In the Gallery February 4th – March 26th, 2022

Featured in the Entryway Gallery
(February 4 – March 26)

Don Bailey

Whil-xolik (Tell Me a Story) – – pronounced “Will-Zo-Lik”

In my native Hoopa language, kiwhliw means “he who paints.” First and foremost, I am a painter. I create complex, richly colorful compositions. I am also Native American, born and raised on the Hoopa Valley Reservation in Northern California.

My work often begins with imagery from archival photographs. I recontextualize the often static, sometimes staged images with layers of color, traditional native design, references to other artists’ work, and landscapes real and imagined. Then, in the spirit of whil-xolik (story-telling), I create new stories to shake up (mis)understandings of (indian) art and history.

I have been featured on the Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) television show Art Beat and in Oregon ArtsWatch. My work is in the collection of the Hallie Ford Museum (Salem, Oregon), the State Library of Oregon (Salem, Oregon), City Hall (Portland, Oregon), the collection of the Chemawa Indian School (Salem, Oregon), Riverfront Park (Salem, Oregon), R B Ravens Gallery (Ranchos de Taos, NM), and private collections. I am a member of Blackfish Gallery, an artist owned and operated gallery in Portland’s Pearl District, and work out of my studio in Portland, Oregon.

Follow more of Don’s works here: hupapaint.com

Follow Don on Instagram @hupapaint

Artists

Edgar Heap of Birds

Edgar Heap of Birds is of Tsistsistas (Cheyenne) background and is best known for his public mixed-media installations. Over the last three decades, he has utilized nontraditional media, such as billboards and traffic signage, to deliver powerful political commentary.

The artworks of Hock E Aye VI Edgar Heap of Birds include multi-disciplinary forms of public art messages, large-scale drawings, Neuf Series acrylic paintings, prints, works in glass, and monumental porcelain enamel on steel outdoor sculpture.

Heap of Birds received his Master of Fine Arts from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1979), his Bachelor of Fine Arts from The University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas (1976), and has undertaken graduate studies at The Royal College of Art, London, England. He was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts Degree from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, Massachusetts (2008).

The artist has exhibited his works at The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, New York, New York, The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia, Documenta, Kassel, Germany, Orchard Gallery, Derry, Northern Ireland, University Art Museum, Berkeley, California, Association for Visual Arts Museum, Cape Town, South Africa, Lewallen Contemporary Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Hong Kong Art Center, China, Bandung Institute of Technology, Bandung, Indonesia, Grand Palais, Paris, France and the Venice Biennale, Italy.

He has served as visiting lecturer in London, England, Western Samoa, Chiang Mai and Bangkok, Thailand, Johannesburg, South Africa, Barcelona, Spain, Belfast, Northern Ireland, Norrkoping, Sweden, Harare, Zimbabwe, Verona, Italy, Adelaide, Australia, and India.

Heap of Birds has taught as Visiting Professor at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island, and Michaelis School of Art, University of Cape Town, South Africa. At the University of Oklahoma since 1988, Professor Heap of Birds teaches Native American Studies. His seminars explore issues of the contemporary artist on local, national, and international levels.

He has received grants and awards from The National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Lila Wallace Foundation, Bonfil Stanton Foundation, The Pew Charitable Trust, and The Andy Warhol Foundation.

In June 2005, Heap of Birds completed the fifty-foot signature, an outdoor sculpture titled Wheel. The circular porcelain enamel on steelwork was commissioned by The Denver Art Museum and is inspired by the traditional Medicine Wheel of the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming.

Heap of Birds’ artwork was chosen by the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian as their entry towards the competition for the United States Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale. He represented the Smithsonian with a major collateral public art project and blown glassworks in Venice, in June 2007 titled: “Most Serene Republics”.

In 2012, Heap of Birds was one of fifty artists honored by United States Artists with an individual fellowship award of $50,000 and named USA Ford Fellow in the Visual Arts category.

