured at least a nascent sense that in this place, time can mingle. “My favorite thing to do is to take contemporary artists and combine them with things in the permanent collection,” he says.

The annual outdoor sculpture show is a good example of how Musgrave’s connections with contemporary artists have influenced what the museum does. On his first day on the job in 1995, he says, he told his new co-workers, “I can’t believe you’ve got 6,000 acres and no sculpture outside.” So he started the sculpture program.

Continue reading Columbia River School: The art landscape in the Gorge →

Bob Hicks, Dance, Environment, Film, General, Music, Visual Art

Scatter friends go out on the town

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With the summer solstice having hit town at precisely 4:59 p.m. Friday — was that a sylph we saw cavorting in the woods? — it’s a semi-beautiful weekend here in Portland, Oregon.

All right, clouds are moving in. Yet we are undaunted. Some cool things are happening around and out of town involving Friends of Art Scatter (this is not an official organization, but we like the sound of it, though not as much as we like the sound of “The Loyal Order of Moose”) and we would be remiss not to fill you in on the upcoming action. Some of these are this-weekend-only opportunities, so get on your dancing shoes, and don’t let the door hit you on your way out of the house.

Subversive operatics at Someday Lounge: We like Opera Theater Oregon. How much? Read our report on OTO’s winter production of “Carmen,” sung live to a screening of Cecil B. DeMille‘s 1915 silent-movie version of the Bizet opera. So we are happy to report that this seat-of-the-pants company, which dares to believe that opera ought to be fun (its motto is “Making Opera Safe for America”), is throwing a one-night wingding Saturday at Someday Lounge to show off its new season, raise a little money (there’ll be a silent auction) and generally blow the art form’s reputation for stuffiness all to hell.

“Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves” will preview the three-show season of Gian-Carlo Menotti’s “The Medium” (paired with a 10-minute original called “The Head of Mata Hari”) in October, “Camille Traviata” (music from Verdi’s opera accompanying the 1921 silent-movie “Camille” with Alla Nazimova and Rudolph Valentino) in February ’09, and “Das Rheingold” (a scrunching-together of the Wagnerian wallbanger with an episode of television’s “Baywatch”) in June ’09. All shows at the Someday Lounge, where you can drink to all that.

Bonus attraction Saturday night: OTO performs Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” with Classical Revolution PDX and Karaoke From Hell. Ouch, we think.

7 p.m. Saturday, Someday Lounge. $25, $40/couple, 10 bucks if you just show up for the after-party from 9 until the cows come home.

Loie Fuller in the Columbia Gorge: Maryhill Museum of Art, our favorite concrete castle on a cliff with a backside view of Mt. Hood within easy driving distance of Portland (see our report on its affiliated Stonehenge replica) was established by visionary engineering entrepeneur Sam Hill as his home and the center of what he hoped would be an agricultural utopia. That failed, but three of his far-flung friends — Queen Marie of Romania, San Francisco dowager Alma de Bretteville Spreckels (wife of the sugar king) and Loie Fuller, the American girl who became an interpretive dance sensation in Paris — turned the place into one of America’s unlikeliest, and quirkiest, art museums.

On Saturday Maryhill is sponsoring a day-long series of events in celebration of Fuller’s life and art, to culminate in an evening performance in the nearby city of The Dalles by the New York company Jody Sperling and Time Lapse Dance, which will perform three dances inspired by Fuller. 7 p.m. Saturday at At the Dalles-Wahtonka High School Auditorium,
220 E. 10th Street, The Dalles; $7-$10.

Looks like a swell day trip, and if you need a break, some good wineries are nearby. The mammoth Maryhill Winery is just down the road from the museum; we’re also partial to the little, high-quality Syncline Cellars in nearby Lyle, Wash. (The poster shown here, part of the museum’s permanent collection, is by Alfred Choubrac, who with his brother Leon was one of Paris’ first poster designers in the 1880s, anticipating Toulouse-Lautrec. She’s probably doing Le Papillon, her butterfly dance.)

Glass at the Portland Japanese Garden: As many of you know, Portland is Glass City, U.S.A. this summer, with a major retrospective of the work of contemporary master Klaus Moje at the Portland Art Museum through Sept. 7, the annual international conference of the Glass Art Society this weekend, and glass work on view at about 40 galleries and other spots around town.

One of those “other” spots is the beautiful and soul-refreshing Portland Japanese Garden, where work by six Japanese or Japanese American glass artists is on view. The work of five (including onetime Moje students Yoko Yagi and Etsuko Nishi) are inside the Pavilion through June 30. But bigger-scale outdoor installations by one of our favorite artists, Jun Kaneko, remain on the grounds through July 31. “This Kaneko piece seems as if it has always been in the Garden,” Diane Durston says of the serene glass bridge in the photo above. We first got to know Durston, the garden’s curator of culture, art and education, when she was the director of education for the Portland Art Museum, and we trust her taste and enthusiasms.

The return of Chamber Music Northwest: One of Portland’s most congenial summer traditions returns Monday night for its 38th season, and we’re not afraid to say we’re looking forward to it. Sure, the crowd’s heads are largely streaked with silver, but these are geezers (and we count ourselves as part of that category) who know a good time when they see one. Great musicians playing great music under very Portland-friendly conditions: no leader onstage, just a small group of talented artists working on something together, and paying attention to the nuances that requires. Scatter pal David Stabler gives details in The Oregonian; we’re looking forward to festival vet Fred Sherry doing a little Wuorinen and Schoenberg’s first 12-tone quartet on July 12.

Through July 27; Reed College and Catlin Gabel School. (The photo is of cellist Sophie Shao and pianist Pei-Yao Wang in last summer’s “Schubertiade.”)