Open your eyes and your imaginations: Oregon’s visual arts world is about to finish a year of vibrant activity on all sorts of fronts.
The Portland Art Museum has been open on a reduced scale during a massive renovation and expansion project that will connect its two main buildings, add more gallery space, and vastly improve access and interior layout by the time it’s finished in fall 2025.
2024: A Year in Review
And Russo Lee Gallery, one of the city’s blue-chip galleries, is heading toward a February 2025 reopening after being closed for several months to deal with smoke and soot damage from a next-door restaurant fire.
Yet the state’s been awash in provocative, pleasing, and mind-expanding art in its galleries, museums, and art centers, and Oregon ArtsWatch has responded with close to a hundred stories about what’s been happening. From those, Visual Arts Editor Laurel Reed Pavic has chosen a baker’s dozen to represent the best and brightest from the year’s visual arts scene.
Julie Green’s first and last meals

Jan. 15: Julie Green, Prudence Roberts writes in New horizons for Julie’ Green’s ‘Last Supper’ and ‘First Meal’ projects, “was at core a political artist: a passionate advocate for human rights and for everyday justice. ‘I paint to point,’ Green once said, paraphrasing Andy Warhol. Much of Green’s work directly points at systemic corruption and cruelty. Nowhere is this more evident than in two of their most important works, Last Supper and First Meal.”
Green died of cancer in 2021, at age 60, but their art took on a life of its own. Last Supper, which deals with the last meal requests of Death Row prisoners before their execution, was donated to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, in Bentonville, Arkansas. Crystal Bridges was selected because of its robust Art Bridges program which means that the work will also travel to other institutions. And the works in First Meal, which focuses “on exonerees and on the circumstances surrounding the first food they ate after being released from prison,” were published in a catalog by the Oregon State University Press. In her essay, Roberts explores the meanings and lasting impact of Green’s art.
Ebenezer Galluzzo’s celebration of the sacred and the self

Jan. 23: “Portland-based artist Ebenezer Galluzzo wants you to know that he is sacred, and so are you,” Shannon M. Lieberman writes in the essay “Processing through photographs: Ebenezer Galluzzo.” “Working primarily in photographic self-portraiture, over the last two decades Galluzzo has built a body of work that investigates gender, explores the disconnect between how we see ourselves versus how others view us, and asks how connections with the environment shape who we are.”
Galluzzo uses self-portraiture to explore trans identity and sacredness, Lieberman writes, and his photography is a celebration of self and the journey it took to get here.
How a Beauford Delaney painting found a new home

Jan. 31: For many years Portland dance critic Martha Ullman West, a frequent ArtsWatch contributor, held Twilight Street, a 1946 painting by Beauford Delaney, a prominent painter during the Harlem Renaissance, in storage. Then she thought, other people should be seeing this, too. Delaney was a friend of her artist father, Allen Ullman, and Martha knew him as a child growing up in New York City’s Greenwich Village.
How did Twilight Street get from 119 Waverly Place in New York to the studio of art conservator Nina Olsson to the Portland Art Museum’s walls? In “A painting’s long and personal journey,” West relates the tale of how she donated the painting to the Portland museum, knowing that it needed restoration and also knowing that it would be a good fit in the museum’s collection. In her essay West talks extensively with conservator Olsson about the long and meticulous process of returning Delaney’s painting to pristine condition so it could go on display, adding a fascinating chapter to the museum’s collection of American art.
Erik Geschke, in on the slumbering joke

Feb. 28: What would happen, David Slader wonders in his essay “A monumental snore (with a wink),” if we turned grandiosity into a joke? Building big, Slader declares, artist Erik Geschke sculpts himself into the possibilities.
“With mouth agape, eyes closed and hands slack, Missgeburt rests his weary body against a wall in Clackamas Community College’s Alexander Gallery where I first noticed him dozing last month,” Slader writes. “Despite being almost twice life-size, he is anything but heroic. He is, instead, the work of an artist with a wry sense of humor and an acute awareness of world history and human longing, expressed with consummate technical skill.”
Heidi Schwegler’s thriller (with cockroaches)

