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About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 17, 2019)
VISUAL ARTS BY B O B K E E F E R A RETURN TO BEAUTY New show at Schnitzer Museum highlights Oregon painters who came of age before art became arid S omewhere in the late 20th century, art in America went through a cosmic shift: “Beauty” became a dirty word. In the 1950s, a middlebrow, slightly romanticized version of modernism dominated mainstream American culture. Writers like John Steinbeck, composers like Leonard Bernstein and painters like Jackson Pollock produced works that were infused with beauty and hope and spoke to ordinary people. All that came to an end as the century closed out and those artistic hopes and dreams crashed into the cynicism and irony of postmodernism, with its emphasis on conceptual works and roots in critical theory. Beauty was out. Ideas were in. Catching the last gasp of the middlebrow culture that once thrived here is one of the premises behind Visual Magic: An Oregon Invitational, a new show that opens with a reception from 7 to 8 pm Jan. 18 and runs through May 12 at the University of Oregon’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. The exhibit looks at work from 45 living painters who began or expanded their artistic careers in Oregon in the 1960s and ’70s. A collaboration with the George D. Green Art Institute, the exhibit grows out of a smaller show mounted by the institute under a similar name, Visual Magic: Hand Made Pictures, at the Northwest Academy in Portland in 2015, says Danielle Knapp, the Schnitzer’s McCosh associate curator. A catalog statement Knapp wrote for the earlier show might apply equally to the new exhibit. “The works included in Visual Magic are MUSIC LUCINDA PARKER’S ‘RETREATING ICE’ beautiful,” she said. “They transfix. Bewilder. Delight. More importantly they are original manifestations of deeply realized personal visions. In some instances, they are unlike anything ever seen before.” Included in the Schnitzer exhibit, which is to be mounted in the museum’s large Barker Gallery, is work by such familiar local artists as Jon Jay Cruson, Margaret Coe, Kacey Joyce, Craig Cheshire and Kenneth O’Connell, as well as regional art stars like James Lavadour and Lucinda Parker. That doesn’t mean you should expect to see nothing but traditional painting. Portland artist Robert Dozono, for example, makes his large landscape paintings included in Visual Magic by gluing the garbage he produces in day-to-day life to canvases and then painting over it. Stand close and you see a collage of used toothpaste tubes and other plastic detritus; back up and you see a river scene. “I think we don’t respect or take enough responsibility for our natural environment. In this age and our economy, it is almost impossible not to waste. I almost wish that we could return to a time where no one wasted and reused everything,” Dozono once explained in an artist statement. Having come of age a half-century ago, the artists in this show are not youngsters. Two — Edwin Koch and Janet Reaves — have died since the roster was selected. The oldest is Portland painter, printmaker and ceramicist George Johanson, who was born in 1928. “By the 1960s he’d already been to New York and come back,” Knapp says. ■ BY B R E T T C A M P B E L L RECOVERING ARMENIA’S PAST THROUGH MUSIC Portland's Cappella Romana return to Eugene for free concert C appella Romana is one of Oregon’s most famous classical music institutions. Founded in 1991, the Portland-based professional vocal ensemble has gone on to become the premier exponent and ex- plorer of the musical traditions of Byzantium and other early Christian music. Artistic director Alexander Lingas is one of the field’s leading scholars. He and other researchers have found and revived a long-dormant repertoire, which the group sings in its original Byzantine and Slavic languages. And Cap- pella has performed music of contemporary European and North American composers who draw on those traditions. Although it’s based in Portland and performs several concerts each year there and in Seattle, the group draws singers from around the country, including the Bay Area, and has performed in Europe, Los Angeles, New York City, Canada and elsewhere, appearing on National Pub- lic Radio, various early music festivals and even at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Cappella earns glowing reviews wherever it sings, se- curing its reputations as one of the Northwest’s most ac- complished musical institutions. Recently, the group has branched out into other Ortho- dox Christian music descended from Byzantine origins, in- cluding Russian, Finnish, Ukrainian and more. You’re un- likely to hear any of this music performed anywhere else. Now the Oregon Humanities Center is bringing Cap- pella Romana to Eugene to share its latest discovery: long- lost Armenian Orthodox liturgical music. On Thursday, Jan. 17, in a free concert directed by Lin- gas and Haig Utidjian, a British conductor of Armenian descent, Cappella will sing traditional Armenian chants and later arrangements of them by 19th-century Armenian choirmaster Makar Ekmalian and his student, Komitas Vardapet, known as the savior of Armenian music. Vardapat collected and transcribed thousands of works that would have otherwise been lost to history, including about the Armenian genocide perpetrated by Turks in the early 20th century. The 8 pm concert is at Central Lutheran Church. It’s a chance to experience a lost world through music. ■ eugeneweekly.com • January 17, 2019 21
