The Hallie Ford Museum of Art has received an Oregon Heritage Commission Museum Grant to preserve 577 prints and other works on paper housed in its Rick Bartow print archives collection. Funds will support the framing, matting, and storage of these prints, as well as digital photography of all 577 artworks to allow for online accessibility.
Bartow’s art career spanned 35 years and included works that explored personal and spiritual spaces, as well as his culture, ancestry, and identity. The Hallie Ford Museum of Art organized Bartow’s first major retrospective exhibition, “Rick Bartow: My Eye,” in 2002, and over the years, featured him in a number of group exhibitions, including “A Contemporary Bestiary” in 2014 and “The Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts at 25” in 2017.
Bartow is the only Oregonian to have artwork on permanent display at the Capitol Mall in Washington, DC. Around the time of his passing in 2016, he and his estate donated his print archive — the world’s largest collection of Bartow’s prints — to the HFMA. It includes 493 of Bartow’s works on paper, as well as 84 works on paper created by other artists (including other Oregonian and Native American artists).
Over the past decade, HFMA has acquired collections of artworks from three prominent Native American artists—Rick Bartow, Joe Feddersen, and Lillian Pitt. HFMA receives between 20,000 and 24,000 visitors annually. HFMA staff also anticipate that access to these works will be important for K-12 educators in Oregon working to implement new state-level curricula around the state’s Native American culture and history, and the museum is working to connect the museum’s collections with the new state curricular requirements.