Find more of his work here.

Frank LaPena

Frank LaPena was a member of the Nomtipom Wintu people of Northern California, a source of deep inspiration for his artwork. He incorporated the traditions, images, and philosophies of his Indigenous culture into his art and teaching. LaPena first exhibited in 1960 and worked in painting, printmaking, sculpture, poetry, dance, and mixed media. He spent many years as a professor of art and ethnic studies at California State University in Sacramento, where he was also the director of the Native American studies department from 1975 to 2002. His 60-year career as a professional artist gave him a central role among contemporary Native American artists in California.

As a child, he was sent to federal boarding schools, first to the Stewart Indian School in Nevada, and later to the Chemawa Indian School in Oregon. In 1965 he earned a BA at Cal State Chico, followed by a teaching certificate a few years later from San Francisco State University. He obtained a MA in Anthropology in 1978 from California State University in Sacramento.

LePena was born in San Francisco in 1937 and passed away on May 2, 2019, at the age of 81.

George Flett

George Flett was a member of the Spokane Tribe, and learned much about his Indian heritage from his mother including tribal lore and traditional art forms. Graduating from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe NM in 1966, Flett went on to study at the University of Colorado and served in the U.S. Army from 1968 to 1970. Flett worked as a full-time artist from 1983 until his passing in 2013. He created work in several media that reflected his Native background — including several representations of the colorful Prairie Chicken Dance — and his former rodeo experience as a champion bull rider. He was well-known for his ledger-style artworks. Flett’s work can be seen in the permanent collections of Institute of Native American Indian Arts (IAIA), Santa Fe; the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, Spokane; Museum of the Plains Indian, Browning, Montana; and the Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, among others. He lived and worked near Wellpinit, Washington on the Spokane Indian Reservation.

James Lavadour 

James Lavadour’s work is deeply rooted in the landscapes of eastern Oregon. He grew up in the foothills of the Blue Mountains on the Umatilla Reservation near Pendleton, Oregon. An avid hiker, Lavadour’s connection to this geography is reflected in the slow and labor-intensive processes he undertakes in his daily painting practice. Paint becomes a vehicle to mimic the gradual layering and subsequent erosion, exposing the trace of previous vestiges of color. Lavadour favors translucent glazes, which leave hints of each preceding layer, creating tremendous depth and luminosity through these topographical surfaces. Often juxtaposing vivid color with subdued passages, each painting strikes a balance between serenity and optical vibration.

Lavadour has been making artwork and exhibiting for more than four decades. Largely self-trained as a painter, he drew his early inspiration from a wide variety of sources, from Romanticist painters such as Turner to more kinetic processes such as those exemplified by Chinese ink painters. Long-held in high esteem among the art world in the Pacific Northwest, Lavadour’s paintings have also been shown in numerous major institutions throughout the United States, with more national recognition building over the last ten years. Lavadour has exhibited at The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (in both Washington, DC and New York, NY); The Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis, IN; Portland Art Museum in Portland, OR; the Heard Museum in Phoenix, AZ; and the Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe, NM among many others. Notably, Lavadour, with the assistance of his Portland gallerist, Jane Beebe of PDX Contemporary, was invited to bring a large grid of 15 of his paintings to show in Personal Structures at the Palazzo Bembo in the 2013 Venice Biennale.

Another significant turning point occurred in 1990 when Lavadour was invited to do a Fellowship at Rutgers Center for Innovative Printmaking (now the Brodsky Center) housed at the Mason Gross School of Arts at Rutgers in New Brunswick, NJ. While visiting Rutgers, Lavadour worked with Master Printer, Eileen Foti who encouraged Lavadour to get a press for his studio. Two years later, Lavadour had assembled a team of interested artists and like-minded friends and in 1992 Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts (CSIA) was founded. Crow’s Shadow has a prestigious artist-in-residence program and is the only professional fine art print publisher located on a Native American reservation in the United States. Located in the same area where Lavadour grew up, Crow’s Shadow enjoys the same formative vistas and inspiring quietude that propels Lavadour’s studio practice.  More than twenty years after its founding, Crow’s Shadow is still guided with Lavadour’s vision in mind.

