On a spring day in 2004, I walked around an old neighborhood by Yaquina Bay looking for someone who’d known a man who once rented there. That man was accused (wrongly, it would turn out) of bombing a train in Spain, and my editors wanted me to find someone who knew something about him. Alas, the neighborhood was deserted.  

Then, in a nearby overgrown meadow, I spotted him, weed wacker running full tilt, his ears covered with protective headphones, his back to me. I guessed he knew nothing about an alleged train bomber, but he was all I had. So, I yelled and waved and hopped around until I finally edged my way into his field of vision. Minutes later, I was following artist Rick Bartow to his house, where he introduced me to his wife and toddler, fetched me a glass of lemonade, then ushered me to his studio. I left that day with a catalogue of his work, a not uncommon gesture by the artist known for giving his art away.

This week, I once again stood by Bartow’s studio – stacked now in numbered pieces on a trailer a mile or so from the homestead where I’d met him those 20-plus years ago.

Soon, the wood planks and old paned windows, along with the tree trunks that once shored up the studio foundation, will be reconstructed at the Yakona Nature Preserve & Learning Center, the 450-acre property created by JoAnn and Bill Barton to “restore native coastal forest on Oregon’s Yaquina Bay.” For the Bartons, what will be called the Rick Bartow Art Studio is an opportunity not only to honor Bartow, but also to give the Yakona (the “o” is long) arts program the home base it’s been missing. At present, that home base is a flattish piece of land enhanced with a layer of hemlock bark and dubbed The Vale.  

“When we do an art program and have students, we put up these collapsible canopies, and we drag out tables and chairs, and that’s fine for some things,” JoAnn Barton said. “But I feel we are finally giving our arts program a home. It’s not a shrine and I don’t think Rick would want it to be. We are going to be conducting art education here and that honors his memory far better than building a shrine.”

A Vietnam vet and member of the Mad River Band of the Wiyot Tribe, Bartow died on April 2, 2016, at age 69. He was considered “one of the nation’s most prominent contemporary Native American artists,” according to the Institute of American Indian Arts, and known for his paintings, drawings, and sculptures, often depicting wildlife in moments of spiritual transformation.  

In 2012, Bartow’s pole sculptures, We Were Always Here, were dedicated outside the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington D.C., where they remain today facing the Washington Monument in the traditional welcome of the Native American culture. 

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Bartow’s studio by Yaquina Bay wasn’t much to look at, little more than a shed, the kind assembled with what is on hand – the kind demolished without so much as a backward glance. And that was its fate – until an old friend of Bartow’s drove by.

“He just wanted to poke around and see what was going on,” said Bartow’s nephew, Michael Clark. The new owner of the property happened to be on hand, and Bartow’s friend explained how important the studio was to the community, Clark said. “He told him, ‘This is the spot where Rick created his art,’ and he asked the guy, ‘Would you give it to me?’ The guy said yes.”

Bartow’s studio was saved, but now there was a new problem: What to do with it?   Neither Clark’s family nor their friend had a place to put it, Clark said.

“It’s a personal thing,” Clark said. “I want to save it because I love my uncle, but I also know that’s not why a building like this is going to be saved. It’s going to be saved because Rick was really important in Newport. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, he’s our star.’ Everyone was really proud of his accomplishments, but he was really deeply loved because of who he was.”

So, Clark, a member of the Yakona Board of Directors, turned to Barton. Barton recalled the encounter.

“He said, ‘Rick Bartow was my uncle, and there’s this old art studio he used to work in … it’s slated for demolition and there’s a few of us trying to save it. We were wondering if you would consider moving it to Yakona?’”

“Would I consider it!” Barton said, laughing as she recalled her immediate and emphatic “Yes!”

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Barton knew Bartow largely from his days at Newport’s Café Mundo, where he and his blues/folk-rock band, The Backseat Drivers, were regulars.

“They were so great,” Barton said. “The music their band played just got everyone up dancing and happy. I’ve never seen any band get people up on the dance floor like Rick did. I don’t think Rick gave a damn about fame; I am quite certain he didn’t give a damn about fame. He wore those accomplishments very, very lightly. We remember him more as a fellow community member than an artist, honestly.”