April 12: “Heidi Schwegler’s new show at PCC’s North View Gallery delivers on the paradox of its title: Existential Action Thriller (EAT),” Abby McGehee writes in her review “Heidi Schwegler’s ‘Existential Action Thriller’.” “It is, by turns, thrilling, witty, and disturbing. Existentialism posits both a state of inertia and one of profound awe or dread. We are waiting for someone or something that will never come, but in that banal space, we encounter the void.
“Placing this twentieth-century philosophy alongside a reference to an action thriller – the kind of mindless pop entertainment designed to distract us from our existential dread – Schwegler introduces the kinds of juxtapositions that permeate the work.”
And, yes, Schwegler tosses in a few cockroaches for good measure.
At Maryhill Museum, art and the mighty Columbia River merge

April 17: “Stand in front of Erik Sandgren’s four-panel, eight-foot wide landscape Wallula to the Sea at the Maryhill Museum of Art and it’s almost as if you’re standing on the museum’s plaza on the edge of a high cliff, looking out over the grand sweep of the Columbia River Gorge,” Bob Hicks writes in “Roll, Columbia, roll: At Maryhill Museum, the river is a unifier and an artistic bridge.”
Well, not exactly, he adds: Sandgren’s painting is distinctly painterly. But the museum’s two main temporary exhibits for its 2024 season, The Columbia River: Wallula to the Sea and King Salmon: Contemporary Relief Prints, “plant the museum firmly in the geology and cultures of its place along the Columbia River. So does its expansive permanent collection of Indigenous art, a large part of which is devoted to basketry and beadwork from the Columbia River Plateau.”
Dennis Evans: After 50 years, the fire this time

July 9: “Dennis Evans isn’t a marquee name in Oregon’s diverse, far-flung arts community,” David Bates writes in “‘Apocrypha’: The art of Dennis Evans at Salem’s Hallie Ford Museum of Art,” “but those who see the Seattle artist’s retrospective show … in Salem likely won’t soon forget it. Dennis Evans: Apocrypha … is as magnificent and absorbing as the elegantly designed, full-color, hardcover book by arts critic Matthew Kangas that accompanies it. …
“Tellingly, when I sat down with Evans and asked him what he wants visitors to take away from it, he replied: ‘That it’s not a group show!’ He laughed. ‘That it’s one guy, one man’s journey for 50 years.'”
Michelle Ross’s deep and fluent abstract exclamations

Aug. 23: In Michelle Ross’s exhibition at Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Never an Even Folding, “we find a painter so deeply knowledgeable about her materials, so fluent in her techniques, and so assured in her abstract vocabulary that she can challenge herself to new ways of making,” Abby McGehee writes in her essay “Michelle Ross at Elizabeth Leach Gallery.”
“The viewer can chart the artist’s process – or at least guess at it – from thick impasto to thin washes, dribbles to turgid pools, large swaths of color to subtle mark-making,” McGehee adds. “We are simultaneously in the studio at the artist’s side watching her work and in the gallery encountering these panels as landscapes, windows and spaces. … Ross’s conversation with Modernism does not present itself solely as a continuing cultural critique. Like her previous work, these paintings demonstrate her profound engagement with twentieth-century abstraction.”
Anna Martine Whitehead’s irresistible ‘FORCE!’

Sept. 11: On a warm Portland evening outside Portland’s Winningstad Theatre, a silent group of performers lead a few audience members up some steps, “weaving past the singers to a side door of the theater,” Lucy Cotter writes in “TBA Review: Anna Martine Whitehead’s ‘FORCE! an opera in three acts’.”
“We follow our leader up the concrete steps of an interior stairwell, not quite knowing where we are or where we will end up. It is a strange feeling, this unknowing, surrendering to being led without instruction, our immediate future beyond personal control.”
“This opera is told, not from the perspective of prison detainees or from an overarching reflection on the incarceration system as such,” Cotter continues, “but from the perspectives of loved ones in such a waiting room. It is inspired by creator Anna Martine Whitehead’s personal experience of these spaces, which are mostly occupied by Black and Brown women and their children who keep their incarcerated family members and friends ‘alive and surviving’ – a hidden form of community work. On state average, people of Color are incarcerated at six times the rate of the white population.”
From Bend to Eugene to New York, Rick Bartow in triplicate

