FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Kill: January 3, 2021 WHO: Natalie Ball, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Ellen Lesperance, Maya Lin, Senga Nengudi, Heather Watkins, Marie Watt WHAT: FEROCIOUS MOTHERS WHEN: December 2, 2020 - January 2, 2021 WHERE: PDX CONTEMPORARY ART 925 NW Flanders Street, Portland, OR 97209 HOURS: 10:00 am – 4:00 pm Wednesday - Saturday by appointment ADMISSION: Free

EXHIBITION NOTES:

PDX CONTEMPORARY ART presents the work of women artists who have managed to make art, and build successful careers while being attentive mothers. This is not an easy task, particularly today.

It takes strong belief in the value of their art, a strong will to produce it, and a strong heart for their families.

The Work:

• Materially varied including works on paper, sculptures in mixed media, glass, papier maché

The Artists: • Women Artists • Mothers • All of the artists are at different stages in their careers from emerging to mid-career to established

Artists’ Bios:

Natalie Ball: I am exploring gesture and materiality to create sculptures as Power Objects. I offer my objects as proposals of refusal to complicate an easily affirmed and consumed narrative and identity, without absolutes. I believe historical discourses of Native Americans have constructed a limited and inconsistent visual archive that currently misrepresents our past experiences and misinforms current expectations. I excavate hidden histories, and dominant narratives to deconstruct them through a theoretical framework of auto-ethnography to move “Indian” outside of governing discourses in order to build a visual genealogy that refuses to line-up with the many constructed existences of Native Americans. My goal is, for my art to lend itself as new texts, with new histories, and new manifestations, to add to the discussion of complex racial narratives that are critical to further realizing the self, the nation, and necessarily, our shared experiences and histories.

Ball’s work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Art Museum, EXPO , and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas. She has participated in group exhibitions at the Institute of Modern Art in Australia, IAIA Museum of American Art, the Portland Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has received awards and honors from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Hallie Ford Foundation, The Cooper Union School of Art, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Bonnie Bronson Fellowship, The Betty Bowen Award, Art Matters, and the Joan Shipley Fellow Award.

### contact: Jane Beebe [email protected] 503-222-0063 Jessica Jackson Hutchins:

Jessica Jackson Hutchins (b. 1971) lives and works in Portland, Oregon. Hutchins’s expressive and intuitive studio practice produces dynamic sculptural installations, collages, paintings, and large-scale ceramics, all hybrid juxtapositions of the handmade. As evidence of the artist’s dialogue with items in her studio, these works are a means by which the artist explores the intimacy of the mutual existence between art and life. Her transformations of everyday household objects, from furniture to clothing, are infused with human emotion and rawness, and also show a playfulness of material and language that is both subtle and ambitious. Based upon a willingly unmediated discourse between artist, artwork and viewer, Hutchins’s works ultimately serve to refigure an intimate engagement with materiality and form.

Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Marianne Boesky Gallery, Adam and Ollman, The Lumber Room and The Cooley Gallery at , Johann König in , The Pit in , The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, ICA , and Contemporary Art Center. She has participated in group exhibitions at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Seattle Art Museum, and Museum 52 in . The artist is a Hallie Ford Fellow. Her work is in collections at the Brooklyn Museum, Denver Art Museum, The Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art, Portland Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Seattle Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art net, Frieze magazine, Art in America, and The New York Times,

Courtesy of Adams and Ollman

Ellen Lesperance:

Ellen Lesperance’s work pays tribute to direct action campaigns and feminist activism. Lesperance's paintings are based on knit garments worn by women involved in protests, sit-ins, demonstrations, and civil disobedience. She meticulously paints the patterns of these “knitted messages,” that function much like other forms of creative direct action such as picket signs, banners, street theater, body painting, and costumes. Pattern, shape, and symmetry emerge in the artist's highly detailed compositions that merge abstraction and figuration. By translating and transforming such source material into something abstract and universal, the works speak to participation and protest as being not radical, but essential and personal. They also create a political lineage, capturing the potential of past events to inspire future action through translated and coded symbols.

Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Seattle Art Museum, Baltimore Museum of Art, Samson Projects in Boston, Derek Eller Gallery, Portland Art Museum, and PS122 in New York. As well as an upcoming solo exhibition at the Hollybush Garden in London. She has participated in group exhibitions at institutions such as the Drawing Center in New York, Ashland Art Museum, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Frye Museum, the Honolulu Biennial, ICA Boston, The Brooklyn Museum, the Dahl Arts Center in Rapid City, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. The artist has received grants and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Art Matters, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Betty Bowen, and the Ford Family Foundation. Her work is in collections at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Rose Art Museum, ICA Miami, Frye Muesum, Museum of Fine Arts, Museum Ludwig, and The Museum of Art and Design. Lesperance’s work has been reviewed by Art net, The Brooklyn Rail, The Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, Artforum, The New York Times, Frieze magazine, and Art in America.

