What Needs to Be Said: Hallie Ford Fellows in the Visual Arts

Due to COVID-19 and Oregon state mandated closures, our winter exhibition What Needs to Be Said: Hallie Ford Fellows in the Visual Arts will be online only. Please flip through our online catalog and watch the video walkthrough. Special thanks to the Hallie Ford Museum of Art for the catalog and Disjecta Contemporary Art Center for the video walkthrough. The exhibition brings together the thirteen artists who have received the Hallie Ford Fellowship in the Visual Arts between 2014 and 2016, an award given annually to artists living in Oregon, that is based on accomplishment, depth of practice, and future potential. These artists, Karl Burkheimer, Ben Buswell, Tannaz Farsi, MK Guth, Anya Kivarkis, Geraldine Ondrizek, Tom Prochaska, Wendy Red Star, Jack Ryan, Blair Saxon-Hill, Storm Tharp, Samantha Wall, and Lynne Woods Turner, evidence the rich and nuanced field of visual and cultural production in this region. There is no single theme that unifies their diverse practices, but rather, seen together they illuminate the breadth of approaches that define our globalized art world.

Organized by Los Angeles curator Diana Nawi for the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, the exhibition features work in a variety of media, including photography, drawing, printmaking, installation, sculpture, sound, and public engagement.

Nawi says, “The exhibition attempts to relay the urgency and intimacy of what happens in the artist’s studio. Art is something we do for ourselves, and something we undertake in the spirit of the collective, sharing our thoughts and investigations with others through exhibitions and conversations. It is, simply, the expression of what needs to be said. While for each artist this is understood and manifested differently, it is an idea that suggests the importance of artistic practice for the individual and society more broadly – something the Hallie Ford Fellowship unquestionably supports.”

The exhibition title, “What Needs to Be Said,” is drawn from an artwork by MK Guth: a series of blank books in which the audience is invited to write down their responses to the prompt suggested by the title. Guth’s books are objects that encourage, record, and contain critical expressions without fully revealing them – an apt metaphor for the possibilities of artistic practice.

Click here for a full screen version of the catalog.