Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art
Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery
Making A Better Painting seeks to spark dialogue among regional artists and theorists about painting practices today and respond to new and pressing questions.
What can be called a painting today? How does painting’s immediacy of materials and the human hand react to the mediated world we live in? How do painters today reckon with the material, historical, environmental and psychological costs of their production? How do we reconcile artistic practice with political engagement? A collaborative effort among artists from multiple institutions across the PNW, Making a Better Painting presents these questions as a starting point for broad and diverse conversations among regional artists, academics and curators. A two-month exhibition of the same title at the Hoffman Gallery on the Lewis & Clark campus includes Washington and Oregon painters and serves as the centerpiece and context for the symposium.
The exhibiting artists are Juventino Aranda (Walla Walla), Bruce Burris (Corvallis), Dawn Cerny (Seattle), Jaq Chartier (Seattle), Ka’ila Farrell-Smith (Klamath), Derek Franklin (Portland), Joe Hedges (Pullman), Grant Hottle (Portland), Paul Komada (Seattle), Ruth Lantz (Portland), Ellen Lesperance (Portland), Margie Livingston (Seattle), Elizabeth Malaska (Portland), V. Maldonado (Portland), Susan Murrell (La Grande), Ralph Pugay (Portland), Anthony White (Seattle), Amanda Wojick (Eugene).
Making a Better Painting Symposium: March 6 and 7
You can find the preliminary schedule below. There will be some changes in the next few weeks, so check back soon!
Registration is now closed.
Keynote: Molly Zuckerman-Hartung
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung is a painter, writer, and teacher who grew up in Olympia, Washington and participated in Riot Grrl in her formative years. She moved to Chicago and attended the School of the Art Institute for graduate school, and now she is working and grocery shopping and taking walks in Norfolk, Connecticut with her girlfriend and dog. She is an autodidact who is opening her attention to pattern and repetition, difference, learning, feedback loops, nostalgia, dolls, Victorian collage and textiles, John Coltrane and Miles Davis, Gees Bend quilts, the effects of soul lag on humans, high theory, low theory, kitsch, Modernism, affect theory, coloring crayons, tissue paper, the parergon, tactility, Elizabeth Bishop, the color of the light in the bare woods, and the emotional landscapes of students, friends, colleagues, and strangers alongside whom she lives. Also, she is a Senior Critic at Yale School of Art, Department of Painting and Printmaking. She has shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, The 2014 Whitney Biennial, The Program at ReMap in Athens, Greece, Kadel Willborn in Karlsruhe, Germany and many others. In 2013 she received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award. She is a frequent guest lecturer at many schools across the country, including, in the past few years, Princeton University, The University of Texas at Austin, Cranbrook, University of Alabama, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Low Residency Program, and Columbia University. She will have a mid-career retrospective at the Blaffer in Houston this Fall. She is represented by Corbett vs Dempsey in Chicago and Rachel Uffner Gallery in NYC.