The premise of the new exhibition at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem, Indie Folk: New Art and Sounds from the Pacific Northwest, began formulating in curator Melissa F. Feldman’s mind after the New Yorker moved to the Seattle area in 2012. She noticed the artistic ecosystem and realized: Things look different here.

The word “indie” is key. It was first used, she notes, to refer to independent record labels, which Seattle knows something about. Sufficiently removed from New York and Los Angeles, artists in the Pacific Northwest’s largest city blended sounds old and new, birthing a musical aesthetic particular to that place.

An art historian who has traveled extensively and lived all over, Feldman realized this dynamic also was true of visual art in the region. While acknowledging that no art scene is monolithic, she maintains the Northwest has a “look” — one that uses tools and draws on traditions associated with hand-making and craft to explore the here and now. At the same time, eclectic visual vocabularies used by these artists draw from the wellspring of the past — pre-colonial Indigenous cultures, religion, literature, and artistic trends such as Surrealism and Expressionism.

“Indie folk,” she writes in the exhibition booklet, which is available online, “is the product of an ongoing rethinking of the boundaries between fine art and craft, aesthetics and functionality, and the academically-trained versus the self-taught artists.” It should be noted that the latter — artists who didn’t learn their stuff at an art school — are taken seriously at the Hallie Ford. Last summer, the museum mounted a marvelous exhibition of this work in the print gallery.

Indie Folk opened this fall and runs through Dec. 21 in the museum’s largest space, the Melvin Henderson-Rubio Gallery. It gathers about 50 pieces in a variety of media by 17 regional artists: Brian Beck, Marita Dingus, Warren Dykeman, Andrea Joyce Heimer, Sky Hopinka, Denzil Hurley, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Jeffry Mitchell, Blair Saxon-Hill, Vince Skelly, Cappy Thompson, Joey Veltkamp, Mary Welcome, Whiting Tennis, D.E. May, Joe Feddersen, and Gaylen Hansen. “I talked to all the artists,” Feldman said, “to see if they were comfortable with their work in this context, and they were.”

Staying true to the original meaning of “indie,” the exhibition also features a playlist selected by Portland’s Mississippi Records. Those songs by Northwest musicians playing through the gallery are providing “the laid-back atmosphere of a front porch and, like the art, offering a fresh take on folk traditions,” according to the show notes.

At the opening reception, Feldman offered her take on what she was seeing when she started visiting galleries in Seattle and Portland 12 years ago.

“I was noticing a dominant sensibility here that was different from what I had seen in other places,” she said. “These artists are not quilting or making ceramics in any traditional sense. They’re interested in traditional craft, but they’re taking that information and those techniques and materials and making work that’s about life right now, so they’re not traditionalists in that sense.”

There’s a strong DIY aesthetic in indie folk as Feldman sees it, particularly in the use of found objects and repurposed materials — making do with whatever is on hand, and then working on it by hand.

This is true of a dozen or so pieces made by several artists, including Blair Saxon-Hill, who was born in Eugene in 1979 and now lives in California. Her two collage sculptures illustrate the constellation of influences embodied by the indie aesthetic.

Both use found objects. Wholly Is Half Manner comprises two separate pieces: a stick with a hand on the top end, pointing toward a figure seated as if facing away, but with a head swiveled back to look at it. The piece incorporates wood, ribbon, a basket (or a piece of one), a glove, chewed straw, fiber-reinforced plaster, and badminton equipment.

Saxon-Hill’s DIY aesthetic extends to the paint itself, which was made from a formula she developed over the years and is used to disguise where one element in a piece connects with another.

“I use a thick, water-based medium that has a slight gray-green base color,” the artist says in the show notes. “The color gives the works a kind of dull gritty patina — like the moss that covers most surfaces in Portland and reflects my affinity for the old.”

Those affinities are based in part on a knowledge of art history learned in school. Saxon-Hill studied art at Reed College in Portland, and in a 2022 interview with Bomb magazine, the artist acknowledges that Surrealism and Dada “heavily influenced” her. “As a queer feral responder to this world, collage and assemblage lend themselves well to my aim of upholding the broken,” she said. “Thinking with scissors has its own urgent resonance: it implies the body in a process of reshaping a preexisting whole.”

In the spirit of reshaping, one finds the exhibition’s largest and smallest pieces also incorporating found materials, from the ladder and canvas used by Portland’s Jessica Jackson Hutchins for Mourner, which commands the center of the gallery’s atrium space, to the little pieces of cardboard, wood scrap, and vintage paper that the late Oregon artist D.E. May used in pieces included in this show — three on the wall, and six in a glass case.

