Portland Art Museum: There is no art in Oregon!
The Portland Art Museum has just announced the five recipients of its first Contemporary Northwest Art Awards.
The CNAAs, begun this year, are the museum’s replacement for its Oregon Biennial, which collapsed and died under the weight of dull conceptual academicism. It also didn’t represent much of anything about Oregon art. An artist virtually couldn’t get work into the Biennial unless he or she happened to live in Portland and produced slick, anemic, university style postmodern art. It wasn’t an Oregon Biennial. It was a Portland Biennial.
But the CNAAs have made things even worse. Of the five artists selected, four live in Washington.
The fifth, Portlander (surprise!) Marie Watt, says on her website that her approach to art-making “is shaped by the proto-feminism of Iroquois matrilineal custom, political work by Native artists in the 60s, a discourse on multiculturalism, as well as Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art.”
Artist statements like that kind of make the heart beat faster, don’t they?
The other artists are Dan Attoe (who writestext on paintings like so many people did in the 1980s); Cat Clifford, who does (ho-hum) video installations; Jeffry Mitchell, who really likes the color white; and Whiting Tennis, who does quirky sculpture.