Making A Better Painting: Thinking Through Practice

Making a Better Painting: Thinking Through Practice

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.

T

he 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 & 7