100% of proceeds from James Lavadour prints sold by Crow’s Shadow are donated back to Crow’s Shadow in support of CSIA’s ongoing operations and programming.

James Luna

Hailing from the La Jolla Indian Reservation in California, James Luna is best known for his performance and multimedia installation art, including the 1987 “Artifact Piece,” an award-winning installation/performance for which he posed lying down in a museum display case along with some of his personal belongings as cultural artifacts. In 2005 Luna represented the National Museum of the American Indian at the Venice Biennale. Having garnered numerous awards, including a 2007 Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art, Luna is an artist whose work has been widely acclaimed for its challenging confrontations and innovative explorations of Native American identities and stereotypes.

During his time at Crow’s Shadow, James Luna collaborated with Master Printer Frank Janzen to create an original body of works on paper. In his series Sumojazz, Luna inserted himself into old images of Japanese sumo wrestlers. This action was both intervention and participation, calling attention to ways in which bodies of color are viewed as cultural identifiers. His second series of monotypes, Indian Edge, are vividly colored works of hard-edge abstraction. These works feature subtle nods to mountains and rivers, with boisterous color offset by more neutral metallic silver or gold inks.

Luna passed away in March of 2018, leaving a powerful and transformative legacy for the next generation of Indigenous voices.

Jim Denomie

Jim Denomie collaborated with Master Printer Frank Janzen in May 2011 for a two-week printmaking residency. Perhaps best known for his surrealistic painting style and cartoonish, “revisionist” depictions of Native American history and themes, Denomie has received numerous awards and honors for his work, including a 2009 Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art and a 2008 Bush Artist Fellowship. Denomie received a BFA degree from the University of Minnesota in 1995 and has since shown extensively in both Europe and the United States.

Gail Tremblay, artist and instructor at Evergreen State University, described Denomie’s work as that which both “sings and stings.”

“To penetrate Jim Denomie’s work and to engage with its imagery, one has to let go of all stereotypes one has about American Indians and their art,” Tremblay writes in the Eiteljorg-published book “Art Quantum.” “Indeed, few artists poke fun at stereotypes or at the romanticized images of ‘Noble Savages’ or primitive Indians with Denomie’s vigor.”

Find Jim on Instagram @jimdenomie

Joe Cantrell

Joe Cantrell visited Crow’s Shadow in November of 2016 as the final Artist-in-Residence for the year. He worked closely with Master Printer Frank Janzen to develop a set of three diptychs based on his photographic practice. Cantrell utilizes extremely close-up macro images to reveal forms inside of rocks and fossils. Adapting spy satellite imaging software for artistic purposes, Cantrell also photographs rocks and pictograms in the Columbia River Gorge, often revealing remarkable things that the naked eye cannot see. The litho proofs that he has developed with Frank Janzen’s expertise are studies of texture and forms both otherworldly and very much of this earth, stating “these images show how interconnected we are; we are all the same stardust”.

Cantrell is Cherokee, originally from Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and has made his home in Oregon for the last 30 years. Cantrell did two Navy tours in Vietnam, during his second tour he was a diving officer in the Mekong Delta. He stayed in Southeast Asia another 15 years, working primarily as a photojournalist until 1986. Among Cantrell’s multiple careers, he has taught at the Oregon College of Art and Craft, and the Pacific Northwest College of Art. He is now happily retired and making more artwork than ever.

Find more of Joe’s works here.

John Feodorov

Born in Los Angeles and currently living in the Pacific Northwest, Feodorov is of mixed Navajo and European American heritage. In addition to his extensive personal work in visual arts, performance, and music, Feodorov works as an Assistant Professor of Art at Western Washington University’s Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies in Bellingham, Wash.

