James Lavadour

James Lavadour has been a full-time artist since the 1980s. Self-trained, he achieved his first museum exhibition in 1990. Throughout the following decade, as Lavadour expanded his palette beyond dark and fiery earth tones, he explored new configurations of panels and moved away from his earlier skeleton imagery. Lavadour experienced a burst of productivity in the 2000s, energized by what he described as intersections between organic landscapes and architectural abstractions. Over the next twenty years, as his artistic vision and command of color matured, his national and international profile expanded; notably, Lavadour was included in the group exhibition Personal Structures during the 55th Venice Biennale (2013) and was awarded a Hallie Ford Fellowship in the Visual Arts (2019), among other honors.  His most recent paintings are spectacularly bold and luminous, physical manifestations of the artist’s statement “the land and I are one.”

Lavadour is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. Throughout his career, he has been guided by a strong personal conviction that artists can serve their communities. In 1992, he co-founded the Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts on the Umatilla Indian Reservation near Pendleton, Oregon and served on its Board for over thirty years. This nonprofit center provides world-class printmaking facilities for visiting artists and offers training in traditional Indigenous artforms. Lavadour began his own work in printmaking in the 1990s as a means to explore layering and to deconstruct the ways in which he organizes visual information in his paintings.