FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Kill: November 01, 2020 WHO: WHAT: EXPECTING RAIN WHEN: September 30 - October 31, 2020 WHERE: PDX CONTEMPORARY ART 925 NW Flanders Street, Portland, OR 97209 HOURS: 10:00 am – 4:00 pm Wednesday - Saturday, or by appointment ADMISSION: Free

EXHIBITION NOTES: PDX CONTEMPORARY ART is pleased to present EXPECTING RAIN, an exhibition of new work by James Lavadour.

James Lavadour lives and works on the Umatilla Reservation near Pendleton, Oregon. He begins each day in the studio, rising before the sun, to get started on work. Just when the sun begins to rise, the Artist leaves his studio to go for a walk or a drive to witness the land waking up. Although Lavadour’s paintings are not based on direct observation, the time spent looking, hearing, and feeling the natural world that surrounds him—his Native land— deeply informs his work. James Lavadour, HOWL, 2020, oil on panel, 28” x 32” Lavadour speaks about being one with the land. His physical, process-oriented practice is one that yields abstract expressionist paintings; accumulations of marks through addition and subtraction are acts of nature in the same way that geological events are acts of nature.

In this exhibition, a spectacular and monumental grid painting, composed of eighteen panels, “EXPECTING RAIN,” is one of, if not the most ambitious and accomplished works of his career. In addition to this major work, the exhibition includes six new single-panel works and one diptych. All of the work in the show will be documented in an exhibition catalog that will be made available in the coming weeks.

Among the awards and fellowships Lavadour has received over the course of his career are the 2019 Hallie Ford Fellowship Award from The Ford Family Foundation, an Honorary Doctorate of Human Letters from Eastern Oregon University, the Eiteljorg Museum Artist Fellowship, the Award for Visual Arts from the Flintridge Foundation, the Award, the Seattle Art Museum’s Betty Bowen Memorial Recognition Award, and numerous large commissions throughout the Pacific Northwest.

James Lavadour’s work was featured as one of only 102 artists selected for the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’s seminal survey exhibition, State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now and at the 55th Venice Biennale in Personal Structures.

Lavadour’s works are included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (Washington, DC), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), Seattle Art Museum (Seattle, WA), Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA), Boise Art Museum (Boise, ID), Crocker Art Museum (Sacramento, CA), the Eiteljorg Museum (Indianapolis, IN), the Hallie Ford Museum of Art (Salem, OR), The Hood Museum

### contact: Jane Beebe [email protected] 503-222-0063 (Hanover, NH), The Heard Museum (Phoenix, AZ), the corporate collections of Bank of America and Microsoft, as well as numerous other public and private collections.

The Work: • landscape-based expressive, abstract paintings • colorful, multi-layered panels in oil paint • one monumental eighteen panel painting, one diptych, and six individual panels

The Artist: • Lives and works on the Umatilla Reservation near Pendleton, Oregon • Walla Walla, an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation • Included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian (Washington, D.C.), among others.