PDX Contemporary Art is pleased to present Home ground, an exhibition of new paintings by James Lavadour. James Lavadour lives and works on the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.

Just when the sun begins to rise, the Artist leaves his studio to go for a drive in his beloved Jeep Wrangler and likely listening to jazz, to witness the land waking up. Although Lavadour’s paintings are not based on direct observation, the time spent looking, hearing, and feeling the natural world deeply informs his work.

Lavadour speaks about being one with the land. His physical, process-oriented practice is one that yields abstract expressionist paintings; accumulations of marks through addition and subtraction are acts of nature in the same way that geological events are acts of nature. He speaks of color being good for us, like the berries and the salmon. The new paintings are alive with nourishing color, rich and vibrant.

The exhibition features new oil paintings on wood panel including two large, multi-panel grids, a triptych, four diptychs, and six framed oil on paper paintings.

One of the Northwest’s most respected painters, James Lavadour was born in Pendleton, Oregon and is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. Among the awards and fellowships Lavadour has received over the course of his career are the 2019 Hallie Ford Fellowship Award from The Ford Family Foundation, an Honorary Doctorate of Human Letters from Eastern Oregon University, the Eiteljorg Museum Artist Fellowship, the Award for Visual Arts from the Flintridge Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Award, the Seattle Art Museum’s Betty Bowen Memorial Recognition Award, and numerous large commissions throughout the Pacific Northwest. Lavadour’s works are included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (Washington, DC), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), Seattle Art Museum (Seattle, WA), Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA), Boise Art Museum (Boise, ID), Crocker Art Museum (Sacramento, CA), the Eiteljorg Museum (Indianapolis, IN), the Hallie Ford Museum of Art (Salem, OR), The Hood Museum (Hanover, NH), The Heard Museum (Phoenix, AZ), the corporate collections of Bank of America and Microsoft among numerous other public and private collections.

We are looking forward to Lavadour's upcoming traveling retrospective James Lavadour: Land of origin at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at University of Oregon in late August 2025. James Lavadour: Land of origin is curated by Danielle Knapp, McCosh Curator and will be accompanied by a full catalogue.