For Immediate Release May 30, 2012 Contact: Meagan Atiyeh, 503-986-0084, [email protected] Christine D’Arcy, 503-986-0087, [email protected] Oregon Arts Commission Awards Arts Acquisition Funds to Oregon Visual Arts Institutions through Partnership with The Ford Family Foundation The Arts Commission awarded $64,450 in Arts Acquisition funds to five arts organizations through The Ford Family Foundation’s Art Acquisition Program. The Art Acquisitions, managed by the Arts Commission, provide resources to acquire seminal works by Oregon visual artists to Oregon visual art institutions with publicly accessible collections. The effort preserves public access to great works and supports the artists and the visual arts institutions that sustain their work through acquisition and exhibition. Awards were made to: Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland $40,000 for the acquisition of Betty Feves (1918-1995), Garden Wall, 1979. This work is currently on view in Generations: Betty Feves through July 28, and is being purchased from the Feves Family Collection. As one of the first Oregonians to receive the Governor’s Art Award in 1978, Betty Feves belonged to a generation of mid-century vanguard artists who set the stage for shifts in the use of clay in art. Feves’ work subverts the male-dominated field of post-WWII and is marked by her discovery of clay as an expressive art form during a time when most women studied art as a hobby. Academically trained in late 1930s, Feves lived, worked, and raised her children in Pendleton, Oregon where she remained for 40 years. An advocate for living locally throughout her life, she expressed a strong connection to her surroundings by creating functional and sculptural bodies using clays and glazes made from materials found in her environment. Her relentless experimentation and desire to forge new approaches to working with clay earned her a national and international reputation and in turn, shaped the American Craft Movement and our understanding today of the potential of clay as an expressive medium. Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette University, Salem $9,000 for the acquisition of Marie Watt, Stadium: Jim Thorpe and Relations (Dwight Eisenhower, Pop Warner, George S. Patton, Michael Jordan, Babe Ruth, Sonny Sixkiller, and Animal Friends), 2008. Stadium is from a series of “blanket portraits” completed by Watt, and was included in the Museum’s recent mid-career retrospective, “Marie Watt: Lodge.” Born in 1967 to the son of Wyoming ranchers and a daughter of the Turtle Clan of the Seneca Nation, Marie Watt identifies herself as "half Cowboy and half Indian." Watt received her BA from Willamette University (1990), AFA in Museum Studies from the Institute of American Indian Arts (1992), and MFA from Yale University (1996). Widely exhibited, her work is in the collections of the National Museum of the American Indian, Seattle Art Museum, and Tacoma Art Museum. Formally, Marie Watt draws from indigenous design principles, oral tradition, personal experience, and Western art history. Her approach to art-making is shaped by the proto-feminism of Iroquois matrilineal custom, political work by Native artists in the 1960s, discourse on multiculturalism, as well as Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. Portland Art Museum $6,750 for the acquisition of Robert Adams, Harney County, Oregon (1999-2003, printed 2003). The Adams silver gelatin print will join and strengthen the Museum’s collection of more than 7,000 photographs, noted for exceptional examples of landscape photography of the American west. Robert Adams, based in Astoria, photographs the exploitation of natural resources. Raised in Colorado, he studied literature in California. Returning to Colorado to teach, he was stunned by the change in the region’s landscape instigated by urban sprawl, and took up photography in an effort to resolve his feelings for the new terrain. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1973, and in 1975 his photographs were included in the groundbreaking exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. A permanent resident of Oregon since 1997, Adams has made the region his primary photographic subject for 15 years. He has advocated for environmental causes since the 1990s, opposing the clearcutting of Oregon forests and a planned liquefied natural gas plant. One of the most important landscape photographers working today, Adams currently is the subject of a major publication and an international, multi-museum retrospective organized by Yale University Art Gallery. Oregon Jewish Museum, Portland $4,500 for the acquisition of Henk Pander, Haarlem Transport, 2011. One of Henk Pander’s continued interests as a painter has been remembrance and commentary on his young life in WWII- Holland. The watercolor was recently included in the Museum’s exhibition Transport: Works by Henk Pander & Esther Podemski. Henk Pander was born in 1937, in Haarlem in the Netherlands. His father was an artist who specialized in Bible illustrations. Pander studied at the Rijksacademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. His artistic character was shaped by the academic training he received there, as well as by the Dutch tradition of painting, with its devotion to representing the visible world. Pander’s work has been the subject of many solo exhibitions, including those at the Portland Art Museum in 2001, the Frye Art Museum in Seattle in 2004 and the Hallie Ford Museum in 2011. His work is in many public collections, and recently the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has acquired a number of the artist’s sketchbooks, drawing, and etchings. Pander the recipient of a Governor’s Arts Award. Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon, Eugene $4,200 for the acquisition of Whitney Nye, Astrogirls, 2009. A graduate of the University of Oregon, Nye’s mixed media work joins modern and contemporary examples of paper and fiber constructions within the Museum’s collection from such regional artists as Louis Bunce, Paul Horiuchi and Alfred Harris. Whitney Nye is a multi-faceted artist living in Portland. Her paintings and sculpture are inspired by her sensitive response to immediate surroundings, and the events beyond her grasp. Compositions are shaped with repetitive, colorful patterns formed by her observations of architecture or nature, and more prosaic encounters with roller coasters or a night sky. Elements of board, paper, and pigments are meticulously crafted into broad, larger expressions. Nye earned a BA from the University of Oregon; she was a 1989-1991fellowship artist at the Penland School (NC) and resident artist at Oregon College of Arts and Crafts. About The Ford Family Foundation Visual Arts Program The Arts Acquisition funds are one of seven program facets launched in 2010 as part of The Ford Family Foundation's $3.5 million, five-year visual arts program established in the memory of Mrs. Hallie Ford to assist Oregon's most promising visual artists. Knowledgeable Pacific Northwest arts leaders helped frame the overall program. In addition to the Arts Acquisition Funds, other resources are being dedicated to the following: Fellowships: three annual Hallie Ford Fellows are provided unrestricted grants to support the conceptualization and the development of new work. Artists-in-Residences: bi-annual awards to three "Golden Spot" residency programs in Oregon that provide opportunities for artists to explore and conceptualize new work. Exhibition & Documentation: funding for the curation, preparation, materials and traveling of exhibitions Capital Projects: resources to improve and/or expand studio and exhibition space at key Oregon visual arts institutions Curator/Critic Tour: visitations by national curators to consult with Oregon's visual artists and interact with the arts community Opportunity Grants: resources to mid-career Oregon visual artists who face unanticipated circumstances that could aid in significantly advancing the creation, production or exhibition of their work. About The Ford Family Foundation The Ford Family Foundation is the sole funder of this Visual Arts Program. It partners with Oregon's leading visual arts educators, gallerists, museum and arts professionals to help implement program elements and leverages funding with other state and national resources. The Foundation was established in 1957 by Kenneth W. and Hallie E. Ford. Its Mission is “successful citizens and vital rural communities” in Oregon and Siskiyou County, California. The Foundation is located in Roseburg, Oregon, with a Scholarship office in Eugene. For more information about the Foundation, please visit the website at www.tfff.org. * * * * * * * * * * * The Oregon Arts Commission provides leadership, funding and arts programs through its grants, special initiatives and services. Nine commissioners, appointed by the Governor, determine arts needs and establish policies for public support of the arts. The Arts Commission became part of Business Oregon (formerly Oregon Economic and Community Development Department) in 1993, in recognition of the expanding role the arts play in the broader social, economic and educational arenas of Oregon communities. In 2003, the Oregon legislature moved the operations of the Oregon Cultural Trust to the Arts Commission, streamlining operations and making use of the Commission’s expertise in grantmaking, arts and cultural information and community cultural development. The Arts Commission is supported with general funds appropriated by the Oregon legislature and with federal funds from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as funds from the Oregon Cultural Trust. More information about the Oregon Arts Commission is available online at: www.oregonartscommission.org - 30 - .