Join us to celebrate the exhibit, America Replated: Paintings by Don Bailey, in our Level 2 Gallery!

Hosted light fare, no-host (card only) wine/beer. Free but RSVP required: oregonartistsseries@gmail.com

Don Bailey, born in 1954, is a Hupa tribal member raised on the Hoopa Valley Reservation of California. A graduate of Western Oregon University and the University of Oregon, he taught art for 40 years at Chemawa Indian School, the oldest continually operating federal boarding school for Native students in America. From that vantage point, Bailey has witnessed the ways bureaucracy imposes itself upon native communities but also the ways irony and humor can be empowering in the face of that stranglehold.

The Level 2 Gallery show features Bailey’s America Replated works, a series of eight paintings, each beginning with an archival (late 19th century/early 20th century) black and white photograph of Native Americans. These photographs, taken by non-Native photographers, were presented to the public as “documents of a vanishing race.” Says Bailey, “I have re-contextualized the often static, sometimes staged portraits with layers of color, traditional native design and landscapes real and imagined. I aim to give the portraits of our ancestors a timelessness and, in the spirit of whil-xolik (story-telling), invite the viewers of my work to consider the lives of people who have never vanished.”