James Lavadour lives and works on the Umatilla Reservation near Pendleton, Oregon. Each day he begins his day of work by rising before the sun and going out to his studio. When the sun begins to rise, the Artist leaves his studio for a walk or a drive to witness the land’s waking and all its magic. Lavadour’s paintings are not based on direct observation but the time spent looking, hearing, and feeling the natural world that surrounds him —his Native land— which deeply informs all 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. 

In this exhibition, a spectacular and monumental grid painting, composed of eighteen panels, “EXPECTING RAIN,” is one of, if not the most ambitious and accomplished works of his distinguished career.

In addition to this major work, the exhibition includes six new single-panel works and one diptych. The show will be documented in an exhibition catalog with images of each work and an essay by the highly respected curator Candice Hopkins. Hopkins co-curated the 2018 SITE Santa Fe Biennial, she was the Senior Curator for the 2019 Toronto Biennial of Art, was on the curatorial team of the Canadian Pavilion of the 58th Venice Biennale, and was a curator for documenta 14. The catalog will be made available in the coming weeks.

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.

James Lavadour’s work was featured as one of only 102 artists selected for the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’s seminal survey exhibition, State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now and at the 55th Venice Biennale in Personal Structures.

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, as well as numerous other public and private collections.