Courtesy of Derek Eller Gallery

Maya Lin:

Maya Lin critically engages with notions of site and place, exploring the development of systems in order to reflect on the environment, creating objects that invite contemplation—intellectual, sensorial, and physical—of the natural world. Lin’s creative inclinations were encouraged from a young age and she spent much of her childhood in her father’s ceramics studio. She went on to study architecture and sculpture at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1981. Lin was thrust into the spotlight after winning a nationwide design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. (1982). Informed by Robert Smithson’s earthworks and Richard Serra’s Minimalist sculpture, Lin’s memorial design was recognized with an Honor Award as well as a Henry Bacon Memorial Award from the American Institute of Architects in 1984, the same year she participated in her first group exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery, New York.

Alongside commissions to design monuments for the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama (1989), and the Women’s Table for Yale University (1995), Lin pursued her art practice through the creation of site-specific sculpture and earthworks. Comprised of mounds of recycled broken safety glass, Groundswell (1993) was created for the artist’s first solo exhibition, Public/Private, held at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, in 1994, and was a response to its surrounding architecture. Further engaging with architectural space, The Wave Field (1995), like Lin’s earlier topological production, is comprised of shaped earth, and evokes the dynamics of water. It was created for the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and is the first in a series of Wave Field works.

Lin’s longstanding environmental advocacy and her fascination with maps led her to begin exploring water as a precious resource in 2007, charting birds-eye views of major bodies of water such as the Hudson, Thames, and Yangtze rivers. These wall works, drawings, and large-scale sculptures have been produced using materials including recycled silver, glass marbles, and custom-made stainless-steel pins. Through her extensive historical and ecological research, Lin’s investigations of bodies of water led her to create the multi-sited and expansive project What Is Missing? (2009–), her final—albeit ongoing— memorial, which serves to raise awareness of environmental degradation and the biodiversity crisis. The recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts (1988, 2007), Lin was also honored with the National Medal of Arts, conferred by President Barack Obama in 2009, and later the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, for her significant contributions to art, architecture, and environmental activism. Extending on her investigations of land use and natural bodies of water, Lin created the site- specific work A River Is a Drawing organized with The Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, New York in 2018. In 2019, Lin’s exhibition Flow, organized by the Grand Rapids Art Museum, expanded the site- specificity of her water works to Western Michigan, including The Traces Left Behind (From the Great Bear Lake to the Great Lakes) (2019) a sprawling relief made of recycled silver.

For Lin, the idea of experience, movement, and nature are integral to her work, heightening spatial perception and environmental awareness. Her approach to art-making often finds its origins in science rather than art, demonstrated in her application of satellite technology and cartographic techniques.

Courtesy of Pace Gallery

Senga Nengudi:

Born in Chicago, raised and educated in Los Angeles and Pasadena with a year of post grad study in Tokyo, Japan, and residing in in the early 70’s, Nengudi is currently living in Colorado.

Interested in the visual arts, dance, body mechanics and matters of the spirit from an early age these elements still play themselves out in ever changing ways in her art. She has always used a variety of natural (sand, dirt, rocks, seed pods) and unconventional (panty hose, found objects, masking tape) materials to fashion her works, utilizing these materials as a jazz musician utilizes notes and sounds to improvise a composition. The thrust of her art is to share common experiences in abstractions that hit the senses and center, often welcoming the viewer to become a participant.

Along with doing art Nengudi is strongly committed to arts education. Along with teaching courses at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs in the Visual Arts and Performing Arts Department, she has always been involved with bringing arts programs emphasizing diversity to the communities in which she resides. Besides her individual efforts she has belonged to a variety of organizations with similar goals. Heather Watkins:

Heather Watkins is a visual artist whose studio practice includes experimental forms of drawing and printmaking, book arts, installation, and sculpture. By working to control the chaotic flow of ink, or the gentle tumble of twine, she makes reference to literary texts and the construction of poetry in space and time. “My work is process-oriented, rooted in materials-based working methods that allow me to explore physical and psychic phenomena such as flow, stasis, circulation, time, and the limits of sensory perception,” she notes, “The incremental, serial nature of the objects I make is driven by the desire to understand how line evokes form and creates meaning while remaining resolutely abstract.” Watkins holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and a dual Bachelor’s from Pitzer College in English and Classical Studies. She currently resides in Portland, OR where she is represented by PDX CONTEMPORARY ART, and has served as a faculty member at Lewis & Clark College, the Art Institute of Boston, and Massachusetts College of Art.

