EUGENE – A career retrospective of artist and Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR) member James Lavadour is on display at the University of Oregon’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Eugene.
“James Lavadour: Land of Origin” includes painting and printmaking and spans more than 40 years of Lavadour’s art, celebrating his status as one of the Pacific Northwest’s most original and powerful painters. The art and its accompanying catalog highlight his connection to the Blue Mountains region of northeastern Oregon, where he has spent most of his life.
The museum announced the exhibition opened Aug. 9 and will be on view until Jan. 11, 2026, before traveling to additional museums in the western United States thanks to a partnership with Art Bridges.
Lavadour’s work expresses the vibrancy of the land and sky he observes daily without seeking to be a literal representation of it.
“Lavadour’s studio practice demonstrates his deep connection to the land and his understanding of his place in it,” said Danielle Knapp, JSMA’s McCosh Curator and curator of the exhibition. “The opportunity to view works from different periods of his art-making, especially works that have never previously been exhibited together, reveals how Lavadour’s approach to painting evolved over the course of his career.”
The exhibition focuses on Lavadour’s painting, particularly the multi-panel grids he began exhibiting in the late 1980s, according to a JSMA press release, calling these works “utterly original and viscerally convincing” and “a unique contribution to contemporary art.”
Two of Lavadour’s newest grids, both from 2024, “Lucky Star” and “Bold as Love,” also debuted in the exhibition.
Lavadour has been a full-time artist since the 1980s and attained his first major museum exhibition in 1990. Soon after, he co-founded Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts on the Umatilla Indian Reservation, a nonprofit center that provides printmaking facilities and training in traditional Indigenous art forms.
The self-trained painter was a part of the group exhibition “Personal Structures” during the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, and he was awarded a Hallie Ford Fellowship in the Visual Arts in 2019.
