Bob Hicks writes on the new exhibit Crow’s Shadow Institute of Arts at 25 at Salem, Oregon’s Hallie Ford Museum of Art. Hicks dives into the paintings and artists on display, beginning with James Lavadour and Ghost Camp.
In addition to Lavadour, artists from the traveling exhibit include: Rick Bartow, Lillian Pitt, Joe Feddersen, Joe Cantrell, Edgar Heap of Birds, Corwin Clairmont, Eva Lake, James Luna, Victor Maldonado, Brenda Mallory, Wendy Red Star, Sara Siestreem, Adam Sorensen, Storm Tharp, Marie Watt, Samantha Wall, Kay WalkingStick, and more.
“As varied as their styles and approaches can be, somehow their work ties together, and it’s not just because it’s all prints but because it all comes from Crow’s Shadow. There is a spirit to the place and what comes out of it,” writes Hicks.
James Lavadour began the Crow’s Shadow Institute of Art in 1992, creating a community surpassing that of just the artists, “but more essentially of native peoples defining their space within and without the larger culture,” writes Hicks. Lavadour (Walla Walla) began the art center in 1992, with Philip Cash (Cayuse/Nez Perce) and Lavadour’s wife at the time, JoAnn Lavadour, partly as a working space for Native artists, and partly to boost economic growth and to create a space for young artists from the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation to train in their craft.
Bob Hicks is a long-time writer on the arts in Oregon, working at the The Oregonian from 1978 to 2007. This impressively detailed and researched story shows the beauty, and also the charge, behind the work of diverse artists and mediums that unite in this show to tell the Northwest’s Native American story.
The exhibition Crows Shadow Institute of the Arts at 25 continues through Dec. 22 at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, 900 State Street, Salem. Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays and 1-5 p.m. Sundays. Admission: $6 general, $4 ages 55-plus, $3 educators or college students with ID, free for ages 17 and younger.
After closing in Salem, the exhibition will travel in 2018 to the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, Wash., and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Washington State University in Pullman.