Tom Prochaska and Christy Wyckoff: In the Footsteps of Charles Heaney

May 9 – July 19, 2015

Print Study Gallery

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In Sept. 2014 Oregon artists Tom Prochaska and Christy Wyckoff set out to follow in the footsteps of artist Charles Heaney (1897-1981), who was a significant mid-20th century Oregon artist known for his paintings and prints inspired by the landscape and settlements of Central, Eastern, and Southern Oregon as well as Nevada.

The exhibition features approximately 30 drawings created by the artists’ during their recent road trip as they traveled and camped at various places identified in Heaney’s work. The exhibition also includes comparative works by Heaney, drawn from the permanent collection of the Hallie Ford Museum of Art.

“Although Heaney was on our minds as we worked at sites connected to him,” Wyckoff explains, “we primarily responded in our individual ways to the landscape in front of us rather than making ‘art about art.’”

This exhibition has been organized by Professor Emeritus of Art History and Senior Faculty Curator, Roger Hull. Financial support for the exhibition has been provided by grants from the City of Salem’s Transient Occupancy Tax funds, the Oregon Arts Commission and a Career Opportunity Grant from the Oregon Arts Commission.

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About the Artists

Tom Prochaska is a painter, printmaker, and sculptor who earned his Master of Fine Arts degree at the Pratt Institute and taught at the Pacific Northwest College of Art from 1988 until his retirement in 2013. He has exhibited throughout the United States and abroad.

Christy Wyckoff earned his MFA degree at the University of Washington and taught for 33 years at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, retiring in 2012. A printmaker, he has exhibited widely and was represented in the Tacoma Art Museum’s 2014 survey Ink This! Contemporary Prints in the Northwest. He is the recent recipient of a Career Opportunity Grant from the Oregon Arts Commission in support of a number of projects including his involvement in In the Footsteps of Charles Heaney.


Exhibition Related Events

Exhibition Opening Reception
Friday, June 5, 2015 at 6 p.m.
Hallie Ford Museum of Art
RSVP (acceptances only): museum-art@willamette.edu or call 503-370-6855

Lecture with Artists Tom Prochaska and Christy Wyckoff
Sunday, June 14, 2015 at 2 p.m.
Roger Hull Lecture Hall
Hallie Ford Museum of Art
Free and open to the public

Museum Publication on Charles Heaney

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Charles E. Heaney: Memory, Imagination, and Place
By Roger Hull

Charles E. Heaney (1897-1981) was a highly regarded Oregon painter and printmaker who created a powerful body of work over a sixty-year period that is remarkable for its consistency, enormity, and complex emotional expressiveness. This volume examines his paintings, including his urban "demolition" series based on the razing of old buildings in Portland as the city modernized, his renderings of the remote landscape of eastern Oregon and Nevada, and his "portraits" of individuals, usually women, placed icon-like in the center of the picture. As a printmaker, he was recognized throughout his lifetime for his woodcut prints of Portland neighborhoods, small Oregon towns, and the high desert of Eastern Oregon, and his aquatints based on plants, fish, and fossil forms.

Roger Hull is senior faculty curator at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art and professor emeritus of art history emeritus at Willamette University.

2005
128 pp., 93 color and black/white illustrations, notes, bibliography, 8.5” x 11”
Paper ISBN 1-930957-54-8
Price: $29.95
Available in the Hallie Ford Museum of Art store or by calling 503-370-6855


Additional Resources on Charles Heaney

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The Oregon Encyclopedia: Charles Edward Heaney
Pacific Northwest Artists Archive: Guide to the Ruth West collection on Charles Heaney


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