Sept. 27: The year 2024 was a time in the sun for the late, legendary Oregon artist Rick Bartow, who had exhibits at the High Desert Museum in Bend, Karin Clarke Gallery in Eugene, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. As Ester Barkai writes in “Say hello to Rick Bartow,” Clarke met Bartow in 2008 in his studio in Newport’s Nye Beach area on the Oregon Coast.
“Clarke said that, unlike other artists she knew, Bartow appeared to work on only one piece at a time,” Barkai writes. “Standing in front of the only art in progress in his studio, he relayed a story. She was entirely engrossed in what he was saying when out of the blue he swirled around and made a sweeping mark across the page he was working on.
“’I was so surprised,’ Clarke said, ‘I gasped.’”
A gasp was not an unusual response to the works of Bartow, who was descended from Wyot and European people, and whose art reflected Indigenous animal tales of transformation combined with European modernism.
What is it about Bartow’s art?
“It has it all,” Barkai quotes Clarke, referring to the spectrum of emotion the artist was able to convey. “His work communicates an enormous range of experience: from pain and suffering to humor and whimsy. He was Native American, a Vietnam veteran, and a widower. But even if you weren’t privy to the specifics of his life, his imagery is highly expressive – the range of emotions are all there.”
Randall Tosh: A boy, a deer, and a world of magic

Oct. 18: “A boy stands shocked, captured in the silent wood face to face with a giant buck that has risen from the earth,” Dee Moore writes in “A boy, a deer, and a world of magic.” “They make eye contact and it is as if they inhabit another place and time, a reality superimposed over this one. More than fifty years later that boy still looks out through Randall Tosh’s eyes, seeking and trying to recreate that magical and life defining moment through his art.
“’The deer is kind of my spirit animal and always has been. It actually kind of dates back to when I was a kid,’ Tosh said.”
Discussing an exhibition of his photography on view through Jan. 24, 2025, at Level 2 Gallery in the Salem Convention Center, Moore continues: “Tosh’s subject matter and process are grounded in magical realism and propose that magic is a normal part of everyday life if only the viewer is willing to see past the veil into that aspect of reality. The dreamlike quality of the images, in part a product of Tosh’s printing process, challenges viewers. Are they ready to shed the known for the unknown to step into a world of magic?”
Naoko Fukumaru and the art of embracing imperfection

Oct. 29: “Upon visiting the Portland Japanese Garden two and a half years ago, Naoko Fukumaru knew that it was the perfect place for her first solo show in the United States,” Laurel Reed Pavic writes in “Naoko Fukumaru at the Portland Japanese Garden,” about the Japanese artist’s exhibit Kintsugi: the Restorative Art of Naoko Fukumaru, which remains at the garden through Jan. 27, 2025. “This certainty may seem out of place for another artist, or maybe aspirational for another venue. For Fukumaru, it is just another installment in a hard-won but ultimately serendipitous and inspiring journey.”
Fukumaru works in the art form of kintsugi, the Japanese approach to repair in which breaks or imperfections are highlighted rather than hidden. She turned to the form, Reed Pavic writes, when “she was at an unimaginably low point in her life, staying at a women’s shelter with her two daughters after leaving a domestic violence home situation. … It changed her life. She explains kintsugi philosophy as “embracing imperfection, impermanence, and the incompleteness of life.”
The impact and energy of progressive art studios

Nov. 21: “Progressive art studios – spaces for neurodivergent and disabled artists to create work – are gaining more of a foothold in the artworld,” Hannah Krafcik writes in “Collaboration and community at Living Studios in Corvallis.” “… This fall I drove from my home in Portland toward Corvallis and took a winding side road up to Living Studios—one of two sites, the other is in Salem—in time to chat with artists and facilitators during open studio hours.”
In a world in which disabled and neurodivergent artists are often marginalized and tokenized, Krafcik found “a bustling environment of prolific art-making and inquiry, a place where artists can find support for their own practices as well as opportunities for collective making.”
“Utopia is a myth,” she continued, “but Living Studios’ capacity to both acknowledge and operate within available systems with sensitivity makes for a generative space of change with vibrations outward. The question remains: Will the overall movement to platform the work of artists from progressive art studios beget necessary culture shifts within the dominant culture of the contemporary art world? This remains an open question.”
Thank you for this coverage. Inspiring and unique stories about and from these selected artists.