Last week, workers poured the foundation for the studio and began reconstructing it. Barton estimates they’ll be able to use about 80 percent of the materials salvaged from the original – not quite 300 square feet in size – in rebuilding it. The finished studio will be part of Yakona’s HeART Connections, a program that “partners with local artists to offer unique classes that blend creativity with the natural world.” Rena Olson, arts and engagement manager at Yakona, has led classes in eco printing and botanical casting and arranged workshops with local artists, ranging from Sitka spruce medicine-making to nature mandalas to stitching on leaves.

A date for the studio opening is still uncertain, though Barton hopes to see it finished in the fall. But, as she discovered soon after her exuberant and immediate yes to Clark’s request, dismantling and rebuilding a structure doesn’t come cheap. To help with the expenses, Yakona will host two film-festival fundraisers, the first set for June 6 at the Newport Performing Arts Center, and the second June 14 at Lincoln City’s Bijou Theatre.

If the rescue of a humble shed set down a country road might once have seemed a little crazy, that it should end up on this preserve, the ancestral home of the tribe known as the Yaqo’n, and mere miles from the land that was Bartow’s home, now seems as natural a fit as Bartow’s cedar poles on the National Mall.

As I stood at the site of the studio’s new home, I was reminded of my last meeting with Bartow, watching as he and his team put the finishing touches on the poles bound for D.C. Leading me around the chilly rental storefront, Bartow explained the themes that informed his work: the slightly grumpy sun, “because in a lot of the stories the sun and moon were always bickering over who should have control over the sky”; the trickster raven; the eagle, which in native lore, flies closest to the face of the creator; and grandfather bear, the original doctor in Native beliefs, and protector of children.

Bartow called the poles the “cherry on my lifetime cake,” and said, “It’s a lot of magic and a lot of mystery and a whole lot of spirit.” There’s something “fiercely woo-woo” about it. 

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Shortly after I arrived at Yakona this week to see the studio site, a raven flew overhead, followed moments later by the pair of eagles that brought logging to a halt on nearby land after it was determined theirs was an active nest. I heard about the ubiquitous deer and elk and their appetite for the young trees planted to restore Yakona, and I’d seen the note “bear spot” on Olson’s phone map, marking the place she’d encountered a black bear. As I listened to Barton and Olson discuss their vision for the site, I turned to Olson. “Where is the bear spot?” I asked. Olson smiled and pointed to a place just a few yards away. “Right there,” she said.

And I was not surprised, not surprised at all, to learn that the animal Bartow recognized as “grandfather bear,” dispenser of medicine and protector of children, had already paid a visit to the artist’s new space.

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RICK BARTOW FILM FESTIVAL
What: Proceeds from a film festival at two locations will help pay to rebuild Rick Bartow’s studio at the Yakona Nature Preserve & Learning Center.
Where: Newport Performing Arts Center: 6:30 p.m. Friday, June 6, and Bijou Theatre in Lincoln City: 10 a.m. Saturday, June 14
Admission: $25
Films to be shown include: 

• Work is Ceremony: A Ceremony for Julie, by Michelle Hernandez (Wiyot) and Samantha Williams-Gray (Tlingit Nation), explores through dance the love of Bartow and his wife of 12 years, Julie Swan, a musician and basket maker who succumbed to breast cancer in 1999. The film, set in the coastal Wiyot homelands, embraces the joy and melancholy of love and loss. 

• Rick Bartow, The Man Who Made Marks, by Nanette Kelley, is a combination mini-documentary and animated music video. Kelley (Osage Nation/Cherokee Nation) uses music, images, and interviews with friends and colleagues to underscore Bartow’s talent and humor. Bartow’s song Black Dog serves as narration in the artist’s voice. 

• Things You Know But Cannot Explain, by Chantal Jung (Inujuk Nunatsiavutimi) and Michelle Hernandez, is an 11-minute stop-motion animated short. Its title comes from one of Bartow’s early graphite drawings, named after a quote by philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

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