Handmade Revolution: Craft in the Pacific Northwest
Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Salem, OR - To March 13, 2027
Handmade Revolution traces how regional artists pushed utilitarian craft traditions into contemporary art. The exhibition draws on the roughly 1,300-object collection once held by Portland’s Museum of Contemporary Craft, which landed at Hallie Ford after the Pacific Northwest College of Art merged with Willamette University in 2021.
“This show is about craft and how artists have taken craft methods and applied them to what we think of as contemporary art,” curator Jonathan Bucci told Preview. “Less of making practical objects and more making art of objects.”
The exhibition opens with a history of West Coast ceramics, anchored by Peter Voulkos’ untitled 1960 sculpture—a rough-edged, cross-shaped form on a wood pedestal that Bucci says helped fracture ceramics’ “purist approach.” Nearby, Ken Shores’ Little Red Eye takes a similarly deconstructed tack in hand-built slabs of red-painted clay.
Jewelry shares equal billing with sculpture: Ramona Solberg’s 1985 found-object necklace and Nancy Worden’s piece encasing dried roses in glass vials both function, says Bucci, as “wearable sculpture.”
Humor and politics surface later in the show. Marilyn Levine’s uncannily lifelike 1988 stoneware leather jacket channels the Bay Area funk movement’s trompe l’oeil wit, while Corvallis artist Clay Lohmann’s quilt Family Spine (2012)—with stray threads, safety pins and painted text—memorializes a genetic spinal condition that, he says, kept him out of the Vietnam draft while his brother was sent to fight.
The show’s signature image, Anne Hirondelle’s nested ceramic piece Tumble 1 (2015), symbolizes how craft and contemporary abstract art intersect. Bucci describes the work, of thrown, cut and hand-reassembled cylinders, as “this kind of joyful color and shape object”—proof, he says, that the potter’s wheel is only where the artwork begins.
