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The New Pioneers

Betsy Eby

Isolated in the remote uppermost corner of the United States lies the Pacific Northwest. Now known for technological innovation, entrepreneurism and natural beauty, the region was once abuzz with logging, fishing, agricultural

settlements and gold rushes, a promised land for the independent and pioneering. Determinism, self-reliance and rugged individualism continue to inform the ethos of the region, qualities much unchanged since its early

settlement days.

In 1805, President Thomas Jefferson commissioned the Lewis and Clark expedition to explore the country’s latest land acquisition known as the Louisiana Purchase, a treaty which doubled the size of the United States. Thus began the Western Expansion, lasting from 1801-1861, and the ethos of “Manifest Destiny,” a phrase used to describe the mindset of individual conquest. To move west and claim “free land,” in the mid nineteenth century, was to be a pioneer willing to extirpate oneself from family roots, societal belonging and tradition in pursuit of freedom and opportunity. Prospectors settling the Wild West and taking advantage of its abundant natural resources were part of this mass movement synonymous to patriotism. Often omitted from this storyline is the bloody annexation of western expansionism. Opportunity was rich if you were white and male as the displacement of Native Americans was largely decided by policy makers in DC if not by settler militias.

Captain Meriwether Lewis and Second Lieutenant William Clark achieved notoriety as frontiersmen paving the way for this mass movement west. They mapped passable waterways, trails, mountain ranges and trade routes while

studying native tribes, plants and animals. But their expedition’s success can largely be attributed to the kidnapped and traded Shoshone teenager, Sacagawea (translated as “bird woman”), who, with an infant on her back, served the roughly forty men as communicator, translator and geographic navigator. The explorers calculated that the presence of a woman and child would signal peace to the encountered native tribes. Not only was Sakagawea the crew’s masthead, she also negotiated horse acquisitions, identified edible plants and medicinals, and, through her keen assessment of terrain and the elements, sited their Pacific coast winter encampment at their Oregon terminus. She was vital to their survival in quite inhospitable terrain. Yet, like so many women, Sacagawea is a footnote in history.

The unspoiled Puget Sound, Washington’s Pacific Ocean deep inlet, is described by novelist Annie Dillard as “The rough edge of the world, where the trees came smack down to the stones. The shore looked… as if the corner of

the continent had got torn off right here, sometime near yesterday, and the dark trees kept on growing like nothing happened.”

Inhabited by western civilization roughly 200 years after the thirteen colonies, the West is a relatively young addition to the country. To put it into perspective, the United States’ claim to the Oregon Territory, once stretching from the Pacific

Coast to the Rocky Mountains, was settled in 1846. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City was founded in 1870. The Northern Pacific Railroad completed its direct route from the East to Portland in 1883 and to the Puget

Sound in 1888.

The history of western figure painting does not hold a firm grasp in Northwest art. Representational artists who ventured west were more or less documenting the landscape with surveying expeditions. George Catlin followed the Lewis and Clark trail documenting Indigenous tribes through portraiture, but he only made it as far as the North Dakota and Oklahoma line. Later expeditions would take artists to the more accessible California. Between 1859-1863, landscape painter Albert Bierstadt made a few trips to gather photos and plein air studies of the Rockies, Yosemite and the Columbia River which he would later turn into his large paintings that satisfied American curiosities about the newly found, expansive West. Between 1871-74, Thomas Moran joined expeditions to Yosemite and the Grand Canyon, respectively, from which he produced some of his most sublime landscapes. But the Puget Sound’s climate and terrain proved too difficult a journey, so artists and culture of European influence were slow to arrive there.

This place of wild, majestic natural beauty shares the Pacific Rim with Asia. Chinese and Japanese immigrants were instrumental in the growth of the region that was resource rich but labor short. Another group to migrate to the region

were of Nordic or Scandinavian descent, either coming by way of the Midwest or directly from Northern Europe, as they were attracted to the landscape similar to their native landscape and the opportunities in timber, fishing and boat

building.

What constitutes Pacific Northwest aesthetics in art and design is still largely influenced by this early convergence of heritages. Where the east coast often borrowed from classical, figurative, European traditions grounded in the

Renaissance, the Pacific Northwest overriding aesthetic was long informed by Indigenous Pacific Coast Native American symbolism, totems, basket weaving, and carving, Asian calligraphy, zen placement and rhythmic vitality, and Scandinavian aesthetics of spareness and utility influenced by nature. Although the Northwest land was claimed by white prospectors, and while Christian missionaries managed some conversions, its soul remained, and still remains,

largely steeped in nature based, secular spiritualism carried over from Indigenous animism, and Buddhist, Confuscianist, and Taoist influences from Asia. Today the region values wilderness conservation seemingly still informed by the words of Chief Seattle: “ All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the son of earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it.”

The region’s cloudy, rainy climate doesn’t inspire observations of light on form, but rather an appreciation of silhouetted form, shallow space, diffused edges and restrained palette. It could be argued that this is why European academic

figuration has been slow to trend on these shores. The climate’s gauzy and diffused light informs Pacific Northwest art’s analogous tonalism over the full chroma of traditional European painting, and atmospheric perspective proves

dominant over linear perspective. The region’s affective atmosphere could be easily characterized in an Asian ink landscape painting, with distant mountains backdropping calligraphic trees, all somewhat gestural as obfuscated by coastal mist mitigating detail. Borrowed views of the Olympic and Cascade mountain ranges and bodies of water ultimately feeding the Pacific Ocean inform the regional psychology with an integral holism, a respect for a larger, universal order of which we are an interdependent piece.

