Point of View

October 28, 2019 – September 30, 2020

2nd Floor Landing, Hallie Ford Museum of Art

In this year's Point of View exhibition series, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Willamette University Xijuan Zhou explores a Neolithic Period painted pot from China that is part of the museum’s permanent collection.

Checkmate! Chess Sets from the Maryhill Museum of Art

January 7 – April 26, 2020

Study Gallery

Over the past 1000 years, the game of chess has spread across the world, crossing cultural and political boundaries. This exhibition looks at the wide range of chess sets made during the past 250 years by diverse cultures from Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. While operating within a predetermined structure of the 32 game pieces, artists bring their own creativity and interpretation to each set, resulting in a wide variety themes and materials. Created with wood, glass, bone, and ivory, the sets include traditional designs, as well as abstract, non-figurative sets and narrative sets depicting mythological characters or historical figures.

Capturing Power: Works on Paper from the Permanent Collection

January 7 – April 26, 2020

Print Study Center

Curated from the museum’s extensive collection of regional Northwest art, and the Crow's Shadow Institute of the Arts archive housed at the museum, this exhibition presents prints and photographs that portray representations of power and power relationships. This exhibition asks visitors to consider who is empowered and why, as well as how the artworks in the exhibition convey a sense of power – be it political, physical, or psychological.

John Buck: Prints and Sculpture from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation

January 26 – March 29, 2020

Melvin Henderson-Rubio Gallery

John Buck is a nationally recognized Montana artist who has created a large and powerful body of woodblock prints and wood sculptures over the past four decades. Buck is a virtuoso draftsman who has learned to draw with different types of sharp tools, which he uses to explore both local and global issues in sophisticated works that are imbued with complex iconography and often layered with multiple meanings.

Northwest Perspectives: Selections from the Permanent Collection

On permanent view

Carl Hall Gallery

Visitors can explore new ideas of landscape, narrative, identity, form and process through a variety of paintings, sculptures and mixed media that highlight both visual and conceptual relationships between historic and contemporary art.

The gallery provides the museum with an opportunity to share many previously unviewed works that capture the rich and varied expressions that have taken place during the past century, which has been marked by rapid changes in the art world, the Northwest and its landscape.

This gallery is named for Carl Hall (1922-1996), who taught at Willamette University for nearly 40 years and painted a luminous record of his response to the region.

View the Northwest Collection

Ancestral Dialogues: Conversations in Native American Art

On permanent view

The Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Gallery

Featuring works from the museum’s permanent collection of American Indian art, this exhibition is organized around the concept of dialogue. The focus is on native art history as a dynamic, rich legacy from which contemporary arts grow today. Art works are placed in conversation, juxtaposed so that the work of many generations is in visual dialogue across time, telling stories of creation, transformation, and renewal. Historic baskets, bags, regalia, and lithics are displayed side by side with contemporary art works by artists such as Rick Bartow, James Lavadour, Bud Lane, Lillian Pitt, Pat Courtney Gold, and Joe Feddersen among many others.

Across Continents, Through Time

On permanent view

Mark and Janeth Sponenburgh Gallery

This exhibition features selections from the museum’s European, Asian, and American Collections, which span 4,500 years and encompass four continents: Europe, Asia, Africa and North America. On view are paintings, ceramics, prints, sculptures, textiles, architectural fragments, archaeological artifacts, Orthodox icons and decorative arts that will deepen visitors’ appreciation for artworks of aesthetic quality and expressive significance from cultural traditions worldwide.

Many of the works of art displayed in this gallery were generously donated to Willamette University in 1990 by Mark and Janeth Sponenburgh, and formed the basis for the creation of the Hallie Ford Museum of Art.

Print Study Center

On permanent view

Print Study Center

The museum’s collections of works on paper – prints, drawings, paintings on paper, and photographs – are stored, studied and displayed in the Print Study Center. The collection includes many contemporary American works, particularly by artists of the Pacific Northwest. Other highlights include etchings by the 17th-century Dutch artist Anthonie Waterloo, and 19th-century American expatriate artist James Abbott McNeil Whistler, as well as an early pictorial photograph by Edward Steichen. Temporary exhibitions in the Print Study Center are designed to highlight works in the permanent collection, and complement and enhance the special exhibitions on view.