Tag Archives: Rebecca Dobkins

Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

OHS’s ‘Native Regalia’ brings it all back home

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Sue Perry Olson, dentalium cap, Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw, 2002. Photo: Frank Miller

Above: Sue Perry Olson, dentalium cap, Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw, 2002. Inset: Chooktoot’s doctor regalia, Klamath, ca. 1900. Photos: Frank Miller

On Portland’s South Park Blocks the big visual news this fall is the Portland Art Museum’s splashy China Design Now exhibit and its micro-blockbuster single-painting show of Raphael’s portrait La Velata, with its sexy speculation on the great Italian painter’s private life.

Chooktoot's doctor regalia, Klamath, ca. 1900. Photo: Frank Miller

But as important as the Far East is to our future and the European Renaissance is to our past, we have a past right here, too, that continues to inform our present and future on the Upper Left Coast.

I’m talking about Oregon’s Native American heritage, and I’m hoping that in all the understandable fuss about China and Raphael, a small jewel of a show at the Oregon Historical Society doesn’t get lost.

The show is called The Art of Ceremony: Regalia of Native Oregon, and it continues for just another week, through Sunday, Nov. 15, at the historical society, right across the park from the art museum at Southwest Jeffferson and Park Avenue. I reviewed the exhibit in The Oregonian last December when it opened at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem; since then it’s been traveling to other museums and cultural centers around the state.

The Art of Ceremony combines a lot of prime historical pieces with work in a historical vein by some leading contemporary tribal artists. It’s curated by Rebecca J. Dobkins, an anthroplogist at Willamette University who’s assembled several fine exhibits of Northwest Native American art at the Hallie Ford, but it’s notable also because the pieces chosen were selected in close consultation with members of each of Oregon’s federally recognized nations: These are the things the tribes themselves consider their best work. And in a lot of cases they’re things that aren’t ordinarily seen in public settings like powwows: They’re traditional regalia not usually in the public eye.

Spend some time with this show if you’re downtown. The historical society is closed Monday but open Tuesday through Saturday.

Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

Grace, Falling Like Rain: Rick Bartow, the original story

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Rick Bartow, True Dog. Courtesy FROELICK GALLERYReaders of Laura Grimes’ recent post “Scenes from a writers’ marriage: How he got that story” have noted that the link to the original story by Bob Hicks, which ran on Sunday, March 3, 2002 in The Oregonian, didn’t work. That was a link to the Multnomah County Library version; the story isn’t available on The Oregonian’s Web site, Oregon Live. So here it is, unfortunately without Stephanie Yao’s wonderful photographs that ran with the original.

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GRACE, FALLING LIKE RAIN

“One thing I hold true is that we’re made up as much of what we’ve lost as of what we’ve gained,” Rick Bartow says, smudging out a streak of pastel crayon with the palm of his hand. “And what is erasing but a metaphor for that?”

A winter rain is snapping against the roof and windows of the Oregon artist’s main studio in South Beach, across the Yaquina Bay bridge from downtown Newport. The little building groans in the wind, which bellows and shrieks and cradles the place, rocking it in a rhythm that is fierce and exhilarating and lulling and somehow timeless. Inside is a cocoon.

Moving quickly and efficiently, Bartow tapes three large sheets of paper side by side by side on the wall. “I’ve tried working on a single sheet,” he says, “and it’s really difficult for me. I have scattered energy, sort of like when I’m talking. I jump all over the place.” He puts a few rough pencil marks on each sheet. Lines, dots, straight, curved. Taking a stick of charcoal in his hand, he flattens his palm and smears a streak of gray against the first sheet. “Just to make damn sure I’m not pussyfooting around,” he says. “I have to do something decisive.” Then he slaps handprints on the other two sheets and smears them around.

He’s just eliminated the Big Empty.

Art has begun.

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