“There is a sense that May would have liked to make useful things with these useful, if timeworn, materials,” Feldman writes in the show notes. “The geometric drawings look technical, while the sculptures could pass for architectural models. The postcard pieces come close to functionality in that each was actually put in the mail and sent to the addressee.”

May, a lifelong resident of Salem who died from cancer in 2019, is one of four artists in the show who have had their own exhibitions at the Hallie Ford: Hansen in 2003 and Tennis 10 years ago, while Feddersen was featured in shows in 2003 and 2010. May made the earliest appearance, in 2000, and for those wanting a bigger dose of him, he’s among the artists whose work is the subject of books and exhibition catalogs Feldman has collected for in-gallery reading — chairs are even provided. Discovering an interview with May in George Baker’s slim volume Dive Bar Architect: On the Work of D.E. May, I briefly lost track of time — the best kind of reading. 

Two artists whose work prominently features found materials include Seattle’s Marita Dingus, whose sculptures with waste were considered revolutionary when she started some 40 years ago. The pieces here include several baskets, and her work is a hybrid of African-American traditions, feminism, and ecological activism.

And while “found objects” might not immediately come to mind looking at sculpted furniture by Portland artist Vince Skelly, each is carved from a single block of wood, including white oak, maple, and redwood.

The balance of the exhibition includes paintings, fabric work, prints, glass, ceramics, and photography — too many to break down here. There’s also a short film, Jáaji Approx., a 2015 documentary by Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians), that is a poetic meditation on “cultural displacement and hybridity within contemporary Indigenous experience.”

Pieces of Americana and/or nods to regional iconography may be found throughout the show. The self-taught Montana-born artist Andrea Joyce Heimer has a spectacular and elaborately detailed acrylic and oil painting with a title that says it all: Driving Through Yellowstone During Buffalo Calving Season We Would Strain to Catch a Glimpse of the Small Chocolatey Calves Fighting Out of Their Mothers Beneath the Hard Montana Sun.

Meanwhile, a large fabric hanging by Joey Veltkamp, Blue Angels, is dominated by the imagery of American flags, with the famed fighter jets represented by five streaks of white overhead. The label for the piece includes an amusing email exchange between Feldman and the artist. She told him the “weird patriotism” of the event seemed “out of character for the Pacific Northwest.” Veltkamp agreed. “Technically, I call this piece Fuck the Blue Angels!,” he replied. “But since my son loves the Blue Angels so dang much, I just called it Blue Angels. I couldn’t hate them more. All the weird nationalism and flag waving and noise and violence. Gross.”

Elsewhere in the gallery, another fabric piece by Veltkamp, Bellevue Exit (520), looks like a road sign referring to the bridge that connects Seattle to Bellevue.  

Finally, there’s a selection of photos from Mary Welcome’s God Bless the USPS, part of an ongoing project to document all 31,000 post offices in the lower 48 states.

Indie Folk has been making the rounds on the West Coast. Organized by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Washington State University, it has since appeared at the Bellevue Arts Museum, the Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland, and the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco.

You can find it at the Hallie Ford in Salem on the Willamette University campus for four more weeks. A free, docent-led gallery talk will be at 12:30 p.m. Dec. 3. For info about hours, parking, admission, and more, visit the website.

On your way to Indie Folk through the Hallie Ford’s lobby, take a moment to check out the ceramics on your left. This is another exhibition, albeit small: Becoming Peter Voulkos: Works from the 1950s showcases a dozen works by famed ceramicist Voulkos, one of the postwar artists who blazed new trails with avant-garde work that “broke the wall that separated craft and fine art,” according to the notes.

The exhibition marks the first time the Hallie Ford has curated a show entirely from the collection that was once in the hands of Portland’s Museum of Contemporary Craft (MoCC). When that museum closed in 2016, its collection went to the Pacific Northwest College of Art, which merged with Willamette University in 2021. That added nearly 1,300 modern and contemporary pieces by artists of both regional and international renown to the Hallie Ford’s already large collection.

“Voulkos seemed like the perfect artist to begin exploring the MoCC collection,” said exhibition curator Jonathan Bucci says in the show notes. “He had an early and influential relationship with the Oregon Ceramic Studio — a precursor to the MoCC — in the 1950s. Voulkos played a pivotal role in breaking down the barriers between traditional craft and contemporary art and the Hallie Ford Museum of Art is thrilled to share these rarely-seen early works with the public.”

Virtually all the pieces in the show focus on the artist’s formative period in the 1950s when he made a name for himself as a master of wheel-thrown functional stoneware. But the last one — the only one not under glass — exemplifies his revolutionary shift which pushed ceramics into a daring new direction. This show also runs through Dec. 21.