James Lavadour: Land of Origin

James Lavadour: Land of Origin presents the most comprehensive survey to date of works by painter and printmaker James Lavadour (Walla Walla). Spanning five decades of work, this national retrospective celebrates Lavadour’s deep connection to the eastern Oregon landscape, particularly the Umatilla Indian Reservation and surrounding Blue Mountains region where the artist has spent most of his life, and recognizes his esteemed place in contemporary American painting. The exhibition includes nearly thirty of Lavadour’s magnificent signature grid paintings, works on individual panels, and prints, most of which have never been exhibited together. It will draw on significant loans from the artist, major museum collections, and private lenders. Recognizing one of Oregon and the nation’s most original and powerful artists, James Lavadour: Land of Origin will also be accompanied by a full catalogue.

Lavadour’s artmaking expresses the vitality of the land and sky observed on his daily sunrise drives and walks on the Umatilla homelands – a practice he continues to this day before going into the studio to work. Mirroring the dynamic physical forces at play in nature, his painting makes visible the extraordinary events and elemental power of the land and sky, but is never a literal representation of it. He typically works on as many as fifty panels at once, eventually composing selections into harmonious grids. Through brushing, pouring, scraping, and dripping oil paints, Lavadour enacts a physical transformation akin to natural phenomena and shifting geological forces: a transfiguration of energy from one state into another. He will often spend years reworking compositions or repurpose an earlier work into a new arrangement.

Lavadour has been a full-time artist since the 1980s. Self-trained, he achieved his first museum exhibition in 1990. Throughout the following decade, as Lavadour expanded his palette beyond dark and fiery earth tones, he explored new configurations of panels and moved away from his earlier skeleton imagery. Lavadour experienced a burst of productivity in the 2000s, energized by what he described as intersections between organic landscapes and architectural abstractions. Over the next twenty years, as his artistic vision and command of color matured, his national and international profile expanded; notably, Lavadour was included in the group exhibition Personal Structures during the 55th Venice Biennale (2013) and was awarded a Hallie Ford Fellowship in the Visual Arts (2019), among other honors.  His most recent paintings are spectacularly bold and luminous, physical manifestations of the artist’s statement “the land and I are one.”

Lavadour is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. Throughout his career, he has been guided by a strong personal conviction that artists can serve their communities. In 1992, he co-founded the Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts on the Umatilla Indian Reservation near Pendleton, Oregon and served on its Board for over thirty years. This nonprofit center provides world-class printmaking facilities for visiting artists and offers training in traditional Indigenous artforms. Lavadour began his own work in printmaking in the 1990s as a means to explore layering and to deconstruct the ways in which he organizes visual information in his paintings. Etchings and lithographs included in James Lavadour: Land of Origin range from early work produced at printmaking residencies to his most recent editions published by Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts.  

The exhibition catalogue for James Lavadour: Land of Origin includes essays by exhibition curator and JSMA McCosh Curator Danielle Knapp and guest writers Meagan Atiyeh, Rebecca Dobkins, and Marie Watt; an interview with Lavadour and JSMA Executive Director John Weber; a fully illustrated checklist with additional images of representative works; and a comprehensive artist’s CV.