Rick Bartow

Richard Elmer “Rick” Bartow (1946–2016) was born and raised in Newport, Oregon. His father, of the Mad River Band of Wiyot people from Northern California, died when Bartow was young, and his extended family raised him to know the cultural traditions of the Siletz Indians. On his non-Native mother’s side, he had exposure to Christianity, so he grew up with a foot in both spiritual communities; as he put it, he “would go to the sweat lodge on Saturday and to church on Sunday!” Bartow’s drawings, paintings, sculptures, and prints have been the subject of over one hundred solo exhibitions and are in the permanent collections of many American museums. His large-scale commission We Were Always Here, two cedar posts depicting Bear and Raven, overlooks the National Mall in Washington, DC. In 2015, Bartow’s thirty-five-year retrospective, “Things You Know but Cannot Explain,” opened at the University of Oregon’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Eugene, Oregon. This show, which includes After Van Gogh, will continue to travel the US through 2019.