Author's Entries

• Albert Patecky (1906-1994)

  Albert Patecky was a Portland painter and printmaker who created works on both sides of the divide that separated traditional and modern artists in the mid-twentieth century Pacific Northwest. Adept at conventional landscapes and marines, he also created works of extreme abstraction and was thus a pioneer of totally nonrepresentational …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Alexander Phimister Proctor (1860-1950)

  Alexander Phimister Proctor, an American sculptor known for monumental bronzes of animals and human figures, placed six major works in Oregon private collections and public places between 1911 and 1932. These remain on view in Salem, Eugene, and Pendleton, as well as in Portland, where, he asserted, …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Amanda Snyder (1894-1980)

  Amanda Tester Snyder is known for her paintings of birds, clowns, dolls, still life, houses, and barns as well as for her abstract compositions. Her works—which combine strong forms, vigorous brushwork, and rich color—align her with other early modern painters in Oregon, including her friends C.S. Price and Charles Heaney …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Barbara McLarty (1919-)

  Barbara McLarty, a Portland gallerist, arts advocate, and publisher and editor of art books, was an active agent on the Oregon art scene for more than half a century. The wife of painter and printmaker Jack McLarty, she was an ardent promoter of his work. In turn, he often …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Carl Hall (1921-1996)

  Carl Hall was a Salem artist known for his paintings of the Willamette Valley, the Oregon coast, the female nude, and imagery inspired by the Northwest Coast Native culture he encountered on his trips to Alaska. Working in Oregon for fifty years, he created a large body of work …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Charles Edward Heaney (1897-1981)

  Charles Heaney was a printmaker and painter in Oregon for nearly sixty years. He lived most of his life in Portland, but he based his art on his perceptions of nearly every region in the state. Known for his prints and paintings of the Oregon interior and Nevada, he …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Constance Fowler (1907-1996)

  Constance Fowler was a painter, printmaker, author, and educator during a career that spanned more than sixty years. Best known for the expressive realism of her wood engravings and oil paintings produced in the 1930s and 1940s in Oregon, she later worked in personal variations of abstract movements that dominated …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Cutler City

  Cutler City, the southernmost neighborhood of Lincoln City on the Oregon coast, was established in the early twentieth century as an independent townsite on land previously owned by Charley DePoe, a Siletz Indian. It comprises 393 tax lots on some 178 acres on the southeast edge of Siletz Bay between …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• George Johanson (1928-2022)

  George Johanson was a Portland painter and printmaker known for his images of the erupting Mount St. Helens, panoramic Portland as imagined from his home near the Vista Bridge, boaters and loafers along the banks of the Willamette River, and cats and rabbits intercepting human life. Drawing on …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Hallie Brown Ford (1905-2007)

  Hallie Brown Ford was a philanthropist who gave millions to support the arts at institutions in Oregon and Oklahoma and established scholarships through a foundation, now known as the Ford Family Foundation, that she and her husband created in 1957. Her gift of $15 million to the Pacific Northwest College …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Henk Pander (1937-2023)

  The Dutch artist Henk Pander arrived in Portland in 1965 and, except for brief periods, lived there for the rest of his life, creating works that challenge status quo modern art of the Pacific Northwest. In his drawings, watercolors, and oil paintings, Pander depicted subjects ranging from the death of …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Jan Zach (1914–1986)

  Sculptor Jan Zach, who joined the faculty of the University of Oregon in 1958, had an international reputation. He worked in a variety of media to create sculptures that celebrate courage and freedom in the face of oppression, a life-long concern of Zach's that was rooted in his opposition to …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Louis Bunce (1907-1983)

  Louis Bunce, a major painter and printmaker beginning in the 1930s, is considered a legend in Oregon modernism. Known for variations of Surrealism and Cubism in the 1930s and 1940s, nature-based adaptations of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s and 1960s, and geometric compositions related to Minimalism in the 1970s, he …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Manuel Izquierdo (1925 - 2009)

  Manuel Izquierdo, who arrived in Portland in 1942 as a teenaged refugee from wartime Europe, established himself as a major Oregon sculptor and printmaker in a career spanning six decades. Particularly noted for his welded metal forms, he also created sculpture in cast metal, wood, stone, and ceramic. As a …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Mark Sponenburgh (1918-2012)

  Mark Sponenburgh was an Oregon sculptor, art historian, educator, art collector, and philanthropist who traveled widely, living for extended periods in Egypt, England, France, and Pakistan. He taught at the University of Oregon and Oregon State University, founded the Northwest Institute of Sculpture in 1955, and in 1992 with …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Myra Albert Wiggins (1869-1956)

  Myra Albert Wiggins was a painter and photographer who gained recognition when she was named to Alfred Stieglitz's famed Photo-Secession, an elite group of American and European photographers dedicated to establishing photography as a fine art. Wiggins's carefully staged photographic vignettes, which resembled Dutch genre paintings, received favorable comment in …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Nelson Sandgren (1917-2006)

  Nelson Sandgren was a painter and printmaker who taught at Oregon State University for thirty-eight years, from 1948 until 1986. He exhibited his work in Oregon, Washington, and California while participating in a mid-century Willamette Valley cultural scene that included his faculty colleagues and others in a variety of creative …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Portland Art Museum

  The Portland Art Museum, which opened in 1895 in the city library with casts of classical sculptures and prints of European paintings, is a nationally respected mid-size museum with a collection of some 42,000 original artworks representing a wide range of cultures and media. Since 1932, it has been located …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Ruth Dennis Grover (1912-2003)

  Ruth Grover was an artist and arts educator who in the course of her sixty-year career promoted the development of the art scene on the Oregon coast. A skilled watercolorist known for her depictions of ocean beaches and coastal vernacular architecture, she later turned to the wax-based medium of encaustic …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• William Givler (1908-2000)

  William Givler was an artist and educator who joined the faculty of the Museum Art School (now Pacific Northwest College of Art) in Portland in 1931 and as dean from 1944 until his retirement in 1973 helped the school become an accredited, degree-granting institution. A printmaker as well as …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• William James (Jack) McLarty (1919-2011)

  William James “Jack” McLarty, one of Oregon’s veteran modern painters, was born in 1919 in Seattle but grew up in downtown Portland, helping his parents operate a succession of small working-class hotels. Except for brief periods, he lived in Portland for the rest of his life, and the city …

  Oregon Encyclopedia