Shaping the Collection: 50 Years of Pacific Northwest Sculpture at the JSMA

This installation highlights artists, donors, and collecting interests that have contributed to the museum’s holdings of Pacific Northwest sculpture over the past fifty years. Among the works on view are selections from the Virginia Haseltine Collection of Pacific Northwest art, gifts from artists, works acquired with the assistance of The Ford Family Foundation through a special grant program managed by the Oregon Arts Commission, and new purchases. These examples suggest the variety of materials and artistic practices explored in Oregon and Washington since the mid-twentieth century. Founded as a museum of Asian art, the University of Oregon Museum of Art (now the JSMA) held no examples of sculpture from our own region for its first thirty years. It wasn’t until the 1960s, with a gift of works from collector and arts advocate Virginia Haseltine, that the museum began to focus on collecting works from what Haseltine called “this time and place.”

A common thread in this exhibition is experimentation, with an emphasis on the fluidity between artistic disciplines. Robert Sperry (1927-98) painted in the style of the Abstract Expressionists before embarking on an innovative career in ceramics. The bold three-dimensional forms of Mel Katz (born 1932), fabricated in steel, Formica, or other industrial materials, bring his line drawings into real space. Reinterpretations of the human figure and natural world are also present. For former UO professor Jan Zach (1914-86), the human condition, the female form, and plant life and natural phenomena inspired expressive wood and metal creations. Christine Bourdette (born 1952), whose early paintings engaged spatial concepts,  playfully abstracts or simplifies the human figure as a tool for political exploration and philosophical meditation in her sculptures and installations. The twenty-five artists represented in this exhibition reflect only a small cross-section of the JSMA’s collection of regional sculpture, but a gathering of their works pays homage to the legacy of Haseltine’s vision. All are considered artists of the Pacific Northwest due to their individual contributions to the regional arts ecology and their personal and professional ties to the area. Many spent significant portions of their lives here, but their biographies (available for review in the binder in this gallery) reflect their diverse backgrounds, educations, and lasting impacts in and beyond the region.