Heather Watkins has been the recipient of grants from the Oregon Arts Commission, the Ford Family Foundation, and the Regional Arts & Culture Council. She has also been awarded residencies at Caldera (Sisters, OR), the Sitka Center for Art & Ecology (Otis, OR) and Em Space Book Arts Center (Portland, OR). Her work has been shown in numerous exhibitions regionally and nationally including at the Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), The Art Gym at (Marylhurst, OR), PDX CONTEMPORARY ART (Portland, OR), The Lumber Room (Portland, OR), the Hoffman Gallery at the Oregon College of Art and Craft (Portland, OR), Nine Gallery (Portland, OR), Disjecta (Portland, OR), CoCA (Seattle, WA), Law Warschaw Gallery (St. Paul, MS), Planthouse (New York, NY), and CANADA (New York, NY). Watkins is currently represented by PDX CONTEMPORARY ART in Portland, OR

Her work is included in the collections of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at University of Oregon (Eugene, OR), the Miller Meigs Collection (Portland, OR), the Portland Art Museum, Portland State University, the Regional Arts & Culture Council Portable Works Collection (Portland, OR), Lewis & Clark College’s Aubrey Watzek Library (Portland, OR), and the Artist’s Book Collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), Newberry Library (Chicago, IL), Rhode Island School of Design Library (Providence, RI), and Oberlin College Art Library (Oberlin, OH).

Mentions and reviews of Watkins’ work and exhibitions have been featured in The Oregonian, Oregon Arts Watch, PORT, Visual Art Source, and Willamette Week. She has also been featured in catalogue essays for The Art Gym at Marylhurst University, the Watzek Library Special Collections, and The Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art at Lewis & Clark College.

Marie Watt:

Marie Watt is an American artist whose work draws from human stories and rituals implicit in everyday objects while using indigenous design principles, oral traditions, and personal experience to shape its inner logic. Blankets, one of her primary materials, are objects that can carry extraordinary histories of use. In her tribe (Watt is an enrolled member of the Seneca Nation of Indians) and other indigenous communities, blankets are given away to honor those who are witness to important life events. By folding and stacking blankets, she forms columns that have references to linen closets, architectural braces, memorials, sculpture (Brancusi for one), the great totem poles of the Northwest, and the conifer trees with which she grew up. These blanket forms also present themselves in printmaking, bronze, and woodwork as a recurring, powerful, motif. Through this material, another layer of story and history is physically and metaphorically woven into the work.

Watt holds an MFA from Yale University and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Willamette University in 2016. She has had residencies at the Tamarind Institute, Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts, Corning Museum of Glass, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, Denver Art Museum, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and has received fellowships and grants from the Art Matters Grant, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation, the Eiteljorg Museum of Western and American Indian Art, among others. She was also awarded the Betty Bowen Memorial Award from the Seattle Art Museum in 2005 and the Bonnie Bronson Fellowship in 2009. Among her solo exhibitions are those at the National Museum of the American Indian (part of the Smithsonian Institution), the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (Santa Fe, NM), the Rockwell Museum (Corning, NY), the Tacoma Art Museum, the Missoula Art Museum, and the Boise Art Museum. Watt has also been in numerous group exhibitions, including shows at the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa, Canada), the Denver Art Museum, Kohler Art Center (Sheboygan, WI), the Aldrich Museum of Art (Ridgefield, CT), the Whatcom Museum (Bellingham, WA), Fabric Workshop and Museum (Philadelphia, PA), and the Seattle Art Museum. Watt is currently represented by PDX CONTEMPORARY ART and Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle, WA.

Her work is featured in numerous public and private collections including Boise Art Museum (Boise, ID), the Bronson Collection (Portland, OR), Denver Art Museum (Denver, CO), Eiteljorg Museum of Art (Indianapolis, IN), Fidelity Investments (Boston, MA), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (Seattle, WA), the Microsoft Collection (Redmond, WA), Montclair Art Museum (Montclair, NJ), Museum of Fine Arts (Santa Fe, NM), National Gallery of Canada (Ontario, Canada), the National Museum of the American Indian (Washington, DC), Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC), the Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Collection (Portland, OR), the Jordan Schnitzer Collection (Portland, OR), Seattle Art Museum (Seattle, WA), Seattle City Light (Seattle, WA), Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA, the U.S. Embassies in Accra, Ghana and Islamabad, Pakistan, and the Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT).

Mentions and reviews of Watt’s work and exhibitions have been featured in Art in America, The New York Times, Oregon Arts Watch, the Globe and Mail, Ottawa Life Magazine, Albuquerque Journal, The News Tribune, Fiberarts Magazine, ARTnews, Seattle Weekly, the Oregonian, The Stranger, the Portland Mercury, and Willamette Week.