From his website bio, “Feodorov often utilizes pop culture detritus, as well as sound and video, to create what he considers contemporary ‘sacred’ spaces in order to question ideas of spirituality, identity, and place. In addition, his paintings and drawings are experiments in creating hybrid mythical iconographies.”

Crow’s Shadow hosted artist John Feodorov for a 10-day residency in 2011.

Find more of John’s works here.

Larry McNeil

Larry McNeil is an award-winning photographer whose mastership of that medium, as well as his sense of humor, richly inspires his printmaking. A member of the Tlingit and Nisga’a Nations from both the United States and Canada, McNeil has exhibited widely, including at the San Diego Museum of Art and the International Center of Photography in New York City. McNeil has described his work as being about American mythology, ravens, the intersection of cultures, and discovering the sacred in unlikely places.

McNeil was awarded an Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art in 2007.

Find more of Larry’s works here.

Follow Larry’s works on Facebook or Instagram

Lillian Pitt

Lillian Pitt is a Native American artist from the Big River (Columbia River) region of the Pacific Northwest. Born on the Warm Springs Reservation in Oregon, she is a descendent of Wasco, Yakama, and Warm Springs people. She is one of the most highly regarded Native American artists in the Pacific Northwest. Her works have been exhibited and reviewed regionally, nationally, and internationally, and she has been the recipient of numerous awards and distinctions. Her awards include the 2007 Earle A. Chiles Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the 1990 Governor’s Award of the Oregon Arts Commission, which declared that she had made “significant contributions to the growth and development of the cultural life of Oregon.” Primarily a sculptor and mixed media artist, Lillian’s lifetime of works include artistic expressions in clay, bronze, wearable art, prints, and most recently, glass. The focus of her work draws on over 12,000 years of Native American history and the tradition of the Columbia River region. Regardless of the medium she chooses to use, Lillian’s contemporary works are all aimed at giving voice to her people.

Find more of Lillian’s works here.

Natalie Ball

(Black, Modoc, and Klamath) is a multidisciplinary installation artist who works from her ancestral homelands in the rural community of Chiloquin, OR (Klamath County). As a young woman, she learned quilt making from her aunt, which has fueled a continual practice of challenging assumptions regarding materials, including the loaded politics and power of matrilineal craft. Often mining found objects for her installations, Ball perennially incorporates seemingly incongruous materials into provocative objects that both carry their own stories while inviting dialogue with viewers.

Raised in Portland, Oregon, Ball has a Bachelor of Arts in Art and Ethnic Studies from the University of Oregon (2005), a Masters in Maori Visual Arts (2010) from Massey University in New Zealand, and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking (2018) from Yale School of Art in New Haven, CT. Ball was the winner of the prestigious 2018 Betty Bowen Award, with a corresponding exhibition on view at the Seattle Art Museum from August 10 through November 17, 2019. She has shown widely around the states as well as internationally, including Whitney Biennial 2017, New York; Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA), Santa Fe; and Art Mûr in both Montréal, Québec, and Berlin, Germany. This will be her first time working at Crow’s Shadow.

Find more of Natalie’s works here.

Follow Natalie’s works on Instagram.

Ric Gendron

Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts hosted artist Ric Gendron for a weeklong printmaking residency in 2010. An accomplished acrylic painter, Gendron’s works have been described as incorporating a colorful blend of traditional Native American images and pop culture elements. Gendron lives in Spokane, Wash., and is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation.

Rick Bartow

Rick Bartow (Wiyot) is one of Oregon’s most important contemporary artists, and has an ever-expanding national and international audience. Bartow was born on the Oregon coast and spent the majority of his life in his hometown of Newport, Oregon. Bartow’s great-grandfather left his Wiyot tribal homeland in northern California nearly 100 years ago to homestead in Oregon where the Bartow family has lived ever since. In the early 1970s, Bartow served in the Vietnam War. He picked up the guitar as a teenager and both music and the visual arts served as powerful creative outlets throughout his lifetime. Bartow passed away on April 2, 2016; he was 69 years old.

