The work of Northwest artist Morris Graves has been described as permeated with a "sense of consciousness in transformation." Graves was a passionate observer of the natural world whose work is characterized by the unification of reality and symbol. In his paintings his selective eye is fused with his mind's spiritual vision.

Graves' painting in the MacNider's permanent collection, Resting Goat, features a golden goat with highlights of turquoise and green. The animal is suspended in a circular form against a distant background of dark mountains. Is the form a shroud? A womb? The circle of life? Graves gives the viewer few clues in the title, simply saying it is at rest. The Museum's collection includes another Graves work, Snake and Moon, a tempera on rice paper work of 1937. Like Resting Goat, it is an image infused with Graves' unique vision of the natural and mystical world.

Morris Graves was introduced to the American public in 1942, when at the age of only 31, New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibited his work in a group show and bought an astonishing 11 of his paintings for their permanent collection. This was an unprecedented splurge for the work of an unknown artist.

Though self-taught and living in isolation at his studio, "The Rock" on Fidalgo Island in Puget Sound, Graves was anything but provincial. He dropped out of high school to work on American Mail Line ships sailing across the Pacific, falling in love with Japan and the spare Japanese aesthetic. At his aunt's urging, he finished high school at the age of 22 in the oil town of Beaumont, Texas and then returned to Washington. When he left "The Rock" to spend time in Seattle he gained minor notoriety for outrageous pranks and some of the first Northwest art "Happenings," though the word for these performance events lay in the future. In the 50s and 60s, he spent a decade living in Ireland developing a body of sculpture based on his observations of the night sky. His commitment to his craft was such that he once flew to Kyoto to secure a specific rare and fragile paper he needed for his work.

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Beatrice Wood, Stormy Lustre Round Vase, 1985, Luke C. Chang Memorial Endowment .

Known as much for her role as a Dada movement collaborator and friend of Marcel Duchamp as a ceramist, Beatrice Wood began throwing pots in mid-life.  Wood was interested in the arts from an early age; against the wishes of her socialite parents she pursued a career in theater and spent time studying art at the Academie Julian in Paris.  Later, when she could not find a teapot to match luster-glaze dishes she had purchased in Holland, she enrolled in a pottery class at the local high school in Hollywood and realized how much she had to learn. She researched the luster-glaze process, the reaction of metallic salts in reduction firing which decreases the amount of oxygen in the kiln, at a local library.  The process is unpredictable, and while Wood did not invent it, she created a unique color palette in an extraordinary range of colors. Until the age of 103, she worked every day at the potter's wheel in her Ojai California studio.

Though Wood could throw very well, her work often appears somewhat crude.  Besides the development of luster glazes, she is also known for her playful figurative pieces that she called her “sophisticated primitives”.  This is an apt description of all her pottery, that more often than not rejects delicacy and symmetry for something more robust and rough-hewn.    Wood’s vase in the MacNider ceramics collection reflects this lack of technical perfection with a slightly lopsided form, but brilliant blue/purple/magenta iridescent luster glaze sheen.

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Romanian–born Costel Iarca creates expressionistic and abstract works using an unusual medium: latex caulk. Discovered by accident, the process involves layering or squeezing latex caulk onto the canvas to simulate fabric or other materials. Acrylic paint is then applied over each layer. Iarca has patented this unusual process that gives his canvases three-dimensional depth and definition.

Iarca was born in a Romanian village while the country was under Communist control and began painting seriously at the age of thirteen. He pursued formal education in art at the School of Popular Art in Targoviste and later studied theology. Developing his talent in a controlled, restrictive environment, he has an intense regard for freedom of artistic expression and remembers vividly the days when a person couldn’t speak freely because a neighbor might be an agent of the secret police. During his formative years he experienced beatings by the police for his political beliefs.  A sense of liberty, spirituality and experimentation characterizes Iarca’s work. He considers Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollack and Jean-Michel Basquiat to be modern masters and especially admires Picasso. Iarca received political asylum in the United States in 1994 and has since become a citizen of his adopted country.

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Philip Evergood, Aftermath, circa 1942, Oil, Museum Purchase

Midwesterners familiar with the havoc that natural elements can wreak across the prairie can relate to the subject matter of Philip Evergood's Aftermath in the MacNider’s permanent collection.  Against a backdrop of a mangled picket fence, a man reaches out to a weeping woman.  They are surrounded by four crying children who hold onto them or stare blankly into the distance as they clutch their dolls.  Closer examination reveals a twisted bed frame, stovetop, dresser drawer and other scattered family belongings.  

Evergood has been called an expressionist, a social realist and a surrealist, and to some extent, all three labels are appropriate.  His work in the 1930’s emphasized social causes and is marked by strong elements of fantasy and the bizarre.  He cited his influences as El Greco, Bosch, Breugel, Goya, Toulouse-Latrec, John Sloan’s Ashcan paintings, and even prehistoric cave art.  The elongated bodies of the figures in his paintings recall the work of El Greco.

Born in New York to a Polish Jewish artist father and a wealthy English mother, Evergood was sent to boarding school in England at the age of 8.  He graduated from Eton and entered Cambridge University but left when he realized his true passion was art. He studied at the Slade School in London and later in Paris and New York.  During the Depression Evergood painted huge murals under the sponsorship of the Federal Arts Project. 

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The exhibition of new works in the MacNider Museum’s permanent collection features the color lithograph Horse Sense by artist, curator, political activist and educator, Jaune Quick-to See Smith.  

Quick-to-See Smith was born on the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Reservation in Montana.  Descended from French, Cree and Shosoni ancestors, her early life was often difficult.  Her father was an accomplished horse trainer and trader, but his work meant she moved frequently. When he was not able to care for her, she lived in foster homes and often experienced discrimination in the schools as a Native person.   School however, was the place where she was first introduced to art materials and fell in love with making art. 

Throughout her career, Quick-to-See Smith has worked in many media and today is an internationally known painter and printmaker.  She is sensitive to the effects of text on images and especially skilled at creating and appropriating texts that capture the paradigms of American culture and open up their meanings. She makes complex juxtapositions that recontextualize the way viewers understand not only relationships between Euro-American and Native culture, but how she, as an artist living in both those worlds, views those issues.   Her works are thoughtful and thought provoking and can raise questions that explode stereotypes and myths about indigenous people. 

Horse Sense is packed full with these juxtapositions of loaded images and text.  We invite you to visit soon and explore the message(s) of its layered and nuanced imagery.

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