Kirjahaku

As a sculptor and role model to aspiring young artists, Lee Kelly has played a significant role in creating the Northwest regional art scene. This book documents his sixty year career. His work has traversed the aesthetic developments of gestural abstraction, minimalism, and post-modernism, while his vocabulary has always retained a core focus on the balance and grace of architectural geometry and a craftsman's respect and understanding of the materials at hand. His work is both an art of contemplation and active experience. The text explores Kelly's impact on the art of the Northwest, his public art projects, and places his work in relation to post-World War II American sculpture.

Michael C. Spafford, one of the most respected and admired painters in the Northwest, has created a cohesive body of work of rare intelligence and power. Now professor emeritus at the University of Washington School of Art, he began teaching in 1963 and was an influential and provocative teacher. Spafford remains an active painter who has never shied away from bold, often brutal universal themes. The rigorous physicality and formal invention inherent in his work enhance the viewer's visual understanding as well as the potency of the image.Widely exhibited, awarded, and collected, Spafford is best known for his fascination with myths of origin and heroic endeavor. His paintings, drawings, prints, and murals depict vivid episodes from epic poems and Greco-Roman mythology: "Leda and the Swan," The Iliad and The Odyssey, "The Twelve Labors of Heracles," to mention a few. Many of these narratives were revisited by Spafford over time in different formats in search of a better visual vignette. He strips these well-known narratives to their most emblematic elements, depicting them in a radically abstracted form, which illuminates these stories in a direct and visually affecting way. This book, the first monograph devoted to the artist, seeks to glimpse the breadth of Spafford's explorations.

In Passionate Pursuit: The Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Collection and Legacy is the first comprehensive publication to document the richly diverse collecting activity and profound impact of the cultural patronage of Portland’s most distinguished post-war patrons of the arts and nationally-known art collectors, Arlene and the late Harold Schnitzer. Including painting and sculpture by Northwest masters, international glass works, Native American works, and English and American silver, the book presents singular artworks that form the core of their collecting activity and explores the impact of this deeply philanthropic couple’s activities as collectors, donors, and role models for successive generations in the arts. The curators of the Portland Art Museum will address the quality and impact of the Schnitzer’s collection on the Northwest arts community and the Museum.In Passionate Pursuit accompanies a major exhibition at the Portland Art Museum of the Schnitzer’s richly diverse collection and their promised gift of art to the community, with essays by Museum scholars on the impact of the Schnitzer’s cultural patronage and collecting of Asian, Silver, Glass, Native American, and Northwest Art, an interview with Arlene Schnitzer, and a definitive list of the artists represented in the Schnitzer collection.