This Bountiful Place: Art about Agriculture, the Permanent Collection by Shelley Curtis

Abstract

referenced,they invariablycome frompopular writings and are eitherpresented as straw men ? tobe easily refuted ? or out of context in order to bolster a particular point. The effect is a disappointing echo chamber where like minded people with bad ideas tell each other how smart they are. Mark David Spence Albany, Oregon that each artwork was produced and acces sioned into the collection since 1980, aesthet ics from both Modernist and Postmodernist art periods intertwine throughout" (p. vii). But there is littlethatqualifies as postmodern here? perhaps Yolanda Vald?s-Rementeria's 1994Familias Campesinas, which has thevir tue of introducing political dimension to the collection, or Charles True's Filbert Orchard at Sunrise, a digitally-manipulated panoramic photograph. Lois Allan, who has been writ ingabout art in thePacificNorthwest for two decades, gets closer to the truth inher catalog essay: "Art About Agriculture does not intend to challenge itsviewers, as somuch avant-garde work does, but rather,itspurpose istocelebrate the earth's bounty and the energy, commit ment, and persistence of themany workers who bring from itour life-givingsustenance" (p. 17). Perhaps inorder toup theante,Allan begins her essay by placing theArtAbout Agriculture paintings in a broader historical perspective by drawing analogies among the celebration of food and wine inprehistoric art ? such as the cave paintings at Lascaux, France, which "depict animals that were the source ofhuman sustenance"? Greek art and itsDionysian worship of the grape, a still lifedrawing of peaches discovered in the ruins of Hercula neum below Mt. Vesuvius, seventeenth-century Dutch stilllifepainting,Van Gogh's Potato Eat ersand Sunflowers,andMillet's The Sower. But because thiswork is sowell known to arthis tory,itsappeal isalmost universal. To compare itto the art inThis Bountiful Place? so local in itsappeal ? seems something of a stretch. That said, there is, as art critic Lucy Lippard once put it,a certain lure to the local. The local is more personal, more intimate. It seems to speak directly tous,without com plication. In the fabric of contradictory and pluralmeaning thatdefines our contemporary world, the local offersus something of a safe haven. It is,afterall,what we know? with a measure of certainty. This BountifulPlace offers THIS BOUNTIFULPLACE: ARTABOUT AGRICULTURE, THE PERMANENT COLLECTION editedbyShelley Curtis Oregon State University and Oregon Historical Society, Corvallis and Portland, 2006. Illustrations, photographs, bibliography, index. 241 pages. $26.00 paper. This BountifulPlace isa catalog containing full color, full-page reproductions of the almost two hundred works of art that comprise the permanent collection of the Oregon State University College of Agricultural Sciences. Beginning in 1983, the college began hosting an annual juried exhibition,ArtAbout Agricul ture, and the collection represents jurors' pur chase awards made over the years up to 2006. The idea,asGwil Evans, one of the exhibition's founders, recalls, was to "encourage Pacific Northwest artists to seek creative stimulation fromwhatever the artist perceived as related to agriculture, food, or natural resources" (p. 2). The result is a body ofwork that focuses primarilyon nature's bounty (stilllifesof fruits and vegetables), landscape (dry and freshly tilled or green and lushlyverdant? more or lessdepending onwhich side of the mountains is represented), livestock (a lot of sheep and cattle), and homesteads (farmhouses, barns, and attendant outbuildings). In her foreword, the catalog's editor and directing curator of theArtAbout Agriculture collection, Shelley Curtis, claims that "given Reviews 639 up these local comforts and pleasures. Add to this theextraordinarily richproduction values that thepublishers have lavished on thisbook ? itswonderful and true color is testimony, once again, thatLynxGroup printing of Salem is a truly remarkable, if largelyunsung, asset toOregon culture ? and you have, all inall, a beautiful book, a joy to leaf through,page by page, something akin to a visual harvest. Henry Sayre Oregon State University - Cascades Campus critical transformative period in Utah's, and the inter-mountain West's, early twentieth-century agriculturalhistory. Agriculture acrossAmerica was becoming big business by the early twen tieth century and this is a case study,of sorts, of how a single industry ? asmuch as copper mining inMontana or timber-cutting in the Pacific Northwest ? came to dominate the economy, thepolitics, and the culture of a vast region of the country. Throughout this period, the Church of Jesus Christ ofLatterDay...