Rick Bartow: Renewal and Regrowth

"I use erasers as much as I use graphite or color. In a more philosophical vein, I use erasure because my life has been shaped as much by what I have lost as by what I have gained."  -Rick Bartow February 6, 1988

Rick Bartow experienced extremes in his lifetime, living through tragic losses of loved ones, witnessing graphic violence, surviving addictions and other health crises. He also knew immense joys; loving and being loved, having deep and substantive friendships, being in a position to make and exhibit his art, performing and recording music. This breadth of highs and lows shaped his steadfast worldview that life requires sustained efforts of making continuous adjustments to find and maintain some kind of elusive balance. Entropy feels inevitable; it is so easy for forces that seem beyond our control to throw off our tentative equilibrium, but cycles of renewal and regrowth in nature offer a model for the possibility to correct course. The particular works in this exhibition are meant to illustrate these extremes. Serene depictions of flora and fauna are juxtaposed with images of decisive action. 

Bartow (1946-2016) was a member of the Wiyot Tribe. He drew from personal experiences, cultural engagement, and global myths, especially Indigenous transformation stories. Animals, masked humans, hybrid-figures, and self-portraits populate his images. A professionally trained artist, Bartow lived and worked on the Oregon coast. He returned from the Vietnam war with severe PTSD and lost nearly a decade to addiction. In the late 1970s Bartow found his footing, through his art making and with help from a local elder on the Siletz Reservation. His artwork addresses both personal and tribal traumas. Bartow was a voracious consumer of art history: German Expressionism and Goya, European modernists like Francis Bacon and Odilon Redon, the lines of Cy Twombly and Diebenkorn. Bartow traveled widely, particularly to Japan and Germany. He was also an accomplished musician, performing regularly around the Pacific Northwest and recording several albums; he sang about love and loss.

This exhibition follows a Spring 2024 solo presentation in our gallery, and the Autry Museum of the American West’s 2018 presentation of Things You Know But Cannot Explain, a major retrospective of Bartow’s art that had an eleven city tour over five years; it originated at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, in Eugene, curated by Jill Hartz and Danielle Knapp. 

A major new solo exhibition of Bartow's art, curated by Kathleen Ash-Milby, will open at the Portland Art Museum in November 2025. Rick Bartow’s work can be found in the permanent collections of over one hundred museums and institutions. Four additional museums and a major new foundation have acquired his work in the first four months of 2025. One of four pieces owned by The Whitney was on view recently in What It Becomes. We Were Always Here, a monumental pair of commissioned sculptures by Bartow were installed in 2012 on the National Mall outside The Smithsonian's NMAI. Other institutions holding his work include the Brooklyn Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Peabody Essex Museum, Portland Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, The Heard Museum, the Hood Museum at Dartmouth, The Legion of Honor (SF), Minneapolis Institute of Art, Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, and the Seattle Art Museum. Recently his work was included in the landmark exhibition Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969, curated by Candice Hopkins at the Hessel Museum/ CCS Bard. And in the exhibition California Stars: Huivaniūs Pütsiv, curated by Andrea Hanley, at the Wheelwright Museum. His late work Buck was featured in a Terra Foundation-funded touring exhibition titled Many Wests, from 2022-24, organized by Amy Chaloupka, Melanie Fales, Danielle Knapp, Whitney Tassie, and E. Carmen Ramos, with Anne Hyland.