The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Portland State University is pleased to present a series of online exhibitions and virtual content. Though our physical space closed on March 13, 2020 to help stem the spread of the COVID-19 virus, we are joining the worldwide effort to bring you #museumfromhome exhibits and artist talks.

On view in our virtual gallery are local artists Daniel Duford and Arvie Smith. Curated by Interim Director Linda Tesner, these exhibitions are woven together by themes of racism, oppression, and social justice. We welcome you to browse and contemplate these works. You can also submit questions for the artists for the next installment in this series, a virtual artist talk.

As always, we deeply appreciate your support of the JSMA@PSU. We are an emergent institution and we look forward to discovering new ways in which to contribute to Oregon’s art ecology. We hold fast to the idea that, in days such as these, art is even more important than ever.

Arvie Smith: 2 Up and 2 Back II is the second of a two-part project to present a retrospective focused on the oeuvre of this elder statesman of Oregon’s art community. (2 Up and 2 Back I was on view at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center from December 7, 2019 – February 2, 2020.) The second part of this examination presents Smith’s earlier work, from 1988-2015.

Arvie Smith takes messages from public discourse, advertising, news media, pop culture, film, and daily micro-assaults on marginalized groups to deliver powerful images. His paintings reveal the normalized and seemingly accepted inequities born of privilege that are designed to interfere with truth, advancement, and release from the chains of a dominant hierarchy based on skin color. Smith’s work is about race and identity, inequity, justice, perseverance and, ultimately, the resilience of the human spirit.

“I intend to expose narratives designed to interfere with truth, advancement, and a release from the chains that have given rise to an unjust dominance hierarchy and reveal the power, resilience, and beauty of those who are forced to carry the resulting burden,” says Smith.

Smith is a professor emeritus at Pacific Northwest College of Art where he taught painting and drawing for over twenty years. He also taught at Maryland Institute College of Art and was a visiting professor at the University of Oregon and Oregon College of Art and Craft. He received his MFA from the Hoffberger School of Painting where he was a teaching assistant to Grace Hartigan. He received an honorary PhD from Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2018. In 2017 he was awarded the Oregon Governor’s Arts Award for lifetime achievement. His work can be found in major African American art collections in New Jersey, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Atlanta. The Portland Art Museum exhibited his work in the APEX Gallery in 2016.

Arvie Smith: 2 Up 2 Back II is accompanied by a fully-illustrated exhibition catalogue, funded by The Ford Family Foundation.

For the past twenty years, Daniel Duford has woven visual narratives, stories that flow through large paintings, graphic novels, and figurative sculpture. Daniel Duford: John Brown’s Vision on the Scaffold is based on the radical abolitionist John Brown. The project was conceived during a 2017 residency at the Ground Beneath Us in Waterford, Virginia when Duford visited Harpers Ferry, the site of Brown’s raid on the federal armory. This exhibition focuses on mythology and storytelling in narrative figure painting with John Brown as the central figure.

Duford writes, “On December 2, 1859, radical abolitionist John Brown stood on the scaffold awaiting the drop of the gallows floor. He was sentenced to hang in Virginia because a month and a half earlier he and a mixed-race group of radical abolitionists took over the federal armory in Harpers Ferry with the aim of creating an insurrection that would end the Slave Power.

He stood for a full ten minutes with the hood over his head and the noose around his neck. He waited patiently as the military gathered information to witness his execution. He had already issued this final statement: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.” The work in this show expands from that ten minutes spanning the deep past into our present.

As Duford witnesses the dire circumstances of American politics, the analogy to John Brown’s ideology and activism have piqued a series of paintings based on portraits of John Brown and his contemporaries. The subjects are presented in anachronistic settings as if they were sitters in Duford’s studio. Concurrently, the landscape behind and around the sitters is an essential “character” in Duford’s narrative. Duford looks at the story through “tree-time” – the slow perception of trees. Tree time allows connective tissue to reach over centuries indicating the passage of time and the cyclical nature of history.

Duford is a Hallie Ford Fellow (2010), the recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship (2019) and a recipient of a 2012 Art Matters Grant. His work has been shown nationally including the Orange County Museum of Art, MASS MoCA, The Atlanta Center for Contemporary Art and The Boise Art Museum. Residencies include The MacDowell Colony and Crow's Shadow Art Center. He has taught at Reed College, Portland Community College: Rock Creek and Pacific Northwest College of Art. He is co-founder of Ground Beneath Us a place-based institute and artist fellowship located in Virginia and Oregon. Ground Beneath Us weaves visual narrative with social justice issues to mine the stories of place and site.

Daniel Duford: John Brown's Vision from the Scaffold is accompanied by a series of essays by Duford.

SUBMIT YOUR QUESTIONS FOR ARVIE SMITH AND DANIEL DUFORD