OJMCHE is taking advantage of the museum’s ground floor windows to give the community an opportunity to experience art from the sidewalk
Mel Katz’s father worked as a tailor in New York City’s garment industry. This seemingly small bit of biography illuminates the shapes in Katz’s current exhibition, Wall Sculptures, on view in OJMCHE’s north windows. Look closely and you will see traces of tailoring patterns in the rigorous lines of his work. The thread of his long artistic evolution is now pieced into his sculptures. Trained first as a painter, Mel Katz decided to become a sculptor. The materials he uses have changed from paint to plastic to wood to steel. He first creates full scale drawings of overlapping and interlocking arrangements. Drawings are traced and programmed to be water-jet cut from aluminum materials. The five anodized aluminum sculptures, created between 2012 and 2019, combine bold colors and abstract architectural shapes to evoke Oregonian flora and landscape. The exhilarating result highlights Katz’s confidence that artwork reveals an evolutionary understanding of what art is and how it should be crafted.
Mel Katz (b.1932) grew up in Brooklyn, the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. After studying at Cooper Union and the Brooklyn Museum Art School, he moved to Portland in 1964 as a visiting professor at the Museum Art School (now Pacific Northwest College of Art). Two years later Katz moved to Portland State University, where he taught for the next 30 years. By the early 1970s, he became celebrated as one of the founders of the Portland Center for the Visual Arts. Since 1956 Katz’s work has been frequently exhibited, including major retrospectives at the Hallie Ford Museum, in Salem in 2006 and 2015, Portland Art Museum in 1988, Museum of Northwest Art, La Conner, Washington in 2017-2018, and the highly acclaimed traveling exhibition Still Working, in 1994. In 2017, he was one of 13 artists featured in OJMCHE’s exhibition, I Am This, Art By Oregon Jewish Artists. Selected collections include the Portland Art Museum; Seattle Art Museum; Tacoma Art Museum; City of Seattle; Oregon Health Sciences University; Good Samaritan Hospital; and Safeco Insurance, Seattle. Mel Katz is represented by Russo Lee Gallery.
Artwork courtesy of the artist and Russo Lee Gallery. Wall Sculptures has been funded by a grant through the Oregon Arts and Culture Recovery Fund.
About Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education
The Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education (OJMCHE) explores the legacy of the Jewish experience in Oregon, teaches the universal lessons of the Holocaust, and provides opportunities for intercultural conversation. Through exhibitions and public programming OJMCHE focuses on Jewish art, history, and culture, while simultaneously recognizing the challenge of remaining relevant in a changing and tumultuous world. OJMCHE challenges our visitors to resist indifference and discrimination and to envision a just and inclusive world.
The museum has gallery space that accommodates traveling exhibitions as well as core exhibitions. The facilities include state-of-the-art storage for archives and artifact collections, an auditorium, a gift shop, and a café. OJMCHE serves as the community repository for the Jewish experience in Oregon and as the proud stewards of the Oregon Holocaust Memorial in Portland’s Washington Park, offering year-round tours and speakers from our Holocaust Speakers’ Bureau and bringing thousands of school children to both the museum and the Oregon Holocaust Memorial.
OJMCHE provides a community-wide gathering place for exhibitions, public events, educational programs, and performances, and offers a wide range of collaborative opportunities. At OJMCHE we seek to teach visitors how to recognize the roots of hatred, how to instill values of inclusion and respect, and how to participate in an inclusive, vibrant democracy built on understanding one another and reconciling differences. Our values shape all of our exhibitions and programs, which celebrate and explore – in the broadest terms – issues of identity, the forces of prejudice, and Jewish contributions to world culture and ideas. For more information, visit www.ojmche.org.
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PDF of Work of Renown Portland Sculptor Mel Katz Shown In OJMCHE’s Windows Press Release