Central to Bartow’s work is the theme of transformation, particularly between the human and animal realms, often juxtaposing corporeal and spiritual dimensions of existence. Among numerous awards, Bartow received an Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art in 2001, and a Flintridge Foundation Award in 2002. His work is held in major public and private collections nationally and internationally. A pair of his monumental sculptures grace the National Mall, commissioned by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC in 2012.

Vanessa Enos

An enrolled member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe in Montana, Enos is of Walla Walla, Yakima, and Pima heritage. Enos moved with her family to the Umatilla Indian Reservation when she was nine and later graduated from Weston McEwen High School. Living briefly on the East Coast, Enos received an associate’s degree from the women’s Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia and has since returned to the Pendleton area.

Wendy Red Star

Artist Wendy Red Star returns to Crow’s Shadow in October for her third residency since 2010. Red Star works across disciplines to explore the intersections of Native American ideologies and colonialist structures, both historically and in contemporary society. Raised on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana, Red Star’s work is informed both by her cultural heritage and her engagement with many forms of creative expression, including photography, sculpture, video, fiber arts, and performance. An avid researcher of archives and historical narratives, Red Star seeks to incorporate and recast her research, offering new and unexpected perspectives in work that is at once inquisitive, witty, and unsettling. Intergenerational collaborative work is integral to her practice, along with creating a forum for the expression of Native women’s voices in contemporary art.

Red Star has exhibited in the United States and abroad at venues including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fondation Cartier pour l’ Art Contemporain, Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Portland Art Museum, Hood Art Museum, St. Louis Art Museum, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, among others. She served as a visiting lecturer at institutions including Yale University, the Figge Art Museum, the Banff Centre, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Dartmouth College, CalArts, Flagler College, Fairhaven College, and I.D.E.A. Space in Colorado Springs. In 2015, Red Star was awarded an Emerging Artist Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. In 2016, she participated in Contemporary Native Photographers and the Edward Curtis Legacy at the Portland Art Museum and recently mounted a solo exhibition as part of the museum’s APEX series.

Red Star holds a BFA from Montana State University, Bozeman, and an MFA in sculpture from the University of California, Los Angeles. She lives and works in Portland, OR.

Whitney Minthorn

In February 2013, the CTUIR’s own Whitney Minthorn came to Crow’s Shadow to explore a new artistic medium: Creating Prints. The prints created during his residency hint at Minthorn’s primary medium of photography. In addition to creating a series of prints, while at Crow’s Shadow Minthorn contributed to the study of arts and crafts among his people by putting on a beading workshop and holding studio sessions at the Mission Longhouse on the CTUIR reservation.

Find more of Whitney’s works here.

Follow Whitney’s works on Facebook and Instagram.

Jeremy Red Star Wolf

Jeremy Red Star Wolf was born and has lived on the Umatilla Indian Reservation for most of his life, which has revolved around the deeply rooted culture of his ancestors and a deep affinity for the land. His drawing skill was recognized at an early age, and his parents consistently encouraged him to pursue art further. Wolf graduated from Blue Mountain Community College, taking a hiatus from art to begin a career in environmental science. He also participated in traditional dancing, basketball, wild horse racing, hunting, and fishing.

His debut solo exhibition, titled “Firsts,” featured lithographic prints inspired by personal milestones, such as his first painting, first salmon catch, first elk kill, first son, first love, and first understandings.

Joe Fedderson

Joe Feddersen was born in Omak, Wash., on the edge of the Colville Indian Reservation. In his 20-year career, Feddersen has worked in painting, three-dimensional constructions like basketry and glass sculpture, photography, and computer-generated imagery. He is best known, however, as a virtuoso printmaker. Much of his work is influenced by geometric designs derived from traditional Plateau Indian artistry, itself inspired by Northwest landscapes, flora, and fauna. Feddersen was awarded an Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art in 2001.