Jay Backstrand

Jay Backstrand
Jay Backstrand’s contribution to the Northwest art scene reaches beyond his own artistic career and into his time as president of the board at the Portland Center for Visual Arts and extensive work as an instructor of drawing and painting at multiple universities in Oregon. The artist’s career in the 1970s and 1980s was extremely productive, as he participated regularly in exhibitions while teaching and also operating the Portland Center for Visual Arts gallery. His work has evolved throughout his career, and the Seattle Art Museum owns work which tracks part of this change.
Backstrand identified his dedication to art during his education. After the military, through good fortune, I found myself in art school,” the artist once stated. He said that it was art school which “gave [him] a sense of purpose.” “Backstrand first attended Oregon State University in 1952, where he remained only until he joined the U.S. Army in 1954 at the age of 20. After his service, he spent a year from 1956 to 1957 at the University of Colorado, and eventually studied at the Portland Museum Art School (now the Pacific Northwest College of Art) in Portland, Oregon, from 1958 until 1961. There, he first showed his works publicly, participating in the Portland Art Museum’s Oregon Annual in 1962 and again in 1963, then showing at Portland State College (now University) and the Fountain Gallery in 1964. He went on to work and study at the Slade School of Fine Art at the University of London in 1964-1965, after having been awarded a Fulbright scholarship.
A work from this productive period, Mama Baby and the Marriage Bird (1965), was exhibited in the fall of 1965 at the Seattle Art Museum’s 51st Annual Exhibit of Northwest Artists. The exhibition jury recommended the work for purchase, which the museum did, much to the chagrin of an interested private collector. Mama Baby and the Marriage Bird was again exhibited in a 1985 exhibition in honor of the 75th Anniversary of the Katherine B Baker Memorial Award.
After the 51st Northwest Annual in 1965, Backstrand continued to exhibit regionally as well as nationally. He returned to the Seattle Art Museum the following year to participate in the 52nd Northwest Annual. In the following years he exhibited in Los Angeles at the Felix Landau Gallery (1967), in Seattle in the Northwest Annual again (1968), and the Biennial of American Painting and Sculpture at the University of Illinois (1969). Backstrand also began instructing drawing and painting at Mt. Hood Community College in 1970 and Portland State University in 1971. He continued at both schools until 1976. He occasionally guest lectured at University of Oregon during the 1970s as well.
Also in 1971, Backstrand and artists Mel Katz and Michele Russo founded the Portland Center of Visual Arts (PCVA). Backstrand served as the President of the Board and Chairman of the Exhibition Committee. The gallery became a hub of activity throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, attracting “some of the best artists in the country to come to Portland and have a show.” These artists included Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, James Rosenquist, John Baldessari, Chuck Close, Richard Serra, Dan Flavin, and Andy Warhol. The PCVA developed a strong reputation after “the first few New York artists had a good experience working in Portland,” and even though their budget was small, “artists like[d] to work at the PCVA because there was never any limit to an artist’s ideas.” Amongst the “ten to fifteen visual arts exhibits every year as well as equal number of dance, music, and theater performances” held at the PCVA, Backstrand gave himself two solo exhibitions at the gallery, one in 1981 and the other showing his sculpture in 1987 (a year prior to the gallery’s closing).
The late 1970s proved a formative time in Backstrand’s career. While he was working as an Associate Professor at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland (1975-1986), he created two critical series of work. Pains Gray, a 1979 painting, was exhibited in the 1980 Seattle Art Museum exhibition Northwest Artists: A Review. At the time of the exhibition, May 29th-July 13th, 1980, the painting was on loan from the Fountain Gallery of Portland, Oregon. It was purchased by the Portland collector Dr. R.B. Forman, and was gifted by Dr. Forman to the Seattle Art Museum shortly thereafter, in September 1980. The painting was part of Backstrand’s “boat series,” a series which the artist says is “about autonomy… a nice metaphor for staying in balance, staying in harmony, being able to move as an independent human being.” The artist said about that period of his career, “that was a time of letting go of old stuff and also looking at what it meant for people to be autonomous. I have seen the way people entrap themselves, create things to tie themselves up – obsessions, limitations.”
Between the years of 1979 and 1981, concurrent with the “boat series,” Backstrand created another body of work he dubbed the “Desperate Images.” He described this series of painted, collage-like portraits as having progressed out of a 1979 “commission for a portrait that was to be painted from a black and white photograph.” Backstrand stated that his 1981 triptych, in the collection of the Seattle Art Museum, Hunting for Joseph “without dought [sic] the most complex and ambitius [sic] piece” of the series. Like other works from the “Desperate Images,” a large facial portrait forms the center of the sculptural painting, while abstract elements (opaque painted geometric shapes, square grids, expressionistic brush strokes) are layered upon the face, creating an odd sense of “dislocation or distortion” in an image of, in this case, Joseph Beuys. A sculptural element has been incorporated in each of the work’s three panels. Empty geometric frames extend off of the painted panels and reach down to the floor in front of work. Backstrand described the frames protruding from the painting as “windows or doors opening to the images offering a way of access.” Resting on the floor in front of the work are small wire cages containing rusty scalpels. Although “inaccessible,” he had explained his intentions of incorporating the scalpels as to “offer the viewer a tool” with which to metaphorically dissect the work. These sculptural elements make the triptych stand out from the 50 single panel prints of the same name, Hunting for Joseph, that were made using the Joseph Beuys image.
Hunting for Joseph was originally shown at the Portland Center for Visual Arts in 1981 and then exhibited at Marylhurst College Art Gym in the 1984 solo exhibition of the artist’s work, Jay Backstrand: Painting 1977-1983. Backstrand gave the triptych painting to his wife, Barbara Backstrand, who eventually donated the piece in 1984 in honor of the Seattle Art Museum’s 50th Anniversary. The work has not been exhibited since.
Backstrand has continued to work from the 1980s through today, although he stopped teaching at Pacific Northwest College of Art in 1986. He is still an active artist and is currently represented by the Laura Russo Gallery.
R. B. Forman has apparently been unable to be located since gifting Pains of Gray in 1980. Barbara Backstrand is currently a Family Counselor in Portland, Oregon.
Laura Russo Gallery
805 NW 21st Ave.
Portland, OR 97209
503-226-2754
gallery@laurarusso.com

Barbara Backstrand
1220 Southwest Morrison Street Suite 932
Portland, OR 97205
(503) 223-9021