Sachi Yanari-Rizzo, Curator of Prints & Drawings
Born in 1951 in Pendleton, Oregon, James Lavadour is a descendant of the Walla Walla tribe and grew up on the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.
In his early twenties he began painting abstract landscapes using food coloring and watercolor. Lavadour credits the land with providing his education; long hikes around the foothills of the Blue Mountains on the reservation honed his skills of observation and heightened his awareness of the physical forces coursing through nature and his body.
In 1990, the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper at Rutgers University honored Lavadour and five other Native American artists with fellowships. The experience working with Tamarind-trained master printer Eileen Foti was a turning point. Lavadour came into the program as a painter but departed with a fascination for printmaking and the concept of collaboration and exchange between artists.
Foti introduced him to the mechanics of lithography as a technique. Lavadour also absorbed printmaking’s analytical nature, commenting, “Up until that time I had worked in great bursts of energy and emotion, but printmaking is one layer at a time. I learned to set aside the emotion—although, of course, it’s always there—and to understand my process more deeply.”i This impacted his painting as well; painting emulated nature by building layers of paint that eroded through scratching and scraping, all intended not so much to paint a landscape but, through the act of painting, to reveal one.
By the early 1990s, Lavadour was receiving critical recognition for his art. He acknowledges guidance from family, the tribal community, and local artists. While he was successfully navigating the art world, Lavadour yearned to ensure that aspiring artists had support, professional opportunities, and a sense of community. He saw the need for access to resources on the reservation, including art materials, equipment, and instruction.
In 1992, Lavadour and fellow artist Philip Cash Cash (Cayuse and Nez Perce) co-founded Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts. The name Crow’s Shadow comes from the first painting Lavadour sold. They garnered support from the community with 20 members contributing $1,000 each as seed money with further support from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the United States Department of Agriculture Rural Development Administration. Crow’s Shadow is housed in a former Catholic mission school on the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation outside of Pendleton. In exchange for the use of space, the Jesuits asked them to cover renovation.
The nonprofit organization “provides a creative conduit for educational, social, and economic opportunities for Native Americans through artistic development.”ii Its programming focuses on both traditional and contemporary art. It is open to all people, and it is renowned for its two-week artist residencies and print publishing program.
In 2000, Lavadour began blending his two distinct styles of work in large-scale paintings: organic, fluid landscapes and geometrical abstractions. Lavadour explained, “I use two elemental structures, a landscape and an architectural abstraction (a vortex and a grid). There’s the flow of landscape and then the intersection of the architectural structure, which is just like being in a room looking out a window, with floors, angles, walls, doors, ceilings, pathways. A painting is a complex event with many things going on at multiple levels. Close, far, color, layers, scrapes, and drips all swirled around by memories. I keep it all organized with structure. Structure is the bed to the river.”iii
The artist brings together these opposing approaches in the museum’s six-color lithograph Stick House (2006) printed at Crow’s Shadow. Lavadour brushed alcohol and toner washes onto Mylar which was transferred to aluminum plates. The sweeping, gestural brushwork moves in different directions charged with nature’s forces. At the same time, the terrain appears ethereal and misty printed with purple and light-yellow inks. The grainy reticulation pattern created by the washes suggest the striations of sedimentary rock layers. In contrast, the architectural structure appears partially built and ghostly, made up of dark brown lines that are assertive and drip.
Lavadour continues to work in lithography at Crow’s Shadow regularly. His work is at the Heard Museum, National Museum of the American Indian, Portland Art Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. His achievement in art was recognized through an Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship, Hallie Ford Fellowship Award from the Ford Family Foundation, Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship for Painting, and an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from Eastern Oregon University.
i Rosemary Carstens, “Artists to Watch,” Southwest Art (March 2009): 46, https://www.southwestart.com/articles-interviews/emerging-artists/james_lavadour.
ii Mission statement from website, https://www.crowsshadow.org/.
iii Rebecca J. Dobkins and James Lavadour, James Lavadour: The Properties of Paint (Salem, OR: Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University, 2008), 4. https://oregonvisualarts.org/wp-content/uploads/Lavadour-brochure-pages_notExcerpted.pdf.