Many artists have lived in and been informed by the region. Among them are Robert Motherwell, Marc Rothko, Agnes Martin, Imogen Cunningham, and Thelma Johnson Streat. But the first to bring Northwest Art into the national

conversation was Mark Tobey. He, along with Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan and Guy Anderson, are historically considered the “Northwest Masters.” In 1953, a Life feature would call them the “mystic painters of the Northwest.”

Their notoriety burgeoned around WWII when nature-inspired, universal, spiritual and moral unity was desired, especially among the New York art world and market. In the background of this story are four women vital to bringing some of these artists into the national conversation. Margaret Callahan, a successful journalist, nurtured the group and set the standards, elevating conversation and insisting art be made to communicate higher moral consciousness. Elizabeth Bayley Willis, an educator and artist, left her four children in the care of her mother and moved to New York City to ensure gallery representation and eventual notoriety for Mark Tobey. She would later prove to be a leading authority of art on the West Coast. Dorothy Miller, curator at Museum of Modern Art in New York, recognized Graves’s and Tobey’s oeuvre as the next zeitgeist and included them in two exhibitions. MarianWillard of the Willard Gallery in NYC, who represented Graves and Tobey, saw in their work what the war-torn American psyche needed at the time, the spiritual side of modern humanity through experimental, abstract art forging harmonious understanding beyond ideology or politics. It has been documented that Jackson Pollock, around the advent of his allover drip paintings, frequented Mark Tobey’s Willard Gallery exhibition of his allover White Writing paintings. It has been suggested that it was Tobey who invented the allover style of abstract painting which has historically been credited to Pollock, but the Abstract Expressionist movement of art for art’s sake, devoid of spiritual, political or religious concept, would eventually eclipse the Mystics on the national stage. Decades after the Northwest School, another artist responsible for shaping the direction of Pacific Northwest art was Dale Chihuly who brought glass blowing from Murano Italy to the outskirts of Seattle when he founded the Pilchuck Glass School in the 1970’s. The physical and alchemical aspects of glass blowing led the way for innovative, experimental, process-centered practices in other mediums by artists throughout the region such as the nationally acclaimed forerunners Barbara Earl Thomas and Carrie Mae Weems. The exhibition, Women of the Pacific Northwest, celebrates the voices, visions and material mastery of female artists working today, with roots from this rich and progressive region. Through the execution of disparate media from bronze, steel, glass, tin, plaster, mylar, printmaking, hair nets, cloth, rubber, wax to paint, these artists have achieved inventive, creative practices originating from critical, generative, inquisition of natural, social or subliminal forces. Stitching, sanding,

exposing, cutting, torching, brushing, layering, blowing, weaving and fabricating, the means to the ends are gritty and boundless. The results are works holding a common spirit of aesthesis, invitations into the sensory realm which disarm

preexisting idioms and convictions. It’s through this disarmament that we can see and receive. Their work is non didactic, anything but mansplainery. Like jazz, without lyrics or simple resolutions, to be moved by it, one must move it in equal measure, as with meditation’s prerequisite emptying of the mind. Women have long been communicators, organizers, and makers yet their place in history is incommensurate. This show highlights a group of female artists

working in diverse media creating art that explores connections to place, whether sociological, environmental or spiritual, in a region supportive of equality, ecology and enterprise. Natural, environmental forces inspire Victoria Adams’ sublime vistas, Drie Chapek’s clashing of internal and externals elements, Ann Gardner’s interplay of

transparencies in atmospheric palettes, Emily Gherard’s steely, geometricconstructions, Katy Stone’s reductive installations of shimmering sun rays and waterfalls, while natural, biological elements are at the heart of Jaq Chartier’s

fugitive matter when exposed to natural light, and Susan Zoccola’s sculptures echoing dendrites to galaxies.

Subliminal and spiritual forces are central to the works of Susan Dory’s color juxtapositions of interconnectedness and transcendence, Etsuko Ichikawa’s environmental messages through Zen Buddhist spareness, and Marie Watt’s

poetic suggestions of Indigenous myth and the ties that bind through storytelling and the passing of traditions.

Sociological forces are at play in Brenda Mallory’s translations of systems, and human interactions within those systems, Julie Speidel’s modernist-totemic, anthropologically referenced forms and Lisa Jarrett’s interpretation of socio-structured environments influencing racial identity. The impetus for this exhibition was originally hatched at the height of the MeToo movement. As today’s climate of hyper-polarization and siloed media saturation

can engender feelings of dislocation and alienation, there seems a greater urgency not only to recognize the role artists play in shared experience but the role women specifically play in social cohesion, environmental awareness and

stewardship and the breaking of barriers. These artists are among today’s pioneers, interpreting universality through personal observation and inventing poetic, transcendent works inspiring greater, pluralistic understanding, connecting us to one another and to the world around us.